The strange creature that is the Kyl-Bingaman amendment has reached a measure of mainstream recognition this past week, with a critical article in Mother Jones prompting a further piece by PC Mag on the US law. Long-time readers of Ogle Earth will be familiar with the amendment, argued against back in 2007, which has effectively kept the commercially available resolution of satellite imagery of Israel and the Occupied Territories at 2.5m per pixel vs an operational maximum of around 50cm per pixel for current commercial satellites. (That’s a 25x artificial reduction in detail).

The Kyl-Bingaman amendment prohibits US companies from selling imagery of Israel at a higher resolution than commercially available elsewhere — currently that France’s Spot Image, which sells 2.5m per pixel imagery of Israel. Russian and South Korean satellite imagery providers, meanwhile, have agreements with Israel not to sell imagery of Israel at higher resolutions than France’s satellites. (There are possibly other such agreements, between Israel and other countries.) As a result, American companies GeoEye and DigitalGlobe pixellate their imagery of Israel before they sell it to the likes of Google.

The impetus for Mother Jones revisiting this law is the news that a Turkish company will soon be launching a high-resolution imaging satellite that can upset the current status quo re Israel. When launched in 2013, The Göktürk satellite will be able to provide imagery to the public at resolutions better than 2m per pixel, including of Israel and Israeli-controlled territories. According to reports, Israel has already tried to negotiate an agreement with Turkey to limit the sale of imagery of Israel, but Turkey is pointedly not playing ball, which is not surprising considering the current freeze in their bilateral relations.

The upshot is that by 2013, Google may well be able to buy higher resolution imagery of Israel from Göktürk. But if Göktürk imagery is commercially available at, say, 1m per pixel, then that will free American companies to also sell commercially at that resolution, as per the Kyl-Bingaman amendment.

Intriguingly, there is yet another new satellite constellation being developed that may substantially improve on the time-frame for availability of higher-resolution imagery of Israel: France’s Pleiades satellites, due to launch this year and next, have a maximum resolution of 50cm per pixel. What remains to be seen is whether Israel convinces their operators to also limit commercial access to imagery of Israel.

(Fact check: PC Mag erroneously believes the amendment is currently interpreted to allow imagery of 1m per pixel. They should have kept on reading the Washington Report article that they reference.)

Google’s mapping saga in China continues to twist and turn — this week, Chinese authorities announced they had again tightened regulations, now outright banning non-Chinese companies from offering online maps in China, unless they do so as a minority partner in a joint venture with a local company. China’s official press agency Xinhua News reported the news on June 8, although the new regulation has apparently been in effect since April 27.

Because these stories sometimes disappear from the internet, here it is in full, for future reference:

China bans foreign companies from offering online mapping, except joint ventures
English.news.cn — 2011-06-08 — 15:53:41

BEIJING, June 8 (Xinhua) — Foreign companies are effectively banned from providing Internet mapping services in China, however joint ventures are exempted, according to a notice issued by the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping on Wednesday. [Note: The hopelessly out-of-date website does not itself carry this notice]

The notice cited an amended regulation on overseas organizations and individuals that offer online mapping services. This amendment has been in effect since April 27, 2011.

The amendment also states that, for joint ventures with Internet mapping as their sole business, foreign investors cannot own more than 50 percent of the enterprise.

According to the notice, the amended regulation sets a stricter criteria for market entry which helps tighten up the rules governing the Internet mapping service market.

As the Internet mapping service market is developing rapidly, a lot of problems are surfacing, such as confidential geographic information being marked on maps, and maps showing no respect for China’s territorial integrity, reads the notice.

The amended regulation also clarifies requirements for overseas companies and individuals surveying China’s territory. They can either set up joint-ventures, contractual joint-ventures, or do one-off surveying with permission of relevant authorities.

In addition, the regulation bans foreign companies and individuals surveying and mapping of borders between administrative regions in China, as well as surveying and mapping of oceans.

As usual, the story serves little to clarify the situation, or the implications for ditu.google.cn, Google’s mapping service for the Chinese market. As of this writing, the website is still up (so is Microsoft’s Chinese map product) – so the amended regulation appears not yet to have been enforced. One possibility is that Google has agreed to enter into some kind of joint-venture arrangement with a Chinese company and given it operational control of ditu.google.cn — but there is no news of such a move, and the website continues to solely refer to Google as the provider.

Back in October 2010, an article on Sina.com.cn referred to the joint-venture requirement as a reason why ditu.google.cn would not get an internet mapping license, unless Google entered into a joint venture. That article, however, only referenced unnamed government sources and did not pinpoint to a published regulatory amendment. That amendment seems to have finally been announced in some official capacity.

