Thanks to high-resolution satellite images provided by Google Earth, North Korean labor camps can be identified from space, even when the repressive and authoritarian regime would prefer to keep them secret.
"Human rights campaigners have used Google Earth to identify previously hidden labour camps within North Korea," wrote the Telegraph. "A blogger has pulled together images of guard houses, burial grounds and mines and corroborated their purpose through interviews with former political prisoners."
"The dramatically improved, higher resolution satellite imagery now available through Google Earth allows the former prisoners to identify their former barracks and houses, their former execution grounds, and other landmarks in the camps," stated the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea in the second edition of their book "Hidden Gulag."
A blogger, Curtis Melvin, who specializes in North Korean economic policy, also uses the maps to infer more about conditions behind the country's closed borders than the regime would prefer.
He believes he has found what may be a new labor camp.
"While updating my Google Earth file to match the new satellite imagery, however, I noticed the addition of a new area that bears striking similarity to other known prison camps. This area was built sometime between 2006-12-17 and 2011-9-21. It is surrounded by a very visible security perimeter. It is also placed right next to Camp 14- even sharing 3kms of border," he wrote on his blog last week.
Even if this new construction isn't a new prison camp, many North Korean dissidents are jailed and forced into a life of hard labor.
"There are six massive prison camps in the remote, mountain valleys of North Korea, some with circumferences that are greater than those of major American cities," reported the Wall Street Journal. "Analysts believe the camps hold 100,000 to 200,000 people, including many who committed no crime other than to be related to someone perceived to be an enemy of the country's authoritarian regime."
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