In 2008, mainstream camera manufacturers began introducing models with built-in GPS receivers, to automatically add location metadata to photographs. Since then, 10 brands have released a total of 41 distinct models of GPS-enabled cameras. You can find most of them in DPReview’s filterable database.

When the GPS-capable Panasonic Lumix TS4 launched in early 2012, GPS Tracklog’s Rich Owings noticed a strange footnote in the press release:

GPS may not work in China or in the border regions of countries neighboring China.

Rich and I pondered aloud on Twitter as to how in-camera GPS receivers could possibly break when used in China. There is nothing wrong with GPS in China, as anyone who has successfully flown there can attest. Tens of millions of Chinese-bought iPhone users have access to highly accurate latitude and longitude readings via Apple’s default compass app, which uses assisted GPS. (I just had a friend in Shanghai read me her coordinates over Skype and confirmed her position in Google Earth.) So why would Panasonic choose to hobble its GPS-enabled cameras so that the location data is withheld from users whenever that location is deemed by the firmware to be in China?

One mooted reason was a Chinese law prohibiting mapmaking and surveying without a license. Foreigners logging location coordinates via GPS while travelling near sensitive sites have been detained on these grounds. In 2010, Chinese authorities cracked down on user-generated mapping, aka neogeography, citing security risks. And in a continuing sign of this trend, just last week a prominent Chinese state TV anchor used his microblog to rail against “foreign spies who find a Chinese girl to shack up with while they make a living compiling intelligence reports, posing as tourists in order to do mapping surveys and improve GPS data for Japan, South Korea, the United States and Europe.”

A tweeted response from Panasonic PR confirmed a legal motivation for the technical restriction:

@gpstracklog @ogleearth GPS function maynot work in China or borders neighboring China government prohibits GPS use.Works in over 200cntrys

— Panasonic (@PanasonicDirect) February 1, 2012

Despite follow-up questions no more information was forthcoming, beyond the suggestion that we check the manual for details.

This left many questions unanswered. Why would a Japanese manufacturer selling a camera in the US and Europe be so eager to ensure that its customers obey a (dubious) Chinese law? What is a Lumix TS4 owner supposed to do if she receives permission to log GPS coordinates in China? What happens if the law changes so that permission is no longer required? How did Panasonic end up second-guessing what customers should or should not do in China?

One possibility is that Panasonic believes its customers would sue if they got arrested for inadvertently logging location data while travelling around China. But then why not allow a manual override for informed and/or authorized users?

Perhaps Panasonic fears a near-future dystopian scenario where GPS-enabled cameras are confiscated by Chinese border guards if they are at all able to log data inside China. But surely, with an average product life-cycle of one year, that’s not a big risk?

Maybe Panasonic decided it would be too expensive to release both a China-compliant model and an unmolested global model — and so decided to just release the China-compliant model globally, having taken note of the size and growth of the Chinese consumer camera market.

Or maybe the GPS chip in the camera is manufactured in China, and thus needs to meet some kind of Chinese security restriction before it gets an export license. Admittedly, my scenarios are getting somewhat farfetched.

In the absence of good answers, I let the story languish a few months, hoping to find somebody in the camera or GNSS industry able to confirm both the why and the how of the Lumix TS4′s curious behavior when inside China.

Unable to get any more clarity on the matter, I recently decided to check the manuals of all 41 models across all 10 mainstream brands, to see if others besides Panasonic admit to interfering with the GPS function of their cameras for political reasons. It turns out that five of the 10 brands do.

Panasonic, Leica and FujiFilm prevent their cameras from displaying location information when in China. Nikon and Samsung appear to restrict location information in some other way. Sony, Canon, Pentax, Casio and Olympus do not interfere with the GPS function of their cameras when in China (or at the very least do not admit to it in their manuals).

Here’s the assembled evidence — relevant excerpts from all the manuals of all the GPS-enabled cameras sold since 2008. First, the culprits:

Panasonic:
Lumix DMC-ZS7 (Jan 2010)
Lumix DMC-ZS10 (Jan 2011)
Lumix DMC-TS3 (Jan 2011)
All these cameras’ manuals have an explanation like this:

Surprise: All three of Panasonic’s GPS-capable predecessors to the Lumix TS4 cripple GPS use inside China, ever since 2010. We only noticed in 2012 because the TS4 press release mentioned it (and no, I don’t have a habit of reading manuals of cameras I don’t own:-).

In addition, all three cameras have a ready-made error message for when the camera has decided to conceal its location: “GPS FEATURE IS NOT AVAILABLE IN THIS REGION.”

Lumix DMC-TS4 (Jan 2012)
The manual for the TS4 is not yet available on the web, but the official website makes clear about what happens to these cameras when in China:

Lumix DMC-ZS20 (Jan 2012)
Same goes for this camera:

Leica:
Because Leica’s V-Lux cameras are rebranded Panasonic Lumixes, we get an opportunity to see how two different marketing departments describe the same technical limitation. Leica, it turns out, is far more articulate about how and why their cameras are crippled:

V-Lux 20 (Apr 2010) (a rebranded Lumix ZS7)

This in addition to the same error messages as on the Lumix ZS7. (So much for Panasonic trying to be coy in its manuals.)

