Geek Shows Kim Jong Il’s House With Google Earth
A Ph.D candidate from George Mason University, Curtis Melvin has infiltrated the reclusive, impenetrable mystery that is North Korea and is revealing secrets previously known only by spies and Kim Jong-il himself.
Curtis accomplished this feat by matching photos from news reports, eyewitness accounts, information he gleaned from two trips there, and tips from other visitors with a dearth of satellite imagery provided by Google Earth.
His achievement is a masterwork of labels of places in a region of the world known only through the inscrutable names of launch sites or nuclear tests. Curtis’ work is, unlike anything else in the public, a veritable one-man CIA catalog of North Korean landmarks.
It isn’t a pretty picture at all, North Korea. Outside of Pyongyang and its elite neighborhoods lie a bleak countryside of barren lands, anti-aircraft batteries, monuments of meaninglessness, mass graves, and unfinished, abandoned civil projects to nowhere.
There is an unsurprising number of secrets about Kim Jong-il that his own people probably do not know, like the palatial villas (in fashion with every other dictator in history), the swimming pools with twirling waterslides (for Jong-un, no doubt), the yachts, and an Ostrich farm that we presume provides Kim Jong-il with low-fat, red meat steaks.
The Google map project, called North Korea Uncovered is described as ”the most authoritative map on North Korea” (no pun intended). Started in April 2007 and currently in its 17th version at the time of this writing, you can download it here.
The project is part of Curtis’ North Korea blog, titled North Korean Economy Watch, which is on its own a broad intelligence resource on the North.
More info:
[Google Earth Download]
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