Google Maps New Target: Secretive North Korea - New York Times

Google/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images A still image from Google shows a before and after map of North Korea's capital, Pyongyang. SEOUL, South Korea — Google threw open its Google Maps program for North Korea Tuesday to "citizen cartographers" around the world, urging them to contribute whatever knowledge they have about one of the world's most secretive countries. The map it published at the same time — which shows streets and important buildings in the capital and elsewhere — is focusing new attention on the North at a time when the country is locked in a tense standoff with the United States and its allies over tightened sanctions and has promised to conduct a third nuclear test. Google's initiative came three weeks after its executive chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, visited Pyongyang in a highly publicized yet controversial trip organized by Bill Richardson, former governor of New Mexico. Mr. Schmidt, a staunch proponent of Internet connectivity who likes to describe the Web as the enemy of despots, said he urged officials of the police state whom he met in Pyongyang to let more of the country's people use the Internet. Google said it has been collecting data on North Korea for some time through a community of people who collaborated using Google's crowdsourcing Map Maker program before it released the latest map. The map is still largely blank, though it does include four city-sized prison camps, highlighting them in gray shading.Google Maps is unlikely to provide important new information to policy makers and others who already have satellite maps, and Google Earth views, to depend on. But Google's crowdsourcing project provides a tool for Internet users anywhere in the world to help identify at least some features in the isolated country that the regime in Pyongyang doesn't want the world to know. (The regime cherishes secrecy to such an extent that its propagandists liked to boast: "When our enemies try to peek into our republic, they only see a fog.") At the moment, the map released Tuesday is far less detailed than North Korean maps available in South Korean bookstores, or the one on Google Earth. In recent years, Internet bloggers and activists have relied on Google Earth, and defectors from North Korea, to locate several places believed to be prison camps. In each of the gulags, international human rights groups said, thousands of political prisoners have been forced into hard labor under inhuman conditions for such crimes as criticizing the ruling Kim dynasty in Pyongyang. The Washington-based Web site 38 North, also using Google Earth, has created a digital atlas of North Korea far more detailed than what exists on Google Maps. "So far, Google's efforts are largely symbolic," said Kim Yong-hyun, a North Korea specialist in Dongguk University in Seoul. "It won't be easy to make a Google map of North Korea of the kind you see of other countries."Google Maps' basic premise — Internet users filling in information about their neighborhood to help update and perfect a map — is severely limited for North Korea. The country is cut off from the Internet, except for its tiny elite, and even their access is controlled. Google can try to enlist the more than 24,000 North Korean defectors who live in South Korea, one of the world's most wired countries. But most of them come from northern North Korea. Given the tight control on people's movements in North Korea, the knowledge they acquired of other parts of North Korea before their defection is limited. There was no immediate North Korean reaction to Google's announcement on Tuesday. Google said although its map of North Korea is not complete, it could be important to some South Koreans who originated from the North and who could now identify their old home villages through Google Maps. via Technology - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNGVud31Iz62w6ItEOsxhqToK4cj6A&url=http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/world/asia/google-maps-new-target-secretive-north-korea.html

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