North Korea News Podcast by NK News - One man’s mission to map all of North Korea – Ep. 339

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un led a salvo missile launch to test the country’s “Nuclear Trigger’ system” for the first time this week. NK News Deputy Managing Editor Alannah Hill (@alannahmhill) sits down in the studio to discuss the test, as well as the release of a new song praising the country’s “friendly father” […]

Thank you. shop. From the popular Daedonggang beer t-shirts to the adventurous Air Koryo designs, each piece offers a unique glimpse into aspects of the DPRK you'll be familiar with. Featuring retro travel-inspired prints of Pyongyang's landmarks and brands, our apparel is 100% handcrafted in the USA. Support independent journalism with every purchase. Explore our range today at shop.nknews.org. That's shop.nknews.org. Hello listeners and welcome to the NK News Podcast. I'm your host, Jack O's Wetsuit, and this pre-interview chat is being recorded on Tuesday, the 23rd of April, 2024. And I'm joined here in the studio by Alana. Alana, welcome.

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me back. Let's talk about some weird and wonderful stories from North Korea, but we should start with the most pressing news. Yesterday, North Korea unleashed a salvo. Tell us about that. Yes, so we had a missile launch yesterday. Salvo is a word I've never heard used

before I started working here. But yeah, it was four missiles were launched yesterday from Pyongyang toward the EC. And then this morning, our update from state media, North Korea called it a nuclear trigger system that it was testing. From what I've read, I think it sounds scarier than it maybe is.

Basically, it was, they were training over the country's war alert system. And so they were using, and I want to read this word for word because I haven't memorized it, the National Nuclear Weapon Comprehensive Control System, otherwise known as Nuclear Trigger. Nuclear Trigger, right.

They're like long names. Exactly, yeah. So that was kind of the latest update from this morning from state media. Now, this morning before coming here, but still wearing my NK News podcast host hat, I was on Arirang TV talking about this exact thing. You're a traitor, Jaco. No, no, because I was representing the brand.

Of course, of course. Thank you. Always. But the big question there was, was this in breach of United Nations Security Council sanctions? And I had to do a bit of research. And then Collins Werko, of course, who wrote the story, friend, can you help me out there? It's interesting that this thing in the article is called a multi-launch rocket system,

which some people simply call a fancy artillery shell. But because of the way that it flies, and people who are watching the video will be able to see my hand doing a neat ballistic projectile, because of the way that it flies in a ballistic arc, it can be called a ballistic missile. Okay, I didn't know that. So South Korea apparently counts these particular kinds of rockets as ballistic. Right. Which means that they are in breach,

if that is the case, they are in breach of the 1718 sanctions. But as Colin said, that it's interesting, It's about basically conventions and where you draw lines between what's ballistic, what's not ballistic, what's artillery and what is a powered flight, etc. So that's the big question in this case. Yeah, the pictures are very cool, I have to say. The ones released by state media today. So I'd tell listeners to check those out. There are good pictures there on the NK News website. And of course, now you know what a salvo is, which is, of course, a simultaneous burst of weapon release. There you go. Yeah, I'll go with that. Good. A word I've never used and probably won't use after my time at NK News. It could also be used metaphorically when talking about like a salvo of curse words or invective.

Oh, okay. Like a burst. Yeah, exactly. Maybe I'll try to get that in the next time I'm on the podcast. That'll be my little secret mission. There we go. We have a challenge. Okay, now what's our second story that we're going to talk about today?

Okay, so we're moving on to something a bit more fun. Last week, the North Korean government opened this huge new development in Pyongyang, 10,000 new homes. And along with the opening of these new homes, they released a new song. And the song is titled Friendly Father. Of course, it's about North Korea's friendliest father, Kim Jong-un. Right. Very upbeat song. I've seen it a lot on actually international media.

It seems to be getting picked up a lot. Really? No, I haven't heard it yet. Can you hum us about it? Well, I won't do that to listeners. We'll never have people listen ever again. But the music video that came with this song, Jacko, I've never seen anything like it. It's incredible. Does Kim dance? No dancing from Kim, but very high energy. You know, we've got the jumping up and down ajummas. Yeah. There seems to be kind of like a thumbs up motif throughout.