V-Lux 30 (May 2011) (a rebranded Lumix ZS10)

V-Lux 40 (May 2012) (a rebranded Lumix ZS20)
The V-Lux 40′s manual is identical to that of the older Lumix ZS7 and ZS10 when it comes to describing GPS limitations (see above).

FujiFilm:
FinePix F550 EXR (Jan 2011)
FinePix XP30 (Jan 2011)
FinePix F600 EXR (Aug 2011)
FinePix F770 EXR (Jan 2012)
FinePix XP150 (Jan 2012)
All FinePix cameras carry this disclaimer:

Nikon:
Nikon seems schizophrenic about its approach to GPS:

Coolpix P6000 (Aug 2008)
One of the very first compacts on the market to have built-in GPS, this camera’s manual makes no mention of GPS restrictions or China. This is how it should be. Nikon’s GP-1 GPS unit for its DSLRs also makes no mention of restrictions.

Coolpix AW100 (Aug 2011)
Coolpix S9300 (Feb 2012)
Coolpix P510 (Feb 2012)
By 2011, however, Nikon’s cameras warn that “GPS may not function properly” in and around China:

On a Nikon website, A user shares his experience using GPS with his Coolpix AW100 in China:

The GPS in my Lumix [TZ10] camera is disabled when in China. The camera gives an information message that it disables the GPS while in China. I was pleasantly surprised that Nikon [Coolpix AW100] does not disable the GPS in China but places some limitations on its use. The locations using the GPS in China seem to be off by about 500 ft to the west. In addition, the map function does not work in China and there are not location points for China in the database. I found it interesting that while I was in Southern China, several miles from Hong Kong, the camera would like the closest location point in Hong Kong (which turned out to be a KCR metro station about 10km away. I am very glad the GPS works in China even with these limitations.

Samsung:
Samsung’s manuals, alas, border on the unintelligible. They are obviously transcribed from some other language:

ST1000 (Aug 2009)

HZ35W (Jan 2010)

It is not clear at all where the GPS works, nor does it make any sense to only allow cameras purchased in China to receive GPS signals in China.

Discussing the GPS performance of the Samsung HZ35W may be academic, however — DPReview’s review says that the camera’s GPS function is “idiosyncratic at best, and at worst, non-functional”, with many users not being able to get it to work at all. (Maybe because it appears to work only in a minority of countries, as per the manual.) Meanwhile, Samsung has not come out with updates to its GPS cameras for over two years.

Next up, those manufacturers who do not second-guess their customers:

Sony:
Cyber-shot HX5 (Jan 2010)
SLT-A55 (Aug 2010)
Cyber-shot DSC-HX7V (Jan 2011)
Cyber-shot DSC-TX100V (Jan 2011)
Cyber-shot DSC-HX100V (Feb 2011)
Cyber-shot DSC-HX9V (Feb 2011)
SLT-A65 (Aug 2011)
SLT-A77 (Aug 2011)
Cyber-shot DSC-TX200V (Jan 2012)
Cyber-shot DSC-HX200V (Feb 2012)
Cyber-shot DSC-HX10V (Feb 2012)
Cyber-shot DSC-HX20V (Feb 2012)
Cyber-shot DSC-HX30V (Feb 2012)
None of these camera manuals reference China in any way. All manuals carry the exact same text:

Canon:
PowerShot SX230 HS (Feb 2011)
PowerShot S100 (Sep 2011)
PowerShot SX260 HS (Feb 2012)
PowerShot D20 (Feb 2012)
None of these camera manuals reference China in any way. All manuals carry a version of this text:

Additionally, Canon gets points for reminding users of potential privacy issues when geotagging photos.

Pentax:
Optio WG-1 GPS (Feb 2011)
Optio WG-2 GPS (Feb 2012)
The GPS utilities guide for these cameras carries an identical short reference:

Casio:
Exilim EX-H20G (Sep 2010)
The EX-H20G’s manual is perhaps the most straightforward of all:

Olympus:
Tough TG-810 (Mar 2011)

Tough TG-1 iHS (May 2012)
The manual is not up on the web yet, but the camera’s web page makes no mention of China or restrictions, and there is no reason to suspect a policy change since the TG-810.

Implications
Why does all this matter? Wherever local laws prohibit the sale or use of a personal electronics device able to perform a certain function, manufacturers have traditionally chosen not to sell the offending device in that particular jurisdiction, or — if the market is tempting enough — to sell a crippled model made especially for that jurisdiction.

For example, Nokia chose not to sell the N95 phone in Egypt when the sale of GPS-enabled devices there was illegal before 2009, whereas Apple opted to make and sell a special GPS-less iPhone 3G for that market. Early models of the Chinese iPhone 3GS lacked wifi, while the Chinese iPhone 4/4S has firmware restrictions on its Google Maps app.

