North Korean Gulags and 5 Other Secret Sites Exposed by Google Maps

On Monday, Google filled in one of the last blank spots on its digital map: North Korea, adding detailed imagery of the secretive country for the first time.

To build the map, a community of citizen cartographers came together in Google Map Maker to make their contributions such as adding road names and points of interest, Google said. The map isn???t perfect - crowd-sourced collections may not be - but any errors can be cross-checked by hundreds of eager eyes.

Google???s efforts are just the latest evolution of what is a full-time job for some, and a strangely compelling online hobby for others. In 2011, a number of amateur Internet sleuths began investing a series of mysterious lines that appeared in the Chinese desert. Numerous explanations were put forward: a signal array? A bombing range? To this day, the lines remain unexplained.

These unofficial investigators are now poring over the millions of square miles of satellite imagery Google accumulated via its partners, and collected within its Google Maps and Google Earth framework. With the addition of North Korea to the digital library, those interested in exploring the ???Hermit Kingdom??? have another locale to virtually explore.

Some locations come and go. ITSecurity compiled a list of locations that were blurred out in years past for either security or privacy reasons, including the roof of the White House. But today, the roof appears unobscured, although the building???s defenses still apparently remain digitally erased. And, of course, Area 51 can be digitally explored, at least from the air. Taiwan also reportedly asked that one of its military bases be digitally hidden from Apple Maps.

In the next few pages, we???ll show you a few locations governments want to keep secret, and what they might mean.

Source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414904,00.asp?kc=PCRSS05079TX1K0000992

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