People are very, very excited. Oh, this is about the new housing? No, it's really just about Kim Jong-un and all he's done for the country and being such a friendly father. A friendly father. Yeah. Also on our website. So I'll post a link to that in the show notes.

Do you think it's inspired by, or is it trying to match the level of size, Kangnam Style? Is that what we're going for here? No, there's no dance. There's no viral dance in the song. So I don't know if it's going to hit Kangnam Style. It may not get the billion views.

It might not. Actually, I might not. Okay. Actually, I am curious. Has it been released by an official North Korean channel onto YouTube? Or is this just, I mean, how did we get it? I believe it was from KCNA. Yeah, it was played on KCNA.

And so that's where we got it from. Right. Okay. And so now it's in the interwebs and people will be just sharing it and doing TikTok videos. Of course, yes. Okay. All right. Got that to look forward to. All right.

Now, what's our third story for today? So our final story for today, it's one that Yvonne Bramer, our fellow Dutch, well, your fellow Dutchman, wrote yesterday. And basically, it's about, it came from this story that 38 North found this. 38 North from the Stimson Centre, hi to Jenny Town and the gang there at 38 North. They found a misconfigured North Korean internet cloud server. Well, misconfigured. So don't ask me the technical questions. Basically, what it means is that you didn't need a password to see what was coming in and out of this server, this cloud server. And so one of the things

that they found were animations, in particular for an Amazon Prime series called Invincible. Wow. I'm not, have you heard of this? No, I don't have Amazon Prime. Yeah, I hadn't heard of it before, but apparently it's quite popular. It's based on a comic book series. And, you know, you've got the likes of Stephen Yuen and Sandra Oh are actually voicing some of the characters in this series. Some Korean-Canadian actors.

Yes, very, very popular. And Yifan kind of caught wind of this when he saw yesterday on Twitter that the production company behind Invincible posted to say, we've been made aware of these allegations that there's North Korean animations in our series. You know, they totally denied having any knowledge of this. In the 38th North article, I believe Martin Williams was the author, and he suggested that what likely happened was this American company outsourced their work to a Chinese company, who in turn outsourced the work to a North Korean company.

But interestingly enough, because it was a North Korean server, he suggested that these animators were based somewhere in North Korea. Because obviously if they were in China, they could just use a Chinese server. Yeah. And you wouldn't know. And you wouldn't know, yeah.

And you wouldn't know they were North Korean animators. Exactly, yeah. So it wasn't just Invincible. There was apparently a couple of Japanese animes that they found images from and apparently another upcoming HBO series.

So, yeah, super interesting to think about when you're watching these shows that, you know, who knows where these animators are coming from or based. But apparently this has been something that North Korea has been sanctioned for before exporting animation. So it was very interesting read. Yeah, I'll link that as well in the show notes. Yeah, there were some earlier stories decades ago about North Korean animators being used in some Disney productions. I forget which one. It may be The Little Mermaid or something like that.

Okay, my favorite one. Yeah, check that one. You have to Google it. But there are some Disney works that were outsourced to studios overseas. And I think what happened was there you know, there's a famous South Korean studio, animation studio, where the founder perhaps was born in or has roots in North Korea. And so back when it was possible under the Sunshine Policy period, he outsourced some work to the North Korean SK studio in,

or SEK, sorry, SEK studio in North Korea. And that ended up in these American films. So it's something that North Korea has been doing for a while. Yeah, yeah, really interesting to think about. Yeah. All right, well, thank you very much for coming on the show today. Thank you for having me. Great to have you here.