The risk to consumers in freer countries is that personal electronics brands might be tempted to simplify their manufacturing processes by building just one device for the global market, catering to the lowest common denominator of freedom — especially if the more restrictive legal jurisdictions contain some of the most attractive markets, such as mainland China.

Still, in the absence of more information from Panasonic, Leica, FujiFilm, Nikon and Samsung, I can’t decisively say whether this is the business logic behind their decision to cripple the GPS in their cameras. And yet uncrippled GPS cameras from Sony and others are freely available for sale in China, for example on Taobao, China’s eBay:

And Sony’s official mainland China site is more than happy to offer instructions in Chinese on how to use the GPS function.

Consumers in the market for a GPS-enabled camera should be informed that five of the mainstream brands engage in location-based censorship. Choose another brand, or get a dedicated handheld GPS device to sync tracklogs with your camera — I don’t suspect Garmin or Magellan will stop working in China anytime soon.

When this Oregon’s Salem News article crossed my radar screen, I felt it was a sufficiently over-the-top case of conspiracy mongering so that it did not merit a retort beyond a line of snark on Twitter.

Is Google Earth Hiding Sri Lanka’s Ghosts?

Tim King Salem-News.com

Google, are we misreading this? Haven’t Sri Lanka’s Tamils been through enough?

(SALEM) – Does Sri Lanka’s ongoing lack of transparency over its recent Genocide of Tamil people extend to Google Earth?

It’s disturbing. Google Earth appears to be be using an unusual series of photographs to comprise its image of Sri Lanka as the regime stands accused of war crimes in Geneva.

It’s a question that deserves to be asked; why is the exact area where so many were killed by government forces hard to make out, and why is that image specifically from 2005, years before the intense attacks on civilians in this area, while adjacent images are from May 2009, in the middle of the worst of the ethnic cleansing?

The number one online resource that people turn to for research should refuse censorship to any government that stands accused of grave violations of international laws regulating war, and crimes against humanity.

Etc. It goes on like that for many more paragraphs.

But then I noticed that others in my Twitter stream, people who generally know better, did not treat this story with the contempt it deserves:

Is Google Earth Hiding Sri Lanka’s Ghosts? flpbd.it/gokfW a bit on the conspiratorial side but raises important issues

— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) March 18, 2012

So suddenly the narrative becomes: Why hasn’t Google posted satellite imagery of the endgame of the civil war in Sri Lanka on Google Earth — specifically from May 2009, when civilian refugee camps were bombarded by government troops. Is it callous negligence, or is Google somehow shielding Sri Lanka’s government from bad PR?

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that satellite imagery is available in Google Earth, and has been in one way or another since June 2009.

It was first available as a downloadable overlay within weeks of the events, created by Amnesty International and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). (I know because I was involved in the production of one component of it — the aerial imagery popups.)

AAAS had asked the satellite imagery provider DigitalGlobe to take these images within the framework of their Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program, which puts scientific resources to use to uncover and publicize human rights abuses, specifically through the use of satellite imagery. (The program has also highlighted abuses in Zimbabwe and Darfur.)

Then, sometime between 2009 and now, these DigitalGlobe images automatically became part of the Google Earth base layer — because Google’s contract with DigitalGlobe stipulates that all imagery take by its satellites ends up in Google Earth. (There are exceptions: Iraq and Afghanistan are not being updated due to the ongoing security situation there. Imagery of Israel and the Occupied Territories is reduced in resolution, as per US law. Overcast imagery is also rejected.)

So how does Salem News’s Tim King get to pen an article in such accusatory tones? If we rule out malicious intent, the only other explanation is ignorance of how Google Earth works, coupled to a conspiratorial mindset that prejudices Google.

The imagery that Tim King thought lacking is in fact part of the historical imagery dataset in Google Earth, and can be accessed by clicking the historical imagery button in the top button bar of the application. If he were to do this over the specific area where he complains the imagery is from 2005 (view in Google Earth here), he’d see imagery from May 27 2011, January 23, 2010, September 8 2009, and June 15, 2009, in addition to 2006 and 2005. In the areas immediately to the north, he’d find imagery from May 24, 2009.

Google doesn’t alway show the most recent imagery in the default layer; sometimes there is more recent imagery available in the historical layer. This is because the default layer is meant to be a reference layer, so older imagery that is clearer will sometimes trump more recent imagery containing clouds, long shadows or snow. The satellite- and aerial imagery used by Google Earth carries metadata such as cloud cover percentages, image resolution and acquisition date, and the resulting image mosaic uses this information to construct the “best” default snapshot of Earth.

When time-sensitive satellite imagery is taken in the immediate aftermath of humanitarian crises such as the Haiti quake or Hurricane Katrina, imagery is often cloudy, because the weather does not always cooperate and cloudy imagery is better than nothing. Google will include such imagery in its dataset, but it tends not to remain in the default view for long. In any case, the default dataset is reconstructed every time Google Earth has an imagery update — these days every two weeks or so — and newer imagery tends to crowd out older.

