OFK’s 15 Minutes: We’re in the Wall Street Journal Today

This blog is mentioned in a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal about Google Earth and North Korea. Curtis Melvin, who has done vastly more study of North Korea on Google Earth, deservedly gets the most ink, but it’s nice to see this humble blog get mentioned:

Joshua Stanton, an attorney in Washington who once served in the U.S. military in South Korea, used Google Earth to look for one of the country’s notorious prisons. In early 2007, he read an international news report about a mass escape from Camp 16, which the report mentioned was near the site of a nuclear test conducted the year before.

No pictures of Camp 16 are believed to have been seen outside the country. But Mr. Stanton had pored over defector sketches of it and combed the map for familiar structures. “I realized I had already noticed the guard posts” while looking on Google Earth the previous year for the nuclear test site, he says.

Mr. Stanton traced what he believed is Camp 16’s boundary, enclosing nearly 300 square miles, and those of other large North Korean prisons and shared them with Mr. Melvin. The fences aren’t easy to follow because they go over mountain ridges, he says. But satellite images often reveal gaps in the vegetation along the fence line, because trees are cleared on either side to prevent people from climbing over.

Last year, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas used Mr. Stanton’s maps in a floor presentation criticizing the North’s human-rights record. “Google has made a witness of all of us,” Mr. Brownback said. “We can no longer deny these things exist.”  [Wall Street Journal, Evan Ramstad]

Don’t miss the interactive graphic, and many thanks to Evan Ramstad for the terrific article.

Update:   The Donga Ilbo misreads a detail in the WSJ piece:  the images Senator Brownback used in his speech were actually of Camp 22, not Camp 16.  Still, it’s always good on balance to see the issue covered, and gratifying that after five years of doing this, I’m in a position to bring more attention to it.

Update, May 30:   More than a week later, the story continues to get a great deal of media attention, all of which I deeply appreciate.  I was even invited to go on the Rachel Maddow Show — I politely declined — though I did agree to a brief interview with a provider of content for Channel News Asia and the Voice of America.  I still have no idea when or if it will air.

The Wall Street Journal story was published in other languages, including Chinese, and government-controlled Sina.com even hosted a story about it.  It’s gratifying to see that Chinese citizens at least have some idea of what their government is sponsoring, although I doubt anyone in China would dare to link this site, given its ferocious criticism of the Chinese oligarchy.  For the most part, my visitors from China continue to come from “anonymized” urls.

My visitors’ log tells me that the story caught the attention of chatrooms in Poland and the Netherlands, and I also found these reports from Croatia and Austria, and this one in Germany’s Der Spiegel.  Several online news aggregators from Russia also picked up the story.