Happy King's Day. Technically it's this Saturday, but we'll be celebrating it this evening. Happy King's Day in advance. Yeah, thank you very much. You've got the orange tie on, and hopefully I'll be making it to the event this evening. Oh, something I've got to mention. Yeah, right. After this break, stick around listeners

because I've got my interview with Jacob Bogle talking about looking at North Korea and mapping it through satellite imagery. He's been doing it for over a decade. It's a massive project, so stick around for that. decade. It's a massive project, so stick around for that. Join the Korea Pro community and unlock a world of exclusive insights on Korea. As a Korea Pro member, you gain access to articles, expert analyses, and comprehensive reports that keep you ahead on Korean affairs. Plus, enjoy priority invites to our unique events in Seoul

that connect you with key leaders and influencers. Elevate your understanding of Korea. Join us today at koreapro.org slash podcast. Okay, welcome back to the podcast. And today's long interview was recorded on Wednesday, the 10th of April 2024 via StreamYard. And joining me on StreamYard is Jacob Bogle, who has been a North Korea analyst since 2013 and has created the most comprehensive map of the country that is publicly available. created the most comprehensive map of the country that is publicly available.

It's called Access DPRK, and you can find that by going to jacobbogel.com. And we'll also include a link to that in the show notes. And you can find Jacob Bogle on Twitter at Jacob Bogle. Jacob, welcome on the show. Thank you for having me. I think that was a dog in the background, wasn't it? That was. I have two dogs. So I apologize to your listeners if you have some sound in the background. Okay, shouldn't be a major obstacle. All right,

so how did you start analyzing North Korea from satellite imagery? How did you get into that? It's a bit of an unconventional story, I guess, for most. I was a contractor with the US Veterans Affairs Department, and I started having some health issues, became disabled and couldn't do normal work. So I wanted to find a hobby and I've always been interested in mapping and I've been a Google Earth user ever since it came online. So I started looking at North Korea, discovered that there was a lot of information missing.

I thought that I could use my free time to fill in some of those gaps. Over time, though, that the scope of that work became obvious. And, you know, one thing led to another. And now the most recent version of the map that I released has it for 70,000 places. 70,000? 70,000 listed. And I've written, you know, a couple hundred articles on the country. So yeah, it just snowballed from a hobby to, I don't want to call it a career, but to something much, much larger. Now, do you think that it takes a special kind of eyes to be able to look at that?

Because I find, you know, I find looking at maps where things are labeled absolutely fascinating. But if you give me an unlabeled satellite imagery, I can't do much with it. I can't recognize that my eyes start to blur over after half a minute and then I do much with it. I can't recognize it. My eyes start to blur over after half a minute, and then I got to look away. Yeah, that's understandable. There is a bit of rewiring of the brain, I guess, to understand what you're looking at from satellite. You know, we're oriented to the world around us in 3D. I had the benefit of, you know, with some experience already using these types of programs for a number of years before I started looking at North Korea.

But a big part of it, I think, is being able to look at, to understand changes, right, from one to the next. And building up in your head quickly an image of what normalcy looks like versus, oh, that's weird. Once you get a hang of that, though, then it becomes pretty easy. Now, are you doing this all with the naked eye, or are you using any tools, for example, any artificial intelligence or other analytical tools to help you in this? No, for the most part, it's just me and my eyes, as good as they are with the glasses. I feel like I have a little more control over what I want to look at and the amount of information that I get. Even if you're using AI, you still have to go through and make some corrections and stuff. I just like to do that myself. Okay. Does that make it a more laborious

task? I mean, it feels to me like with the advances in AI in the last couple of years, that there must be some scope for at least simplifying or speeding up some of the processes. If I was starting the process now, I would agree with you. But I've already built up my baseline database. Everything's already there. And so now it's just looking for what's new. And a lot of that, we learn about early on with KCNA reports and things like that. And at the moment, it is just me. I don't work for any institution. I don't work for any government. So, you know, it's what I can afford at the moment. It's not a new AI program.

Now, you use commercially available imagery, satellite imagery. So help the layperson listener and me to understand the difference between what is available to the public and what intelligence organs with three-letter acronyms and the US military have access to. I mean, the main difference is image resolution. So, you know, using commercial satellites, you can see that a person is a person. You know, usually it's a little dot,

but you can tell that, you know, it's a person. With military satellites, you can tell what they're wearing and if there's a book in their hand or something like that, which does come in handy, but not for general purpose surveys. And also the rate at which a satellite goes over a particular area of interest. With commercial satellites, you might get once or twice a day. With military satellites, you can have multiple times a day. Sometimes, depending on the program, they can park it and observe an area long term. So those are the main differences. Okay. All right. That's a great way to explain it. So how does this work that you do? How does it help people to understand North Korea better? Not just in what it looks like, but what's going