There is one final question to address: What if Google Earth had not had this data? Would Tim King’s complaint have been justified? Is it Google’s responsibility to commission satellite imagery itself every time it suspects some humanitarian disaster is in the offing? Google promotes the work of advocacy groups in support of human rights, as evinced by the Global Awareness layers available in the sidebar of Google Earth, and it also collaborates with DigitalGlobe and GeoEye in specific cases where getting time-sensitive satellite imagery to first responders via Google Earth will help the rescue. But Google should not be in the business of vetting every cause — that is the job at which the likes of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch excel. Much better is for Google to focus on building an ever more accurate geospatial platform for the work of of such groups. And finally: Whenever a monitoring group commissions imagery from DigitalGlobe (such as what ISIS does when it monitors Iran’s nuclear program) that imagery ends up in Google Earth automatically, over time. Any cause can play, for a few thousand dollars.

Google Earth is a powerful transparency engine — so it is best to read the manual before penning embarrassing conspiracy theories that at best are a waste of the reader’s time, and at worst succeed in subverting initiatives that Google actually deserves praise for.

The border between China and India is contested in many places, and is a matter of prickly national pride for both countries — the month-long Sino-Indian War in 1962 was triggered by an escalation of a border skirmish on the northern edge of the present-day Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, a large part of which China insists belongs to Tibet. In that war, China quickly advanced to its claim line on the southern edge of Himalayan foothills, where the line skirts the Brahmaputra river plain. Having met little resistance from the Indian army, China then unilaterally retreated to the pre-war line of control, approximately the McMahon Line, possibly because winter was looming. China’s claim remains, however — and the border has since been the topic of much fraught bilateral negotiation.

Not surprisingly, mapping the China-India border has proven something of a thankless task for Google. Both China and India prohibit the publication of maps that do not draw their respective official claim lines as the ground truth, so Google has created three distinct Google Maps datasets — one for the Chinese market at ditu.google.cn that shows the area north of the claim line as unambiguously Chinese, one for Indian users at google.co.in/maps that shows the border along the McMahon Line, and one reference set for the rest of the world at maps.google.com which shows the area as disputed; this is also the dataset used in Google Earth.

Google has on two occasions (in 2007 and in 2009) messed up its depiction of the area around Arunachal Pradesh, and each time India’s media was outraged at Google’s perceived nefarious conspiracy to undermine Indian sovereignty, when in fact the error was an honest mistake that Google quickly rectified. Still, India’s media now keeps an eagle eye on Google’s depiction of its border.

That eye once again saw cause for complaint when the the northeastern Indian local paper Seven Sisters Post this Monday ran the story — on its front page, above the fold — that Google Earth is now showing parts of the neighboring Indian state of Assam as being claimed by China:

This story was subsequently taken up by other Indian media outlets, where the headline soon read: “Google shows Assam as part of China”.

What happened? If the papers had kept to watching Google’s India-facing map dataset, they’d have nothing to complain about — it still shows India’s borders in conformity with Indian law. But Seven Sisters Post went looking on Google Earth, which shows both the Chinese and Indian claim lines for that section of the border.

That Chinese claim line is not, in fact, identical to the internal border between Arunachal Pradesh and its neighbor, Assam. In the region close to Bhutan, China has since before the 1962 war claimed an area beyond Arunachal Pradesh in Assam. Close to Burma, there is a large part of Arunachal Pradesh that China does not claim. The divergence is visible on this map:

As recently as 2009, Google Earth still showed the Chinese claim line near Bhutan as equivalent to the internal border between Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. (Note the jagged indentations of that borderline.)

That depiction was not, in fact, correct. At some point since then, possibly quite recently, a more accurate representation of the claim line was added, though at a far coarser resolution than the internal state borders or the McMahon Line that depicts India’s claim.

On the international version of Google Maps, both the internal border and the Chinese claim line are visible. Here is the map near Bhutan, with the short dotted lines depicting the Chinese claim line and the longer dotted lines the internal border between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh; the solid line is the border with Bhutan:

View Larger Map

On Google Earth, however, something is gone from the dataset: The internal border between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh is missing when it runs to the north of China’s claim line:

Screenshot from Google Earth on 13 March 2012

Why is it missing, and since when? I don’t know, but I assume the representation on Google Earth is a mistake that will soon be rectified, because Google has long argued that more — and more accurate — information in the pursuit of context is always better. Here is the relevant policy statement from December 2009:

We work to provide as much discoverable information as possible so that users can make their own judgments about geopolitical disputes. That can mean providing multiple claim lines (e.g. the Syrian and Israeli lines in the Golan Heights), multiple names (e.g. two names separated by a slash: “Londonderry / Derry”), or clickable political annotations with short descriptions of the issues (e.g. the annotation for “Arunachal Pradesh,” currently in Google Earth only [...])

