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.)

Got GeoInt? flags a great story: Iran’s military is launching a Google Earth competitor, slated to go live later this week, according to the Iranian Mehr news agency and Tehran Times.

According to Brigadier-General Mohammad Hasan Nami, head of the armed forces’ geographical affairs organization, the web service will be called Basir, and is motivated to counter the “cultural aggression” of Google Earth/Maps against Islamic countries.

Google Earth is also accused of “distorting history”; while he doesn’t specifically refer to it, the Brigadier-General is no doubt referring to Google’s naming policy, which has resulted in the waters between Iran and Saudi Arabia to be labelled both Persian Gulf and Arabian Gulf. This has irritated the more literal-minded Iranians to no end, and resulted in both a protest from the Iranian foreign ministry and an online petition signed by 1,245,781 people last time I checked.

With Basir, Iran will now be able to call the Gulf anything it wants.

When asked to differentiate Basir from Google Earth, Brigadier-General names a qibla-finding tool — Which calculates the direction to Mecca, for prayer. Alas, due to the Google Maps API, qibla finders are now a dime a dozen.

But the most fantastical feature attributed to Basir by the Brigadier-General is the fact that “it can prevent certain websites such as the ‘Google Earth’ from gathering information about other countries.” I suspect something got lost in translation but I’ll have a guess at what he means: Now that Iranians will have access to a Google Earth/Maps substitute, it will be easier for the regime to justify blocking Google’s mapping services. After all, Google Earth is cultural aggression, so surely the next step is to block it.