on there? Right. Well, I like to focus on things that other analysts aren't looking at or only do so sporadically. And there's plenty of information out there about North Korea's nuclear program and ballistic missiles. I focus a lot of my effort on, I guess you'd call it daily life. And whether that's infrastructure, whether that's looking at new schools being built or environmental damage, you know, North Korea is a country of 26 million people. And they're not able to tell their stories to the world. Using satellite imagery, you can get a pretty good insight into what's going on. And, you know, some pretty small stuff. You can see trends in traffic and exercises out in the schoolyard.

You can see a lot of stuff going on. And so I look for those trends and what's happening that impacts people's daily life much more than, you know, what Kim Jong-un is doing. Okay, so it's trends. Well, that's very useful, obviously, to understand what's happening on a broader picture. But again, it seems to me that it would be hard to find trends with the naked eye because you've got to look over a large area and then through a period of time as well you do but also if you have looked over every square meter of the country multiple times like i

have you build up in your mind you know a certain amount of memory of what was there before and so it makes it a little easier i I also like to, you know, if I have a question about something and an answer is not readily available, I'll go and answer that question for myself because I have the capability of doing it. And so that helps with identifying trends because I'm looking for them anyways.

So how many hours a day would you say you spend on it on average? A daily average is kind of hard to give. Like I said, I do have some health issues. There are some days I just, I can't get out of bed and I'm completely useless. Wow. Other days I'll spend eight or 10 hours. I think on the mapping up to the most recent version, I spent around 7,500 hours on that.

So yeah, you know, a fair amount of time, but it's spread out over a decade. So it's not too cumbersome. Right. Now on your website, you offer a free version and there's one behind a paywall. So congratulations on finding a way to monetize it. But just tell the listeners what's available, what can they find for free through your site and what's behind the paywall? Right. They're largely similar. The free version has, if I remember, around 60,000, 63,000 locations. That's just stripped down information, though. So you have this is a factory in the name of the factory, or this is a monument or whatever.

But you have military sites, monuments, schools, factories, official markets, illegal markets, just about everything that you can think of that you might want information on is there in the free version. The professional version has more detail, like on the ballistic missile sites, all of the individual locations of interest are marked out. You have construction dates, what types of missiles are housed there. You have notes of changes. I've tried to turn it into a database that has all of the changes that have occurred under Kim Jong-un. So you have a lot more specificity and how it relates to other sectors in the country.

How do you cross-reference the name of something with what you're seeing on the satellite? Like you mentioned that this is the, here's a factory and here's the name of the factory. Where do you get the names from? How do you do that? How do you link? Yeah, a lot of that comes from, you know, official North Korea media. There are also databases that governments and NGOs have put out. a lot of that's pretty limited. So even with everything that is available in the open source, there are still, the majority of factories don't have official names because we don't know them.

But you can also- So you sort of label them, this is factory A or it may be producing X. And so you'll say it's a factory producing X. Is that sort of the rule of thumb? Exactly. A lot of them would just have the generic, this is a factory. And then I've broken them down into different categories. So food production,

agriculture, those are in a separate folder. Other factories, some do have telltale indicators of what they make. So I'll add a note saying this is probably a factory doing this. But a lot of that is still just not in the open source. Right, right. Now, tell us about the different versions that you have. On the website, I saw there's a reference to a 2017 and a 2021 version. What's the difference? Or why was it, I guess, and I suppose, why is it necessary to make a new version?

Right. Well, the 2017 version was the first time I completely mapped the country and had everything pulled together into, you know, into one database. And I released that for free. There was 50 some odd thousand places in that. And I, at that point, I thought I was done. A couple of years later, though, I start noticing, you know, a lot more construction going on. There were a few errors in the original version. And so I wanted to make, you know, a new one that came out in 2021. Did you start from scratch again, or did you

port over? I went through the 2017 version, made any changes to that, and then just built on top of that. And then with when COVID began and the border down, you had a lot of construction along the northern border and the coastlines. You had a lot of economic changes going on on the ground, you know, new factories, new greenhouses. And so I wanted, there was a need for, you know, another update. And again, that just built off previous versions. Now, what are the organizing principles that you use when mapping something or in categorizing what you're seeing? So the map is broken down by province. I think for me, that just makes more sense instead of doing it nationwide. If you try to look at every military site nationwide, your computer will probably crash.

