Google Earth - how close are we to individual identificationl?

Google Earth now has the capability to display satellite images of people/faces and license plates for a given location on Earth.





Presumably, facial recognition technology can be used to identify people whose faces can be seen in the images. However, how long before a scan is possible to determine if a particular individual at a given location is, in fact, a person that is wanted by authorities even if the face is not visible? It may sound crazy, but if you said 15 years ago that you'd be able to punch in an address on your computer and get a satellite image of your house and yard, with the detail to be able to see a person in the yard, people would have thought you crazy....





Any thoughts..... see top story on www.drudgereport.com for details....|||Did you see the street image you can do now? It's not in real-time obviously, but you can put yourself down on street level and look 360 degrees and even go down the streets of NYC, LA, Denver, Las Vegas and Miami.





Even once the technology exists, the government won't use it- look at the resistance (right or wrong) to the phone tapping of suspected terrorists- and we've had that technology for who knows how long.|||If I was standing on my street when the Google image was taken I think you would almost be able to make out my face (although probably still not quite).





Edit:


It is probably currently fairly straighforward to up the magnification and also take images in real-time.