Open Mobile Map

For autocratic regimes, naming landmarks is both a perk and a tool — a cheap stab at immortality and a means to cement authority: In Syria, examples abound: The main highway through Damascus is named after the late despot Hafez al-Assad, father to the current one. In the coastal town of Latakia, a main street is called 8 Azar Avenue, named after the March 8, 1963 coup d’état that brought the Ba’ath Party to power, soon headed by the al-Assad clan. (March = Azar = آذار)

Should the al-Assad dynasty fall in Syria, these names will certainly change. In the meantime, how do reference maps depict such landmarks? Taking Latakia as an example, here’s a conventional, static tourist map found online:

Here’s the crowd-sourced OpenStreetMap:

(Neither Bing nor Yahoo Maps has street-level data. MapQuest uses OpenStreetMap’s.)

How about Google Maps and Earth?

What’s going on here? Israeli news site Arutz Sheva flags an article in Syria’s Damas Post (translation), dated Friday, January 6, 2012, which first noticed that a new name “15 Azar” had been added to Google’s maps. The reference is to March 15, 2011, when mass protests erupted in Daraa, launching the present uprising in Syria.

In Damascus, the Hafez al-Assad highway shows up in Google Earth with two names:

Who is Ibrahim al-Kashosh? At the start of the uprising, he penned popular songs mocking Bashar al-Assad, admonishing him to leave power. He was later found dead in a river with his vocal cords ripped out.

What’s unusual in these two examples is that the names exist as part of Google’s official place name dataset — in previous cases, such apparently rogue names had been attributed to contributions in third-party content layers. The Damas Post uses this observation to construct an elaborate conspiracy theory involving the Egyptian Google employee and activist Wael Ghonim, whom it accuses of promoting a pro-western agenda in collusion with the US through “the implementation of the theory of creative chaos”. The surreptitious renaming of streets is meant to be an example of such “creative chaos”.

That is of course not what happened, through the truth also carries interesting implications. For a few years now, Google’s been crowd-sourcing map making in those regions for which no good online reference datasets exist, in competition with OpenStreetMap. Google’s tool, Map maker, lets any user add or edit streets, placemarks, and names, with a review system in place to catch errors:

The first time a Map Maker user makes edits to a map, the edits may require review and approval before the edits will be published. Once a Map Maker user has made a few approved edits, most of the subsequent edits will go live automatically. However, some types of edits or edits in specific regions will always require review, regardless of how experienced the mapper is. In addition, some edits may require multiple reviews before the edits appear on Google Maps.

There is no need for Google or the US to engage in creative chaos: It would be enough for some enterprising opponents of the al-Assad regime to get some of their edits past unwitting reviewers for these name changes to make it onto Google Maps and Earth.

And that is exactly what seems to have happened: Currently pending edits in Latakia and Damascus betray the tail end of an edit-war that seems to have been playing itself out. Here’s the situation in Latakia today:

What we’re seeing is a request to have the street name changed back to March 8. Below it is the edit history, which shows that the name change to March 15 was promoted by several anonymous users in the past few months.

In Damascus, the current name for the disputed highway on Map Maker and on Google Maps is not the same as what you see on Google Earth. Both “Hafez Al Asad” and “Ibraheem Al Kashosh” have been replaced by the more neutral-sounding “Southern Bypass” / “Mothalik Aljanobi” / “المتحلق الجنوبي”:

But if you begin searching for Ibrahim’s name in Map Maker, his name is autosuggested, though without returning a result — indicating that the name did exist on the map, but not any longer:

The edit history also shows that Hafez al Assad’s name on the highway was replaced by the existing “Southern bypass” by a moderator on December 14, 2011. (Click on the history tab on the bottom of the linked page above to see for yourself.)

Since Google Earth’s dataset of place names is updated less frequently that Google Maps, what we’re likely seeing in Google Earth is an earlier snapshot of an edit war that was eventually resolved in a truce: Neither the name preferred by the regime nor the one by its opponents stayed; instead a neutral descriptive name was chosen. Unless Google intervenes in this case, expect Google Earth to have the highway labelled as “Southern Bypass” / “Mothalik al-Janobi” / ”المتحلق الجنوبي” soon enough.

