• The Geotaggers' World Atlas – a set on Flickr
  Just gorgeous.
• Louisiana House OKs bill to strengthen penalties for 'virtual map' crimes | NOLA.com
  This is just bizarre: Using "virtual street-level maps" to plan a crime in Louisiana will soon add years to your sentence. You are still free to use mobile phones, binoculars, walkie talkies, GPS devices, cameras, stake-outs and getaway cars for your crimes, just not Google Street View, OK?

• Google Maps: Location of Syria site identified in Haaretz
  Location of the Syria site flagged by Haaretz. It looks abandoned. BTW, the latest DigitalGlobe imagery is not visible in GE, just the metadata in the DigitalGlobe default layer.
• Western intelligence agency repeatedly ordered satellite photos of secret Syrian site – Haaretz
  "Which Western intelligence agency requested satellite photographs of secret Syrian military installations near the border with Lebanon over the past two years? A small patch of territory in northwest Syria has been photographed on at least 16 occasions. The images were procured by satellite imaging service DigitalGlobe, which the Western company hired."

  The images are all visible in Google Earth.

• FT.com / China – China cracks down on online maps
  Some more details:

  "Beijing has been requiring online map services providers to place their servers in China since March 2009. However, the latest regulations also demand that map services companies give the authorities the IP addresses of their servers.

  The companies must also set up internal work structures for file storage, screening and deletion, which have to be approved by the regulator. All entities that have revealed state secrets in the past three years are banned from running such businesses."

  BTW FT, if you do a geolookup for the current IP address of ditu.google.com, you see it is located in Mountain View.

An “article” from the state-owned China Daily newspaper republished on the website of China’s official news agency Xinhua News serves as our English-language notice: The crackdown on internet mapping services in China is real, and starts next month. The piece deserves a careful read:

China issues new rules on Internet map publishing

BEIJING, May 19 — An updated standard for Internet map servers will be implemented next month to avoid state secrets being disclosed and uncertified maps published online, authorities have said.

The new standard issued by the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping, one year after the first standard was launched, requires all Internet map servers to keep servers storing map data inside the country and provide public Internet protocol addresses.

In other words, if you want to have your maps seen inside China’s great firewall, you will need to have them served from within China, where they must abide by Chinese law. The Google Maps version adapted for China, ditu.google.com, already abides by Chinese law — borders are shows as dictated by China, and there are no annotation layers visible — but it is not now served from within China [They are now for Chinese users]. I think this spells the end of Google Maps in China, and of the API as well.

Another casualty of this decree will likely be Google Earth — it has no datasets adapted to suit the local laws of countries like China and India, and is served from outside China.

Under the latest standard, qualified online map servers must have no record of information leakage in any form in the past three years.

That’s another count against Google Earth, whose annotation layers are chockfull of information of the kind that the Chinese government probably considers leakage. It’s also a handy way to retroactively punish any Chinese map service that’s published geogaphic information not to the government’s liking before this regulation was announced.

The new regulation includes all maps downloaded or copied from the Internet onto cell phones and handheld computers.

Best to close that loophole before mobile maps take off.

By the end of December, the authorities will also crack down on unregistered or illegal Internet map servers and release the blacklist to the public.

Song Chaozhi, deputy director of the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping, said in a conference on Internet map services in Beijing on May 14 that there are two main problems existing in the field: One is publishing maps with wrong locations or information, and the other is leaking sensitive information involving State secrets on maps.

All these will harm consumers’ rights or even endanger national security, he said.

Here we finally get an inkling of their motivation. “Maps with wrong locations or information” is newspeak for “maps with place names and borders with which we don’t agree”. As for “state secrets”, these are of course anything but secrets, because anything visible from space has now been in the public domain for years. The bit about consumer rights is just cynical posturing, but the party faithful eat that stuff up.

Cases of illegal mapping are not rare in the country.

The national surveying and mapping bureau reportedly punished three Germans who collected geographic information in Yichang, Hubei province and later mapped these in computers.

Similarly, the Longyan bureau of land and resources in Fujian province reportedly meted out administrative punishment to a Japanese who measured 195 locations inside Longyan and located 80 of them on his map.

