North Korea - Turn On the Lights, Please

North Korea's recent missile launch furor, and the obvious conventional weaponry doctrine in place, as well as my comments in the Travel Without Moving series - Korean Demilitarized Zone, reminded me of a how they tend to fuel growth in military spending/the regime, where the trade-off is a developing economy, or any economy at all. I feel North Korea is still quite dark these days, very impressive imagery showing that :

"South Korea is bright, North Korea is dark. This amazing image is included in the standard US Department of Defense briefings on North Korea. It was mentioned in a news briefing on 23 December 2002 by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who stated that "If you look at a picture from the sky of the Korean Peninsula at night, South Korea is filled with lights and energy and vitality and a booming economy; North Korea is dark." There are a number of versions of this image in circulation, with visible differences that vary according to the conditions at the time the imagery was acquired."

Rich Karlgaard's comment on lifting North Korea sanctions, and Quentin Hardy's argument that "Capitalism has corrupted other authoritarian regimes, why not North Korea?”are worth taking into consideration. Continue reading →

Suri Pluma - a satellite image processing tool and visualizer

I just came across a great satellite image processing software and decided to share it with my blog readers. Perhaps that's a good moment to spread the word about my RSS compatible feed, so consider syndicating it. To sum up :

"Suri Pluma is a satellite image processing tool and visualizer. It can open the most common image formats without importing to an internal format and minimizing the memory required for visualization. It is designed to be modular and extensible. It has a meassurement tool (distance and areas with error estimation) and geographical and map coordinate information."

Check out the screenshots and consider downloading it in case you're interested. Meanwhile, you can also go through a previous post that's again related to visualization.

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satellites, visualization, Suri Pluma

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Security quotes : a FSB (successor to the KGB) analyst on Google Earth

"Lt. Gen. Leonid Sazhin, an analyst for the Federal Security Service, the Russian security agency that succeeded the K.G.B., was quoted by Itar-Tass as saying: "Terrorists don't need to reconnoiter their target. Now an American company is working for them." A great quote, and I find it totally true. The point is, not to look for high-resolution imagery, but to harness the power of OSINT, improve their confidence by observing the targets "from the sky", and actually plan and coordinate its activities on huge territories. AJAX anyone? :)

However, the public has always been good at bringing the real issue to the rest of the world. There have been numerous attempts to spot sensitive locations, and I wouldn't be myself if I don't share the joys of the Eyeball Series with you. Of course, in case you haven't come across the initiative earlier. However, the way it gives terrorists or enemies these opportunities, it also serves the general public by acting as an evidence for the existence of espionage sentiments, here and there. Echelon's Yakima Research Station was spotted on GoogleMaps, originally by Cryptome, see the dishes there? Any thoughts in here? Can Microsft's Local Live with its highly differentiated bird eye view on important locations turn into a bigger risk the the popularity of Google's services?

Technorati tags :
Google Earth,Google Maps,satellite imagery,OSINT,security,terrorism Continue reading →