This annotation makes clear that Arunachal Pradesh is wholly administered by India. I’m adding it here for the sake of completeness:

Arunachal Pradesh (Hindi: अरुणाचल प्रदेश Aruṇācal Pradeś) is administered by the Indian government as the easternmost state on India’s northeast frontier; Itanagar is the capital of the state. Meanwhile, it is also claimed by the People’s Republic of China as an integral part of its territory, as a part of South Tibet (Zangnan 藏南) and integral with the Chinese prefectures of Ngari, Shannan and Nyingchi. The dispute originates with the 1913 establishment of the McMahon Line which divided British-controlled India from Tibet; however China did not recognise the line’s authority. After India became independent in 1947 and the PRC was established with full control over Tibet, India asserted the McMahon Line as the India-China boundary in 1951 and forced Tibetan authorities to withdraw from the area. During the Sino-Indian war of 1962, China recaptured most of Arunachal Pradesh (then called the North East Frontier Agency or NEFA) but voluntarily withdrew back to the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in 1963 which approximates the McMahon Line’s location. Indian and Chinese forces clashed in the region in 1986-87, but the countries signed agreements in 1993 and 1996 to respect the LAC. Despite several attempts to reconcile, including discussions as recent as January 2008, India and China remain in dispute over this territory.

How do other online maps fare? OpenStreetMap draws the International border as India would have it, with no sign of China’s claim line. Microsoft’s Bing Maps, on the other hand, has China claiming a much larger area than on Google Maps, with the claim line even crossing the Brahmaputra river at one point:

(Note, you need to zoom in to see this border. if you zoom out, the map reverts to a more vague border that approximates the internal border between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.)

In addition to showing the border between Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, could Google Earth be even more complete in its depiction of the region? Yes, by drawing an orange Line of Control between China and India along the McMahon Line, just as it does for the de facto border between India and Pakistan in Kashmir. This would make it clearer that the region is administered by India, which matters, as possession is a great advantage in territorial disputes.

In August 2010, I visited Kashgar, a city in China’s remote far west that for over a millenium helped drive the Silk Route economy, inheriting an old town with distinctive Islamic architecture. My visit was compelled by the news that this old town was in the process of being dismantled by authorities, so I wanted to see it before it was gone. I ended up spending a week documenting and mapping the process, publishing the results in a Google Earth file.

On February 17, 2012, new imagery of Kashgar appeared in Google Earth, taken just three months ago, on Nov 17, 2011. By comparing this new imagery to the older imagery and my notes, I’ve been able to update the map to chart the progress of the old town’s transformation in the 15 months between my visit and the latest imagery. Here it is as a Google Earth file:

Some observations from studying this new imagery:

• Around two thirds of the old city has now been demolished, up from almost half 18 months ago. The goal still appears to be to demolish 85% — there are two designated protected areas that are slated to remain untouched.
• The new satellite imagery does not show wide open spaces where demolished houses once stood. That is because the building of new structures starts almost immediately as old houses are demolished. The best way to look for rebuilt areas is to compare before-and-after structures, which often include construction that does not yet have a roof.
• Some good news: The rebuilt structures by and large appear to be of the same scope and size as the ones they are replacing — there are no further encroachments of large modern tower blocks on the old city core (so far). It also looks like no new larger roads are intersecting the rebuilt areas, though it does seem from Google Earth that new alleys are not being redrawn along old routes (but it is hard to tell).
• Some bad news: Some of the street-facing architecture that I marked on the map as being distinctive when I visited — for the verandas or traditional workshop fronts — appears to have been demolished. I’ve marked these areas in light blue on the map. I was hoping these parts of town would be left alone, or restored, rather than demolished, as they were especially worth saving.
• In demolished areas, some isolated original structures are allowed to remain, and new construction is built around them. This points to some flexibility on the part of authorities. Perhaps some instances of authentic courtyard houses will manage to survive intact, even in the areas slated for demolition.

For autocratic regimes, naming landmarks is both a perk and a tool — a cheap stab at immortality and a means to cement authority: In Syria, examples abound: The main highway through Damascus is named after the late despot Hafez al-Assad, father to the current one. In the coastal town of Latakia, a main street is called 8 Azar Avenue, named after the March 8, 1963 coup d’état that brought the Ba’ath Party to power, soon headed by the al-Assad clan. (March = Azar = آذار)

Should the al-Assad dynasty fall in Syria, these names will certainly change. In the meantime, how do reference maps depict such landmarks? Taking Latakia as an example, here’s a conventional, static tourist map found online:

Here’s the crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap:

(Neither Bing nor Yahoo Maps has street-level data. MapQuest uses OpenStreetMap’s.)

How about Google Maps and Earth?

What’s going on here? Israeli news site Arutz Sheva flags an article in Syria’s Damas Post (translation), dated Friday, January 6, 2012, which first noticed that a new name “15 Azar” had been added to Google’s maps. The reference is to March 15, 2011, when mass protests erupted in Daraa, launching the present uprising in Syria.