Indeed, as long ago as 2006 scary foreigners were caught collecting geographical information from inside China! Unhelpfully, we’re not told if adding waymarks to a GPS device warrants the prescribed 7-10 years in jail. It might just be less of a hassle to get the coordinates from Google Earth.

The 2006 news item led to a speculative post on Ogle Earth about what might happen should Chinese officials catch on to these annotation layers, and four years on, it is proving remarkably salient.

In April 2010, the Shenzhen land planning and supervision team detected a website named Moon-bbs.com, where confidential geographic information including military airports and locations of nuclear test explosions were published.

That’s the BBS maintained by China’s William Long, who is also author of this English-language blog. It’s unlikely that this BBS and his Google Earth-centric blog Google Earth Watch took until 2010 to be “detected”. Even Ogle Earth managed to detect William Long’s work as long ago as 2008. More likely, the authorities decided that annotation layers would no longer be tolerated, and William Long was chosen to be made an example of so as to create a chilling effect.

The website was reportedly linked to the server of a foreign map website, where users can scan high-definition satellite pictures worldwide free of charge and mark the location or relevant information of a military site on it.

That would be Google Maps/Earth. Great investigative reporting, China Daily.

Satellite pictures cannot be called electronic maps because no coordinates are marked, but in this case, when users marked coordinates of military sites, it can reveal state secrets, experts said.

If your secret submarine cave base has been found — and let’s face it, it’s kind of a cool thing and something people will want to see and photograph if they can — the game is up for ever. You can’t put these photons back in the bottle. Ditto for new submarine classes that surface, or special training grounds.

Most of the world’s militaries and intelligence agencies know this. They also know that what’s visible to a satellite has long been accessible to everybody with sufficient resources, e.g. other governments, or conglomerates willing to spend cash on commissioning images and analysts.

Since Google Earth, this scrutiny has extended to crowds of interested individuals, collaborating to share their findings on the internet. And what do they annotate? Military sites are just a tiny portion; just check the list of topics in Google Earth Community: Huge and unique, sports and hobbies, transportation, people and cultures, nature and geography, history illustrated, travel information… and yes, military.

One way you certainly cannot solve the “problem” of having your sensitive sites scrutinized by the rest of the world is to legislate against it. The sustainable solution, as most modern militaries know, is to camouflage your installations, or hide them underground or in buildings, or otherwise frequently change the setup and configuration of those installations out in the open.

In another website called Godeyes, a well-known portal based on Google Earth with 440,000 registered users, people can pilot virtual planes from Nanning, capital of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, to Beijing.

Yes, and?

China has about 42,000 Internet map websites and as the number grows, more cases of information leakage reportedly occur.

Anyone who violates the State Secrets Law or reveals State secrets can be jailed up to seven years, or up to 10 years if the crime involves military secrets.

Many analysts said the new regulation will impact Internet map servers significantly.

Edward Yu, president of Analysys International, said the issue will involve balance or competition between the government and Internet map servers.

Workers from online search engine Google and communications giant Nokia said they have not heard of the regulation and have no comments on its impact.

“If it’s about natural fields rather than cities, satellite mapping information can be sensitive and State secrets such as military bases may be exposed,” said Chu Xiaowen, assistant professor of the department of computer science in Baptist University in Hong Kong.

“That’s quite normal for any country. No one would agree to put its own map information in other countries,” said Li Zhilin, professor of the department of land surveying and geo-informatics at Polytechnic University of Hong Kong.

Li Zhilin seems wasted on Hong Kong, where freedom of speech is still protected and none of these stringent new mapping restrictions will be in effect. He is of course also mistaken: These annotation layers are not owned by China, so they can be served from anywhere. And if by “own map information” he should in fact mean “maps of China” then he is especially wrong: Other countries don’t in fact have a problem with the Google Maps dataset of the world being served out of the US.

So what is the state of play currently? I’ve just checked:

• The Google Earth Community is still accessible from within China.
• The default version of Google Maps is still accessible.
• Google Earth is also still accessible from within China, as are all its annotation layers.