For those new to this story, some context is in order. In May 2010, China announced internet mapping regulations that required licenses for online maps in China; companies were only eligible if they had not recently breached rules regarding sensitive information or shown borders that diverged from China’s own view. Arguably, Google’s ditu.google.cn product was in compliance with these conditions, as the dataset it uses obeys Chinese law and does not display user-generated content. A year-end deadline was set for a crackdown on “unregistered or illegal internet map servers”.

Google did not immediately make the cut, however — by the end of June, it was not on a draft list of companies up for approval, though it is also possible Google had not yet applied as it sought clarification through back channels. In July 2010, Google did manage to renew its license for its main google.cn property, though with search queries shunted to google.com.hk, hosted in the free-speech haven of Hong Kong. At this time, I argued that continuing to offer a censored mapping product in China was incompatible with Google’s stated position that it was no longer willing to censor its China-facing properties.

In October 2010, we had the story about the joint-venture requirement on Sina.com.cn. Then 2011 arrived and yet ditu.google.cn continued to operate. By March 30, 2011, Google had still not applied for a license, according to Chinese authorities. One possible clue as to Google’s plans came in April 2011, when it previewed Google Earth Builder, a mapping platform that lets anyone build and serve internet maps on top of Google Maps technology, but with complete control over the contents. Google Earth Builder could be a way for third parties to create mapping products palatable to Chinese authorities, based on Google Maps.

At this point, the main questions are: Is Google interested in entering into a joint venture to keep serving up ditu.google.cn in China? Or will it instead run out the clock and see if/when ditu.google.cn gets shuttered for being an unlicensed/illegal website? If so, will it then try to to market Google Earth Builder to third parties more willing to navigate the morally murky waters of Chinese mapping regulations? Might Google become a minority partner in a joint venture running Google Earth Builder, responsible just for the technical implementation of the platform? In that case, would Google’s distance from the grimy business of censorship be sufficient to placate anti-censorship advocates increasingly intent on keeping western companies from operating in ways that compromise human rights? Stay tuned.

The BBC today revealed that near-infrared satellite imagery taken of Egyptian archaeological sites have led to some significant new potential discoveries, including the identification of 17 candidates for buried pyramids (of which two have been confirmed, according to the BBC).

The University of Alabama’s Dr Sarah Parcak is the lead researcher in this quest, and she will feature in a new BBC documentary, Egypt’s Lost Cities, airing on May 30, 2011. It will be viewable online to anyone with a VPN or proxy into the UK.

Eager to check out this new research in a region and topic this blog has covered with much interest before (Amarna, Middle Egypt, Elephantine, Kom Firin, Khufu) I went looking to see if any of the raw imagery used by Parcak was available online, perhaps as part of her research findings. Alas, after much Googling, none of the research seems to be publicly available (yet?), so it appears we will need to watch the documentary to find out more. (BTW, Parcak wrote the book on satellite remote sensing for archaeology.)

Meanwhile, a short video excerpt (viewable by all) has the presenters looking breathlessly at infrared imagery from Tanis, which appears to reveal a hitherto hidden cityscape for this ancient Egyptian city. However, the presenters oversell the case somewhat: Tanis has been extensively excavated for some time, and its foundations are documented; they are definitely visible on Google Earth’s base imagery, though we get a somewhat clearer view at infrared wavelengths. So, just to be clear, Tanis isn’t a “lost city” that has just been found, as the documentary’s title might lead you to infer. Here’s the location in Google Earth, with and without the infrared image overlaid (taken from the Daily Mail’s story):

Another BBC press handout is more promising, however. Not far south of Saqqara, near the Pyramid of Khendjer, an infrared image is marked to show the location of one of the buried pyramids. It certainly looks plausible that this feature turns out to be a newly discovered pyramid:

In the absence of any further information online, we’ll have to wait on the documentary to tell us whether an excavation corroborated the promise of this particular image.

I’ve overlaid both images in Google Earth so you can check them out for yourself. Download this file, and open it in Google Earth. Double-click on an overlay to zoom in. Be sure to play with the opacity slider for each overlay to see how the imagery compares with Google’s own base layer. In both locations, there are multiple versions of the base layer from multiple years, so do check to see how the site has changed over the years (by using the historical imagery slider in Google Earth).

With erupting Icelandic volcanoes seemingly becoming an annual event, Adam Burt has overhauled his ash-cloud visualization tool for Google Earth, which he first made for Eyjafjallajökull’s eruption in June of 2010. Based on data gleaned every six hours from the UK Met office, the resulting network link visualizes ash density from Grimsvötn at different times and airspace heights, and can be played as an animation. Here it is — open in Google Earth.

Interesting to see how at different heights, the ash heads off in completely different directions.

Starting in 2006, several people were experimenting with phylogenetic tree structures visualized in Google Earth, and these experiments were blogged here, here, here and here. Unfortunately, most of these experiments are no longer online, so those articles are now linking to nonexistent pages.