In Damascus, the Hafez al-Assad highway shows up in Google Earth with two names:

Who is Ibrahim al-Kashosh? At the start of the uprising, he penned popular songs mocking Bashar al-Assad, admonishing him to leave power. He was later found dead in a river with his vocal cords ripped out.

What’s unusual in these two examples is that the names exist as part of Google’s official place name dataset — in previous cases, such apparently rogue names had been attributed to contributions in third-party content layers. The Damas Post uses this observation to construct an elaborate conspiracy theory involving the Egyptian Google employee and activist Wael Ghonim, whom it accuses of promoting a pro-western agenda in collusion with the US through “the implementation of the theory of creative chaos”. The surreptitious renaming of streets is meant to be an example of such “creative chaos”.

That is of course not what happened, through the truth also carries interesting implications. For a few years now, Google’s been crowd-sourcing map making in those regions for which no good online reference datasets exist, in competition with OpenStreetMap. Google’s tool, Map maker, lets any user add or edit streets, placemarks, and names, with a review system in place to catch errors:

The first time a Map Maker user makes edits to a map, the edits may require review and approval before the edits will be published. Once a Map Maker user has made a few approved edits, most of the subsequent edits will go live automatically. However, some types of edits or edits in specific regions will always require review, regardless of how experienced the mapper is. In addition, some edits may require multiple reviews before the edits appear on Google Maps.

There is no need for Google or the US to engage in creative chaos: It would be enough for some enterprising opponents of the al-Assad regime to get some of their edits past unwitting reviewers for these name changes to make it onto Google Maps and Earth.

And that is exactly what seems to have happened: Currently pending edits in Latakia and Damascus betray the tail end of an edit-war that seems to have been playing itself out. Here’s the situation in Latakia today:

What we’re seeing is a request to have the street name changed back to March 8. Below it is the edit history, which shows that the name change to March 15 was promoted by several anonymous users in the past few months.

In Damascus, the current name for the disputed highway on Map Maker and on Google Maps is not the same as what you see on Google Earth. Both “Hafez Al Asad” and “Ibraheem Al Kashosh” have been replaced by the more neutral-sounding “Southern Bypass” / “Mothalik Aljanobi” / “المتحلق الجنوبي”:

But if you begin searching for Ibrahim’s name in Map Maker, his name is autosuggested, though without returning a result — indicating that the name did exist on the map, but not any longer:

The edit history also shows that Hafez al Assad’s name on the highway was replaced by the existing “Southern bypass” by a moderator on December 14, 2011. (Click on the history tab on the bottom of the linked page above to see for yourself.)

Since Google Earth’s dataset of place names is updated less frequently that Google Maps, what we’re likely seeing in Google Earth is an earlier snapshot of an edit war that was eventually resolved in a truce: Neither the name preferred by the regime nor the one by its opponents stayed; instead a neutral descriptive name was chosen. Unless Google intervenes in this case, expect Google Earth to have the highway labelled as “Southern Bypass” / “Mothalik al-Janobi” / ”المتحلق الجنوبي” soon enough.

So is Google the only mapping provider susceptible to this latest innovation in guerrilla mapmaking? No. In fact, OpenStreetMap has been hacked in exactly the same way, and on the very same highway:

In OpenStreetMap, the highway is currently named after March 15, 2011, the same revolutionary date we saw in Latakia. MapQuest, which periodically imports OpenStreetMap data for its map of Syria, still names the highway after Hafez al-Assad (on a barely legible map):

Unless OpenStreetMap does any further edits to this item in its dataset, MapQuest too will soon have a renamed highway on its map.

Are there any far-reaching implications to the fact that OpenStreetMap and Google Map Maker are susceptible to political hacks? I don’t thinks so; it’s a challenge that Wikipedia has long dealt with, and the problem can be minimized, if not completely eradicated, by alert moderation. And if the alternative to crowd-sourced maps of places like Syria is no online maps at all, then the overall advantages far outweigh the occasional blip. This is the Yahoo Map for Damascus today:

Which, when you compare it to a crowd-sourced map at the same scale, manages to be both devoid of information and fictitious:

I’ll take Google Maps or OpenStreetMap any day, the occasional hiccup notwithstanding. (That said, I would not stake my life on Wikipedia, Google Maps or OpenStreetMap, not without first crosschecking sources.)

On November 12, a powerful explosion ripped through an Iranian missile base on the outskirts of the town of Bīdgeneh, 40 km west of Tehran. As the Guardian reported soon after, among the dead at the base was the architect of Iran’s missile program, Major General Hassan Moghaddam. There has been heavy media speculation the explosion might have been the result of a covert operation by Israel’s Mossad.

