There are yet another side to all this

The greeks are paranoid about maps too, and appear to treat them as weapons. I don't know the actual law, but I do know that high-res maps are pretty-much unobtainium (or were a few years ago), and that you could get into trouble for distributing them (we were cavers that needed a good map - the only way we could even look at one was to find a freindly person at a road-building company who could show us his (but definately _not_ hand it over).

And recall what happened to some UK plane spotters a few years back for a general idea of the paranoia level. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/greek-cour...

You can see the remnants of this 'maps are military' meme in the UK, where the mapping agency is still called the 'Ordnance Survey' (ordnance is bombs and missiles). Mapping was once an almost exclusively military activity. A few countries haven't quite got past this to accept that it's incredibly useful for everyone and that military/state control of mapping is no longer possible.