So I break it down by province. Within that, you have things divided into military sites, domestic and economic sites. Those are all in one folder. And then monuments, because there's just a lot of those. And then those are further broken down. Air defense, radar, Navy, conventional forces, nuclear forces, factories, power production, dams, electrical substations. Overall, I think there's close to 120 different specific types of location.

Okay. Do you have a category for the Tower of Eternal Life that appears in every town and village in North Korea? Right. That's actually in its own. So that's within the monument folder, but then that has its own because it is so ubiquitous. So yeah, if you want to find one, has its own because it is so ubiquitous yeah so yeah if you want to find one you know you can every every single one in the country is in that folder fantastic okay do you know how many there are by offhand i think it's around three or four thousand okay um overall there's twelve thousand or so monuments of of different types and they they have these kind of study houses or study halls. I forget the name of it. It may be Revolutionary Study Hall or something like that

that's all over the country. Do you have that in a category on its own too? Yeah, and they've gone by a couple of different names over the years and get entered into the nomenclature that we use and analyze them as different things. Ideological study houses, cultural centers, different things like that. Most of them are pretty easy to identify because they share the same architecture. Yeah, those are in a separate file.

The local town hall, if you want to call it that, is in files. Theaters, like I said, schools, universities, those are all separated out as well. Okay. And what rules of thumb do you use to help you to speed up the process or to simplify the process of mapping and categorizing? Well, the main thing is comprehensiveness, right? And accuracy. And so really what I do is I just, I divide the country up into squares, five by five kilometer squares. And I just look through those and whatever's in that square gets put into its, into its folder. And, you know, it's just, it's a pretty simple system. And then if I have a question, you know, about the identification of something, I'll reach out to

other analysts or I have a personal library of over 30,000 pages worth of reference material that I can look into. And yeah, it's all a very straightforward thing. How big is your monitor? It is small. I terrify people when they see what I'm actually doing this on. I just use a laptop, 15-inch screen. It's probably why I wear glasses. Okay. Very simple setup. a laptop 15 inch screen it's probably why i wear glasses okay would it be different if you had a you know some large big screen tv type monitor would that change the i think i would have fewer headaches probably but i i like to just sit on the couch and and do the work okay i have an office and everything is set up but i prefer to just sit on the couch and do the work. Okay. I have an office and everything is set up, but I prefer to just sit on the couch. So the laptop is easier. Right. Now, how often do you

go back and look at a site that you've previously mapped to see if something has changed? I do have a list of places that I think are important and warrant looking over and over. That's usually every couple of months, But I end up looking over the entire country two or three times a year. So everything gets looked at. So every five kilometer by five kilometers square gets looked at a couple of times a year. Right. Okay. What, generally speaking, what kinds of things are difficult to identify just by looking at an image? speaking, what kinds of things are difficult to identify just by looking at an image? So understanding that you're looking at something that is something that something worth noting is pretty easy, I believe. But understanding what those things are isn't always easy. So

there are a number of compounds throughout the country, close to a thousand, that look, they look a lot like jails. They have little corner towers and walls and everything, but that's not what they are. What they are is still a bit of a mystery. How do you know they're not jails? Right. Because, well, for one thing, there's a thousand of them. And some of the security doesn't quite match.

A lot of them are very small. And then some of them look more like food distribution or agriculture, you know, grain storage facilities, not silos, but just warehouse type structures. It gets muddied because some of them have been identified by defectors as being prisons. So there's this mixed use of these facilities and understanding which use is currently happening, that can be difficult. And there's a few things like that. So what I've done is I've put those in other locations that I don't know what they are, but that they weren't. Research is I put them together and put it out there for anybody else.