Post-explosion satellite imagery has now become available that shows the extent of the destruction. Commissioned by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), the imagery was taken on November 22, 2011. ISIS Senior Research Analyst Paul Brannan has published the annotated image along with the most recent available imagery from before the explosion, taken September 9, 2011. He adds:

ISIS learned that the blast occurred as Iran had achieved a major milestone in the development of a new missile. Iran was apparently performing a volatile procedure involving a missile engine at the site when the blast occurred.

You can’t tell from the imagery if sabotage caused the explosion, but you can tell the damage was extensive, wiping out most structures at the base. The NYT elicits more commentary from Paul Brannan in an interview.

Because ISIS’s web post and accompanying PDF used lower-resolution versions of the Nov 22 image, I asked ISIS for the original high-resolution image, to overlay on Google Earth. The September 9 imagery is already in Google Earth’s base layer, so it was just a matter of overlaying the one new image. Here is the resulting KMZ file, containing the high-resolution original, ready to open in Google Earth.

In Google Earth 6 and above, remember to click on the opacity button in the sidebar and then play with the opacity slider to switch between the before- and after- imagery. For reference, the sports court at the base is 30×15 meters, about the size of a basketball court.

P.S. On November 28, an new explosion ripped through what appears to be a uranium conversion plant near Isfahan, rattling windows in the city. Speculation is mounting (some based on intelligence sources) that Iran’s nuclear and missile programs are being systematically sabotaged or attacked. In 2010, the Stuxnet worm caused heavy damage to the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz.

Over at Dliberation, I’ve reported on a story with a geolocation twist likely of interest to Ogle Earth readers:

In an unfortunate bout of regulatory innovation in Slovenia, the information commissioner there has decided that panoramic photography benefits from less legal protection than conventional photography because she reckons panoramas make it is easy to tell where the photograph was taken, and when, thus compromising the data rights of the people in the shot. She argues this, apparently unaware that all modern digital photography comes with EXIF time stamps which sites such as Flickr will automatically share, while many smart phone camera apps will attach their location to photos published to Twitter or Facebook. Photographs of landmarks also situate individuals at a certain place at a certain time. The commissioner may have unwittingly condemned all such photography to Street-Viewesque blurring requirements — at least if she is consistent in her logic.

I “blame” Google for this:

[This is] a case study of how Google, by voluntarily implementing facial blurring in its relatively new but hugely popular Street View automated 360-degree panoramas, created norms in the minds of regulators that they are now eager to set in stone legally.

Because Street View is so popular, it is quite possibly the only kind of immersive panorama that most people have seen. I believe this has altered popular expectations regarding the blurring of individual faces, which led to the commissioner decreeing that all panoramas not depicting a news-worthy event need to be blurred. Ironically, Google Street View isn’t even available in Slovenia:

That’s because Slovenia said it would require Google to keep the raw Street View images in Slovenia until they were blurred — no unblurred images were allowed to leave the country. Because the blurring makes use of Google’s servers, none of which are in Slovenia, Google respectfully declined to add Slovenia to its Street View program.

Read the whole article over at Dliberation.org.

In case you wonder what else I get up to, in terms of my interests: I’ve started Dliberation.org, a blog about the global social and political impact of digital networks. What Ogle Earth is to digital atlases, Dliberation is to digital networks — so yes, it is a lot less niched, but in line with how my interests have developed these past few years. Ogle Earth continues to be the place where I report on how Google Earth affects science and society; for a broader look at Internet regulation, censorship, surveillance, activism and cybercrime, visit Dliberation.org. Here’s the inaugural post, about a new research center for the Internet and Society, situated in Berlin and funded by Google. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I will enjoy writing it.

There is a juicy scandal unfolding in India’s smallest and richest state, Goa, where the State Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has prepared a report indicting ruling Congress Party politicians for benefiting from illegal mining in the state. Illegal mining is estimated (by the Hindustan Times) to have cost Goa over USD 600 million over the past five years in lost tax revenues, turning this into a whopper of a story.

Reporters are having a field day with the clumsy ways in which local Congress Party bigwigs have maneuvered to derail the report. Congress Party members on the PAC committee refused to sign the report, but that didn’t deter the chairman of the committee, Manohar Parrikar, from submitting the report to the State Assembly. The (Congress-affiliated) speaker of the Assembly, Pratapsingh Rane, then refused to table the report, on account that it is “merely a draft”:

On October 8 Rane sacked Parrikar, who also happens to be the leader of the opposition, from his role as chairman of the PAC committee. Parrikar then vowed to release the findings to the public, “using government documents and records that are in the public domain,” reports the Hindustan Times.

Part of those public domain records are from Google Earth, The Economic Times reports:

According to highly placed sources, the PAC has based its findings against [Congress Party leader Dinar] Tarcar on the satellite images procured by the Google [Earth] tool.

The mine operated by Tarcar through Power of Attorney at Temebocheo Dongor in rural Goa (survey number 59/51) has been found to have extracted several million tons of ore. [...]

“The Google pictures of 2003 clearly show that the area was a virgin land and it is not possible to agree with any fallacious contention that several million tons of ore dump accumulated has been done on account of earlier dumps accumulation,” the report mentioned.

