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Crowdsourcing the hunt for North Korea’s prisons and prison camps

The world didn’t awaken to the horrors in North Korea in time save Kim Jong Il’s victims or hold him accountable, but it may be doing so in time to give Kim Jong Un some pause as he prosecutes his bloody purges. Various reports from inside North Korea — reports that are impossible to verify — say that he has carried out mass arrests and executions, both in Pyongyang and near the border regions that represent the greatest threat to his total control over information.

If those reports are true, we would expect to see that some of the camps had expanded, or that new facilities are being built to replace those that, like Camp 22, have been compromised. Recent satellite imagery suggests that the capacities of Camps 12, 14, 16, and 25 have all been expanded to one degree or another, but with new imagery becoming available on a regular basis, North Korea still hasn’t given up all of its secrets. And I have less time each year to find them myself.

This is where you come in. With the help of a friend I’ve never met, I’m crowdsourcing the search for North Korea’s secrets. A man who prefers to be identified as “a software engineer in Europe” has created a web page that allows anyone to pick a grid square and search it for suspect facilities. You’ll find the map, and instructions on how to use it, here.

By the way, our web designer friend in Europe already has one “find,” a possible prison up in remote Ryanggang Province.

New prison in Ryanggang

It bears all of the characteristics typical of a prison, including guard towers, but I would not attempt to say that any location is confirmed to be a prison without witness corroboration. It could be a factory, or a military installation. But it’s a beginning to a process of investigation.

Prisons of this kind typically house a combination of violent, economic, and political criminals. Some of the prisoners there would be sent to prison in most countries for the behavior that got them sent here. Many others, such as those imprisoned for religious activities, unauthorized trade in consumer goods, or trying to flee the country, would not. But it is the conditions in these prisons — and the high mortality rates they cause — that really distinguishes them.

Obviously, our friend could be deluged with false reports or people mistaking power lines for fence lines, so if you want to join the search, I would first urge you to read and study these pages and become familiar with the distinctive characteristics of North Korean prisons. Large prison camps surrounded by fence lines and guard posts look nothing like the smaller, walled penitentiary-style prisons, and either can resemble military (or even industrial) facilities.

If you have experience as an imagery analyst, your assistance is especially welcome. And now that Congress has funded an online database for North Korea’s prison system, the information is likely to get wide dissemination, once confirmed. I’m obviously happy to credit anyone who is willing to be named.

Thank you, good day, and good hunting.

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13 Responses

  3. I think we should all join forces and publish it. I will be a baseline for NGOs to do interviews with refugees who can corroborate what the locations actually are.

  4. To Curtis Melvin: so, if you have done this already, how do you continue with update? So you regularly revisit the whole country? It would seem to me this kind of project is not a one-time thing because new construction can take place etc. I guess that then depends on how frequently new satellite pictures become available.

  5. Well, that’s a lot of what I had in mind. I don’t think there’s anything in the existing imagery that Curtis hasn’t seen, but what I’m interested in is new facilities, changes in existing facilities, changes in border security, and population movements. A lot of this won’t show up until new imagery is released, but GE is posting a lot more imagery of North Korea than it did just a few years ago.

  6. UrtheCast

    http://www.urthecast.com

    might help find the Norkland concentration camps / general nastiness. And much else. The business model makes available snapshots of specific Earth locations from a hi-def camera installed on the International Space Station. ISS covers The Nork Empire at least once every twenty-four hours, so weather permitting, it will see everything the Norks do above ground – almost in real time. At

    http://www.urthecast.com/business#image-processing -> “Change Indicators”

    UrtheCast says they will have a product, right out of the box, that shows how an area changes over time. The website says the company will release an API sometime this year, so developers can PROBABLY build an application front-end over and around the product itself. If I understand the Urthecast product correctly, it would really help the effort.

  7. Hi Thomas,

    I spend just about every working day (the whole day) going over satellite imagery of North Korea. I daily check publicly available satellite imagery of the country and keep an extensive database of locations from prison camps to military factories to vegetable shops on the side of the road. I have been doing this on a full time basis since 2009. I also regularly interview North Korean defectors on satellite imagery both in the US and in South Korea.

    Josh, I will reach out to you soon about this stuff.

    Best,
    Curtis

  8. I have volunteered for the crowd sourcing hunt. Based on the above comments, is the project still viable? If the satellite imagery isn’t more current than Mr. Melvin’s work, where is the benefit in doing this work?

  10. The imagery is added to Google Earth/Maps randomly, but I systematically check it every morning (the whole country) and then methodically cover each image tile piece by piece. I have literally examined every image tile in North Korea on Google Earth. There is a tool that Google produced that shows the location of new imagery, but it is not very good…

  12. To Curtis Melvin:

    Sorry I missed your earlier response to my post. The reason why I was asking is this: when you posted your first comment here that you have basically done all this, I wondered – does that mean that you are trying to discourage people from joining the crowdsourcing project because this would be an unnecessary duplication? I actually would like to take part but then you clearly do this in a much more intensive way as a full-time job, so I sort of don’t know whether you see the dprkmapscan as a complement to your work or whether they are just alsorans…? Please advise.

  13. IT World reports

    http://www.itworld.com/demand-software/422874/us-government-oks-sharper-satellite-images

    that some time in the first half of 2015, private American companies can sell high-resolution satellite pictures without U.S. government restrictions. It looks like Google will use this material for its imaging products, so we’ll have an easier time watching the Nork Empire. Of course, the report does not say how often Google updates its images, but this new policy will help.