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Google Street View Driver Detained As Government Spy

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A Google Street View driver is just doing his thing, capturing images for us to use in Google Maps and Google Earth. All of a sudden he’s stopped by authorities and detained as a government spy. Seems legit, right? That’s exactly what happened to a Google employee in a village in northern Thailand. The villagers in Ban Sa-iap have been opposing a government dam project in their area. The dam would demolish local forests and the villagers don’t want it to be built. When Deeprom Phongphon came through the area in his Google Street View car, the villagers assumed he was secretly running a survey for the dam project. Even though the car was painted with the conspicuous Google Maps pattern, the villagers surrounded the car, forced him to stop, and bombarded him with questions about what he was doing.  The Bangkok Post  reports that they detained him and made him swear on a statue of Buddha that we was not a spy, but merely a Google employee doing his job. The villagers apologized  after