So is Google the only mapping provider susceptible to this latest innovation in guerrilla mapmaking? No. In fact, OpenStreetMap has been hacked in exactly the same way, and on the very same highway:

In OpenStreetMap, the highway is currently named after March 15, 2011, the same revolutionary date we saw in Latakia. MapQuest, which periodically imports OpenStreetMap data for its map of Syria, still names the highway after Hafez al-Assad (on a barely legible map):

Unless OpenStreetMap does any further edits to this item in its dataset, MapQuest too will soon have a renamed highway on its map.

Are there any far-reaching implications to the fact that OpenStreetMap and Google Map Maker are susceptible to political hacks? I don’t thinks so; it’s a challenge that Wikipedia has long dealt with, and the problem can be minimized, if not completely eradicated, by alert moderation. And if the alternative to crowd-sourced maps of places like Syria is no online maps at all, then the overall advantages far outweigh the occasional blip. This is the Yahoo Map for Damascus today:

Which, when you compare it to a crowd-sourced map at the same scale, manages to be both devoid of information and fictitious:

I’ll take Google Maps or OpenStreetMap any day, the occasional hiccup notwithstanding. (That said, I would not stake my life on Wikipedia, Google Maps or OpenStreetMap, not without first crosschecking sources.)

On November 12, a powerful explosion ripped through an Iranian missile base on the outskirts of the town of Bīdgeneh, 40 km west of Tehran. As the Guardian reported soon after, among the dead at the base was the architect of Iran’s missile program, Major General Hassan Moghaddam. There has been heavy media speculation the explosion might have been the result of a covert operation by Israel’s Mossad.

Post-explosion satellite imagery has now become available that shows the extent of the destruction. Commissioned by the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), the imagery was taken on November 22, 2011. ISIS Senior Research Analyst Paul Brannan has published the annotated image along with the most recent available imagery from before the explosion, taken September 9, 2011. He adds:

ISIS learned that the blast occurred as Iran had achieved a major milestone in the development of a new missile. Iran was apparently performing a volatile procedure involving a missile engine at the site when the blast occurred.

You can’t tell from the imagery if sabotage caused the explosion, but you can tell the damage was extensive, wiping out most structures at the base. The NYT elicits more commentary from Paul Brannan in an interview.

Because ISIS’s web post and accompanying PDF used lower-resolution versions of the Nov 22 image, I asked ISIS for the original high-resolution image, to overlay on Google Earth. The September 9 imagery is already in Google Earth’s base layer, so it was just a matter of overlaying the one new image. Here is the resulting KMZ file, containing the high-resolution original, ready to open in Google Earth.

In Google Earth 6 and above, remember to click on the opacity button in the sidebar and then play with the opacity slider to switch between the before- and after- imagery. For reference, the sports court at the base is 30×15 meters, about the size of a basketball court.

P.S. On November 28, an new explosion ripped through what appears to be a uranium conversion plant near Isfahan, rattling windows in the city. Speculation is mounting (some based on intelligence sources) that Iran’s nuclear and missile programs are being systematically sabotaged or attacked. In 2010, the Stuxnet worm caused heavy damage to the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz.

Over at Dliberation, I’ve reported on a story with a geolocation twist likely of interest to Ogle Earth readers:

In an unfortunate bout of regulatory innovation in Slovenia, the information commissioner there has decided that panoramic photography benefits from less legal protection than conventional photography because she reckons panoramas make it is easy to tell where the photograph was taken, and when, thus compromising the data rights of the people in the shot. She argues this, apparently unaware that all modern digital photography comes with EXIF time stamps which sites such as Flickr will automatically share, while many smart phone camera apps will attach their location to photos published to Twitter or Facebook. Photographs of landmarks also situate individuals at a certain place at a certain time. The commissioner may have unwittingly condemned all such photography to Street-Viewesque blurring requirements — at least if she is consistent in her logic.

I “blame” Google for this:

[This is] a case study of how Google, by voluntarily implementing facial blurring in its relatively new but hugely popular Street View automated 360-degree panoramas, created norms in the minds of regulators that they are now eager to set in stone legally.

Because Street View is so popular, it is quite possibly the only kind of immersive panorama that most people have seen. I believe this has altered popular expectations regarding the blurring of individual faces, which led to the commissioner decreeing that all panoramas not depicting a news-worthy event need to be blurred. Ironically, Google Street View isn’t even available in Slovenia:

That’s because Slovenia said it would require Google to keep the raw Street View images in Slovenia until they were blurred — no unblurred images were allowed to leave the country. Because the blurring makes use of Google’s servers, none of which are in Slovenia, Google respectfully declined to add Slovenia to its Street View program.

Read the whole article over at Dliberation.org.