India’s national Directorate of Mines and Geology has now also taken an interest in the mine, ordering it to immediately cease production until it is investigated. An article by Goa’s Herald spells it out for us:

Tarcar has cheated the government by avoiding huge amounts of export duty by under-invoicing of his exports.

When presented with evidence of massive ore dumps that could not have been produced within quota, his mining company contended that these were from earlier activities. Google Earth’s imagery from 2003 effectively catches the company in a lie.

So: Where is Temebocheo Dongor in Goa, and is there an mine there that didn’t exist in 2003?

Browsing Goa’s hinterland with Google Earth, you’ll find it riddled with open-pit mines — mining is the second largest industry in Goa, after tourism.

Two pieces of information allow us to pinpoint a strong candidate for the mine in question. The first is that we know there has to be imagery of the mine from 2003 in Google Earth. About two thirds of Goa satisfies that criteria.

The second piece of information comes from the Herald article, which points out that the mine is “at Caurem and Maina.”

Those places are easily found in Google Earth via search. Once there, turn on historical imagery, and voilà, here is the closest high-resolution imagery available from 2003, taken on Feb 10 of that year, showing virgin lands and an embryo of a mine:

Versus the current view, from March 27, 2011:

If you want to see the historical imagery yourself, here is the KML pointer to it in Google Earth. Or have a look for yourself in Google Maps:

View Larger Map

Absent verification on the ground, we can’t be 100% certain that this is the Temebocheo Dongor mine, but it sure looks to be a strong candidate.

In Sweden late last week, the story “broke” [translation], as it tends to do every few years, about how Sweden’s military secrets are visible in imagery on Google Earth and Maps, but not on its local competitors, Hitta.se and Eniro.se, amid general consternation from random interviewees.

The one big difference this time round is that Google Sweden’s own spokesman, Andreas Svenungsson, appears to join in, expressing what Swedish Radio describes as “self-criticism” when he says that “clearly, if it’s not supposed to be there [on the map] then we will take it away.”

It is possible that he was being diplomatic, knowing full well that Google is not required to censor imagery taken from space or which is already in the public domain. Much better, however, would have been to use the interview as a teachable moment, pointing out that just like any other country, Sweden has no sovereignty over space, but that it is welcome to censor its own aerial imagery before it is published by Sweden’s national GIS agency, Lantmäteriet. And that Google has no obligation to use Lantmäteriet’s imagery, though it currently does for large parts of the country.

This blog has long lambasted Lantmäteriet’s policy not just of censoring its maps, but of obfuscating the censorship, making it look as if “sensitive” locations are forests or fields instead of just pixellating them. Lantmäteriet was caught doing this with the National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) HQ back in 2006 and more subtly in 2009. This kind of behavior undermines trust in all their maps and data, and is unbecoming an open society, especially when the information is easily available via other channels. (The Dutch, for example, openly pixellate.) There was a moment of hope earlier this year, when it looked like Lantmäteriet had moved on from these cold-war methods: It released what appears to be uncensored imagery of the FRA HQ, visible in Google Earth. It now looks like this was just sloppiness on their part.

Because Google’s spokesman doesn’t educate the reporter, Peter Andersson, much of his article is mired in confusion. The current panic is about the locations of the two main underground control centers for Sweden’s air force — one near Stockholm, and the other in the South of Sweden; both are well-known nationally. In Google Earth, the one outside Stockholm is visible, but not the one in the South. This happens to be because near Stockholm, Google’s current imagery consists of uncensored satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe; in the South, it uses censored imagery from Lantmäteriet. Andersson and his interviewees assume that because one of the locations is censored, both should be.

In fact, neither is: Even in the South, if you use Google Earth’s historical imagery tab, you can see two uncensored views of the control bunker area. It’s imagery dated from 2006 and 2009, and curiously also credited to Lantmäteriet, which obviously previously released it into the public domain without censorship. The location is very easy to find for anyone with basic Googling skills: Searching for the generic name for these underground centers, “stridsledningscentral”, leads to an article discussing how the nearby village of Hästveda depends on jobs at the control center in question. In Google Earth, the village is easily found. Then, by toggling between the current imagery and that from 2009 using Google Earth’s historical imagery panel, the Photoshopping by Lantmäteriet of the current imagery pops out immediately from the surrounding countryside, because it looks like buildings in 2009 have been replaced by virgin forest in 2010:

Hästveda stridsledningscentral in Google Earth, imagery from 2009.

Hästveda stridsledningscentral in Google Earth, imagery from 2010.

Try it yourself at this location in Google Earth (open downloaded KMZ file in Google Earth). Nobody should be in any doubt that keeping this kind of “secret” is pointless; the effort and intelligence required to discover it is so minimal as to render the term meaningless. The only people not in the know are those who don’t care.

(If you read Swedish, this post on Cornucopia? runs through how the various mapping services portray Sweden’s various “secret” locations.)