But that doesn’t mean that these kinds of visualizations have stopped filling a need. Most recently, Christian Anderson went looking for a script to build phylogenetic trees in Google Earth, couldn’t find the ones linked to here in Ogle Earth, and so decided to build his own.

He sent over the result, and it is worth posting here for the sake of future web searches. This is a zip file containing the a script written in the R language, as well as a sample KML file. He’s looking for feedback.

• China sets up office for Internet information management
  Does China have a new internet maps regulator?
• Google LatLong: Imagery Update – Week of May 2nd
  Google updates its maps for Abbottabad with satellite imagery taken on May 9, 2010, and says it will soon also incorporate the post-raid imagery taken by GeoEye on May 2, 2011.

Via the Map Room, news of a brand new satellite image taken today, after the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s compound.

It’s by GeoEye, and the caption reads thus:

This one-meter resolution image shows a walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. According to news reports Abbottabad is the town where Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces. The image was collected by the IKONOS satellite on May 2, 2011 at 10:51 a.m. local time while flying 423 miles above the Earth at an average speed of 17,000 mph, or four miles per second.

That would place the timing of the image at just under 10 hours after the attack.

What it lags in resolution vs the DigitalGlobe image from January 2011 (blogged previously) it makes up for in terms of timeliness and color. In fact, the crash site of the problem-helicopter seems plainly visibly (to my eyes) as a blackened helicopter-shaped mass. While there are photographs around of helicopter chunks eventually being hauled away, this satellite image seems to have been taken before then:

As with the DigitalGlobe image, it looks great when overlaid on Google Earth, so here is the KMZ file (2MB). As usual, play with the opacity slider to compare vs the older imagery from 2005 below it, and remove the outline of the compound to get a better look.

UPDATE May 3: A graphic made by the New York Times places the helicopter crash at the same location as indicated in the image above:

[Update May 3: Google today updated its base image layer to include imagery from Abbottabad taken on May 9, 2010 — just under a year ago. You can still see the imagery from 2005 (and 2001) by using the historical imagery time slider tool in Google Earth.]

A closeup of that photograph making the rounds of Obama and his team following the raid on Bin Laden’s compound in the Situation Room: (Click to enlarge)

Sure enough, it is an aerial surveillance image of the compound. Also note that “a classified document seen in this photograph has been obscured,” as the caption puts it. What’s interesting is that this document too — for as far as I can tell through the pixellation — looks like a highly detailed aerial image; probably so detailed that the US military would rather us not know just how detailed it can get.

UPDATE: A new post: GeoEye publishes post-raid satellite image of Bin Laden compound

Via a comment left under the previous post here on Ogle Earth, a pointer to just-released high-resolution satellite imagery of Osama Bin Laden’s compound, published by DigitalGlobe to their Flickr account. Dated January 15, 2011, and showing a scene with denuded trees, the black-and-white image clocks in at 5368 × 5719 pixels, making it an ideal image to place as an image overlay into Google Earth.

So without further ado, here it is as a KMZ file to be opened in Google Earth. It’s 6MB, so give it some time to open. As usual, play with the opacity slider on the left-hand side to compare the base imagery (from June 15, 2005) with the updated B&W imagery from 2011. I’ve also added an outline of the compound; feel free to turn that off to get a better look.

As you may know, there is also a layer in Google Earth that outlines the locations of DigitalGlobe satellite images taken over the years (under “More”). I actually went looking there today to see if there had been any recent activity over Abbottabad, because in past cases (such as when Israel destroyed a nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007), an area of close interest to a DigitalGlobe customer would later show itself to be the location of a military strike. The most recent date shown for a DigitalGlobe image of Abbottabad is 2006… followed of course by the current image from January 2011. So could we have known (with hindsight) that something was up in Abbottabad? No, because Google Earth does not yet show where DigitalGlobe imagery for 2011 has been taken. The above image is too recent!

(For older coverage of the Osama Bin Laden compound’s location, check out my previous post.)

[Update May 3: Google today updated its base image layer to include imagery from Abbottabad taken on May 9, 2010 — just under a year ago.]

UPDATE: Scroll to the end of the article to see the final confirmed location of the compound.

UPDATE 2: A new post: 2011 DigitalGlobe imagery of Bin Laden compound, now on Google Earth

UPDATE 3: More posts: GeoEye publishes post-raid satellite image of Bin Laden compound, In the Situation Room, aerial imagery of the Bin Laden compound.

Osama Bin Laden’s death first manifested itself as short news items on Pakistani news sites: “Copter crashes on Kakul road – Monitoring Desk“, and indeed, later we would hear that one of the helicopters used in the raid on Bin Laden’s compound was damaged and destroyed.

The repercussions of Bin Laden’s death are still uncertain, but this post will just concern itself with the location of this compound. Where exactly was it? Can we find it on Google Earth?

