The Commanding Heights of National Intelligence

Here's an amazing story about a group of amateurs led by a PhD candidate in Northern Virginia who have created a detailed map of North Korea using little more than Google Earth and scraps of information gleaned from the regime's propaganda photos. Gulags, Nukes and a Water Slide: Citizen Spies Lift North Korea's Veil

(Curtis) Melvin is at the center of a dozen or so citizen snoops who have spent the past two years filling in the blanks on the map of one of the world's most secretive countries. Seeking clues in photos, news reports and eyewitness accounts, they affix labels to North Korean structures and landscapes captured by Google Earth, an online service that stitches satellite pictures into a virtual globe. The result is an annotated North Korea of rocket-launch sites, prison camps and elite palaces on white-sand beaches.

"It's democratized intelligence," says Mr. Melvin.

I am willing to bet that there are just two groups of people who would have no use for this: (1) Big Media types at the networks and NY Times writing think-pieces about North Korea and (2) anyone working the North Korea desk at the CIA.  The information that Curtis and his cohort has been able to gather is remarkably detailed, especially when you consider that these guys are thousands of miles away. 

But, even from this distance, it's easy to see the misery with which North Koreans must live:

Many updates later, Mr. Melvin and his correspondents have plotted out what they say is much of the country's transportation network and electrical grid, and many of its military bases. They've spotted what they believe are mass graves created in the 1995-98 famine that killed an estimated two million people. The vast complexes of Mr. Kim and other North Korean leaders are visible, with palatial homes, pools, even a water slide.

(snip)

On the satellite images of North Korean towns, it's easy to see many people gathered around the markets and no one in the giant plazas that are tributes to Mr. Kim's government.

Mr. Melvin says the images also make clear the gulf between the lives of Mr. Kim and his impoverished people. "Once you start mapping the power plants and substations and wires, you can connect the infrastructure with the elite compounds," Mr. Melvin says. "And then you see towns that have no power supply at all."

The satellite images of the mass graves - tiny little nubs from our perspective - are especially poignant in their mute testimony.

While there is much incompetence on display in our nation's intelligence gathering, it's good to know that an ad hoc group like this can make a real contribution towards understanding a regime that is so far removed from the civilized world.