Let’s see what changes come June 1.

Just for the record, I think it is entirely a good thing that the average interested citizen can browse military installations and capacities both domestically and internationally. After all, we’re collectively paying for it, and if we are going to support this level of militarization globally, then we should know what it entails, and what we’re getting for our money. Accountability is a cornerstone of any open, democratic society, so it is fitting that in Europe and the US (and most elsewhere), pointing out military installations on a map is part of a healthy discourse on security and its costs. Criminalizing such activity is as stupid and reactionary as it is pointless.

• 3quarksdaily: Wednesday Poem: Google Earth
  by Adam Wyeth, from "Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland". Well worth a pause to read.
• 月光论坛事件媒体博客报道汇总-月光博客
  William Long posts a collection of links to blogs reporting on his brush with CCTV re user-generated maps in China. Good to see he isn't just rolling over.

• Google images show North Korea logging into UN protected biosphere-ET Cetera-News By Industry-News-The Economic Times
  "Upon investigating he found that large swathes of the biosphere had been stripped bare by North Korea, and alarmingly, the deforestation accounted for almost 75 per cent of the forest's core area."

Having lived in China for just over a year, I’ve seen the progressive blocking of Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot, YouTube and now most recently DropBox, so today should not have come as a surprise: User-generated maps and annotations are up next.

There was some hope these past few years that Chinese authorities understood the collaborative nature of neogeography, and how ironic it would be to block it domestically or even criminalizing it for the sake of preserving state secrets that would then be available to everyone except the Chinese.

But considering the myriad of authorities with a finger in the national security pie, it was only a matter of time before the more paranoid among them were alerted to the existential threat posed by Google Earth, and the treacherous placemarks its users share with the world.

And thus we get this week’s crackdown, in the form of an “exposé” by the national propaganda television broadcaster, CCTV, and an article on the China Economy site entitled “Seven government departments rectify geographical information market: more than a thousand problem websites dealt with”. Danwei blog helpfully gives us the blow-by-blow account for non-Chinese speakers. An excerpt:

The CCTV program ‘Topics in Focus’ (焦点访谈), ever happy to attack Internet companies, especially Google, participated in the purge by airing a program last night showing how a Chinese blogger was “revealing state secrets” by writing annotations on Google Earth.

In the program segment titled ‘Beware of Internet maps revealing state secrets’ linked below, journalists appear to ask the blogger, identified as ‘Xiao Long’ about his online activities. Although they pixelize his face, they show his webpage, and it’s not hard to figure out that the blogger in question is none other than William Long of the Moon Blog, which Danwei has linked to many times in the past. His blog has a Google Earth section where he compiles and links to various interesting things on Google Earth.

The 11 minute segment from CCTV is especially worth watching. You don’t need to speak Chinese to understand the grave, serious tone of voice with which the presenter announces this newly discovered danger to the motherland. You also can’t miss the buckets of intimidation being heaped on the unsuspecting William Long as he is hauled in for a media ambush with the connivance of a local planning authority (at 2:43). All in all, an incredibly effective, and chilling, piece of propaganda for the 21st century, broadcast yesterday to hundreds of millions of homes across China. (And you were wondering why a large majority of Chinese citizens approve of their internet being censored?)

William Long’s Google-oriented blog is Google Earth Watch. (His default blog is Moonlight Blog.) Most of his posts are short texts on interesting sights, sometimes with a photo, and then a KML file pinpointing the location that can be opened in Google Earth. He’s been posting continuously up until 2 days ago, but not recently about China. The most recent post tagged with China is from October 2009, the oldest from way back in July 2006, about the then-upcoming Beijing Olympics. Here’s hoping William doesn’t succumb to a bout of self-censorship, and that this wonderful Chinese-language Google Earth resource site stays up.

[Update 17:28 UTC: Danwei is more sanguine about the possible motivations for this “purge”:

If there is a rational reason for this purge, it’s probably a way of making sure unauthorized vendors do not poach on the turf of government mandated providers of maps and GPS services. Giving CCTV another chance to give Google a little slap in the face is just an added bonus.]