If you know what this is or if you have ideas, give me that information, help out the process. Yeah. Yeah. Because of course, you're looking at satellite imagery, which is taken from the sky. So you're looking down on something, but I suppose it's worth bearing in mind that not every satellite image, you're looking perpendicular down onto a roof. Sometimes you see it on a bit of an angle, so you can see how tall a building is. Am I right? Right. Yes. That can be really helpful. Sometimes you're looking, if you look straight down, you know, you might think it's a house, you know, just a single house and you get another image at a different angle and then you see it's, you know, four stories tall. And also, you know, shadows and playing with the lighting and orientation and everything can all help you

understand a location better. Right. Because shadows, of course, help you identify the height of something. I can't think of what else it helps, but I'm sure it's very helpful. Right. Well, it can help you understand the purpose of a building. You know, if you have a building with lots of windows, then it's probably not being used for storage, right? Or it's, you know, it could be housing versus military use. Some of the images and some of the buildings you get really good imagery of, and you can actually see signage on them. You can't read them, but you can see the signage and that might match what you've seen a photograph of elsewhere. And you can start, you know, putting the pieces together to identify a location based on that. Yeah.

Now, occasionally people release videos on YouTube that have been surreptitiously taken inside North Korea by citizen journalists or North Koreans who've been given a camera, does that help you to identify things or to put things together? Do you look through those kinds of videos? Absolutely. Whether it's video or, you know, even people in China looking over in border tourists and just taking photographs. Actually, tourist photos of the border were very helpful in helping us to understand the type of security along the border during COVID with the border blockade. North Korea ended up building around 15,000 additional guard posts on the northern border. But what the photographs helped us understand was that these were just temporary wooden structures that they

could actually move around. And now that the border construction is complete, they've been taking some of those back and turning them down. And yeah, you know, tourist photos and videos helped us understand that. Right. Coming back to what you said about some of the photographs of buildings are very, very, very good imagery. I'm wondering, can you tell by looking at a building whether the window has been filled with glass or if it's just an empty hole? Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes you get very helpful flares, you know, glints of light that the satellite picks up from a reflective surface. And then other times there's a shading difference. But usually, I mean, you just kind of, you know, you assume that there's a window there. on a trip, well, when they used to be available, trips to Panmunjom from the southern side, and they would take you to a hill and you would look over to the North Korean village of Gijongdong, which the American military calls Propaganda Village. And it's been said for decades that those buildings don't have any glass in the windows. And I wonder if that's changed over

time, whether they might be filled with glass now. I can't see well enough to tell, but is that something you've been able to see? Right. I haven't looked for that specifically. You can tell, especially during construction, if they're putting in space for a window anyways versus just painted on the wall. I would imagine if you look at enough images and you get enough vantage points that you could see the shadows of the window itself. Right. Or the space for the window. Or the clear. Yeah.

And that you could determine that. Now, how often do you have to go back to an image and say, oh, that wasn't the missile launch pad after all. It was just a new baseball diamond. Well, there's only one baseball diamond that I'm aware of in North Korea. But they do have one. They do have one. So it's not a common occurrence, but it does happen. You know, I thought something was whatever and it wasn't.

Or I thought something, especially in air defense and the short range anti-aircraft artillery, there are thousands of these locations across the country. And sometimes they're empty, but they still have the barracks and the radar and things are, they still look like it's being maintained. But that could be, you know, that site could be in the process of being decommissioned. And so there are, you know, occasional changes like that, that you realize, oh no, this isn't an active site that's been decommissioned. There was one example where I, for my blog, this was early on, North Korea built this new structure. And the only thing I could liken it to was a runway. You know, it was paved over long enough to be a runway. You know, that's what I thought it was.