Al Jazeera English mentions “a mansion” surrounded by high walls, comprised of “boxes” with no windows. On a map of Abbottabad shown on their screen, Al Jazeera shows Kakul Road, and marks a specific location on that road, at the edge of some fields.

In a news story sourced to CBS/Associated Press, we get an eyewitness to tell us the following:

“I heard a thundering sound, followed by heavy firing. Then firing suddenly stopped. Then more thundering, then a big blast,” he said. “In the morning when we went out to see what happened, some helicopter wreckage was lying in an open field.”

He said the house was 100 yards away from the gate of the academy.

The New York Times reports that the mansion was “on the outskirts of the town’s center, set on an imposing hilltop and ringed by 12-foot-high concrete walls topped with barbed wire.” It goes on:

The property was valued at $1 million, but it had neither a telephone nor an Internet connection. Its residents were so concerned about security that they burned their trash rather putting it on the street for collection like their neighbors.

American officials believed that the compound, built in 2005, was designed for the specific purpose of hiding Bin Laden.

Is it possible to correlate these disparate clues? Not really. The NYT is most likely to be wrong as to the location — Al Jazeera footage shows a backdrop of flat fields near the compound, not a hilltop. Also, from the position marked by Al Jazeera on the map, the front gate of the military academy is around 2km away along the straight Kakul road, rather than the “100 meters” mentioned by the AP eyewitness.

I am inclined to give Al Jazeera the benefit of the doubt on this. They are the most likely to have people on the ground with the correct information, they are specific in their pinpointing of the location and their video footage supports their map.

But there is one further clue we can use. Google Earth’s high-resolution map of the area has imagery from June 15, 2005 — almost 6 years old. One set of older imagery is available — from March 23, 2001. If the NYT sources are correct on Bin Laden’s mansion being under construction in 2005 (and on this they are likely to be correct, as it sounds like a piece of information from an intelligence source) then we should be able to compare the 2001 imagery with the 2005 imagery, and look for any mansion-sized construction going on in 2005.

[Update May 3: Google today updated its base image layer to include imagery from Abbottabad taken on May 9, 2010 — just under a year ago. You can still see the imagery from 2005 (and 2001) by using the historical imagery time slider tool in Google Earth.]

And Indeed, in the specific region marked by Al Jazeera, there is construction underway in 2005. Below is the imagery in 2005, then in 2001, then in 2005 again with the construction marked.

Imagery taken on June 15, 2005

Imagery taken on March 23, 2001

Construction ongoing on June 15, 2005

Of course, it is possible that construction on the mansion began after June 15, 2005.

Finally, here is a Google Map I’ve made of the locations mentioned in this article:

View Osama Bin Laden’s mansion location.kmz in a larger map

And here it is as a downloadable KML file for Google Earth.

It’s possible that these locations are wrong. The easiest way to find the precise place would be to walk on over there and take a look, but failing that, I will keep this article updated with more accurate information as it becomes available.

UPDATE 9:53 UTC: Pakistan-based journalist Omar Waraich tweets that the location of the mansion, and where he is headed to, is Bilal colony/town in Abbottabad. On Google Maps there is a marker tagged “Bilal Mosque” which corresponds perfectly with the screenshots of Google Earth above. In other words, there is reason to be more confident that the above locations are correct.

UPDATE 13:29 UTC: Here are screen grabs from Al Jazeera of the compound:

As you can see from the wide shot, the compound (not so much a “mansion” in terms of opulence”) faces the edge of an area with fields. Zooming in, we can see a section of red tarpaulin erected to hide ongoing investigatory activity. The mountainscape behind the compound can be reconstructed in Google Earth from the Bilal Town location pinpointed above. In other words, this is more evidence that Bin Laden’s compound is in the above location, most likely on the dirt road that runs along the creek visible in the Google Earth screenshots.

UPDATE 13:51 UTC: Here’s a screengrab of Al Jazeera’s map referred to above (via):

UPDATE 14:52 UTC: After a comment left by Dave (below), I took another look further to the west east of Bilal Mosque to see if there was any prominent construction there in 2005, in an area that is less built up than in Bilal Town proper. And indeed, there is one conspicuous compound that sticks out, and which closely matches the video imagery above. Here is the view in Google Earth in 2001:

And here it is in 2005:

I think we have a very likely candidate here. (I’ve updated the map and added the location to the Google Earth KML file.)

UPDATE 15:13 UTC: Published a few minutes ago, this new story by the BBC all but confirms that this compound is indeed the correct location, with a highly detailed map:

(Via maptd)

Thank you for playing everyone. We have a winner:

View Osama Bin Laden’s mansion location.kmz in a larger map

UPDATE 16:22 UTC: The CIA Pentagon releases aerial imagery confirming that this is indeed the location, as reported by the National Journal: (Click to enlarge. PDF of originals)