But it turned out it was actually used for vehicle training. And there were some obstacles and things that you could, you know, learn how to handle, you know, whatever kind of vehicles. But so I got that wrong. Right. But I put a notice on the article. I'm very transparent. You know, if I get something wrong, I'm not afraid of it. And so, you know, even today, all of these years later,

you can go back and see, oh, did I get messed up? Right. But that's fine. And that's later, you can go back and see, oh, Jake, it messed up. But that's fine. And that's how, you know, open source only works if people are open, you know, with all of their findings. Just before we go on, for the baseball fans among us, where is that one baseball diamond you mentioned? Oh, it's in Gyeongsang, which is... Oh, near Chongjin? Yeah okay so way up in uh in North Hangyong province yeah it's as I recall it's by the river not not the walled city but the more modern city it's next to the river I don't believe I've ever seen anyone playing there but it's very clearly a slightly squashed

baseball diamond is it on the grounds of a university perhaps? No, it's just sitting out there by itself. And that brings up another question for me. Are you able to see from satellite imagery if vegetation has taken over an area and it therefore looks abandoned? So could you tell, for example, if this baseball diamond was starting to grow a lot of weeds and therefore clearly was no longer being used? Absolutely. It depends on when the image was taken. So if it was a winter imagery, all the vegetation is gone anyways. Right, right.

But spring, summer, oh yeah. You can see illegal farm plots. You can see vines overgrowing derelict factories, all that. Right, okay. Now, obviously you must be better at spotting things now than when you started this more than 10 years ago. What kind of visual data do you think is significant now that you used to overlook in the early years? That's a good question. I look for

everything. And I started out looking for everything. For me, what has become extremely important is being able to have that historical imagery and going back for changes and being able to put that together in context and how it relates to the surrounding landscape. You know, once you know what a house looks like, you know what a house looks like. And so, yeah, I'm not sure. And looking for, you know, and ranking importance, I'm not sure that's really changed much for me. OK, tell us about one of the finds that made you most excited. There's been a few of them. And unfortunately, they're all bad things. You know, this is North Korea we're talking about. Right. But they were important. about right but there they were you know important yes one of them was finding ongoing long-term

industrial waste being leaked from the kongsan uranium plant which was particularly concerning because the river that the waste is dumped into eventually flows into south korean waters oh and so i wrote about that and that actually made international news and the South Korean government went and did a series of tests on water to make sure that levels were, by the time it got to South Korea, that the levels were safe. And a lot of environmental things like that, that I've noted that ended up being rather important. Right. Yeah. Do you sort of prioritize military hardware and installations? As far as, you know, keeping an eye on them, no more than other sites, especially, I mean, hardware itself, vehicles, I'm not very good at identifying those. You know, a truck is a truck

to me. Yeah. But understanding the types of buildings, storage facilities, understanding a new military base versus what could be just an agricultural facility. Yeah, I keep an eye on those. And if it's something that is out of the ordinary, I try to write about those. Have governments of different countries taken an interest in your work and reached out to you? Not directly. I think that's about all I can say about that. Okay. All right. Good. Yeah. I have this idea that in North Korea, there must be a large number of very strong buildings to hold all the paper archives, all the reports that people write, observations and surveillance. And as we all know, while a

single piece of paper is quite light, paper becomes very heavy when you have large amounts of it. And so you've got to have some buildings with very strong floors to hold them. And assuming that these archives are kept for a long period of time, there must be buildings just in every province, in every large town devoted to holding reports and archives. Is there a way that you could tell from the sky, this is probably an archival building? Not from satellite imagery. We do know the location of some archives. One is in a party building in the walled government quarter in Pyongyang. There is an underground facility called Heigap, which is near Pui Chang that the construction started in the 90s. And at first people thought that it was another underground nuclear facility,

but construction is still ongoing. And now the analysis has shifted to that this is probably actually a government archive for the most important material because it's a very large underground facility and it would be able to withstand anything except a direct attack. Do you think you've been able to identify all the houses that Kim Jong-un uses around the country? Definitely. They're hard to miss. Security is very tight. And even within, like at Wonsan or the Ryongsan Palace complex, you have walled compounds and more highly secured residences, even among the highly secured residences. And so we can pick out the ones that he visits frequently. How many residences does he have in total, do you think?

Well, of the ones that he uses, there's about a dozen. Of the ones that have been built over the years, there's two or three dozen. Of the ones that have been built over the years, there are two or three dozen. Goodness. Now, here's a question just out of my own curiosity. There was a guest house or a residence built back, I think, in the 1970s for Prince Sihanouk when he was living outside Cambodia during all the turbulence in that country. Do you know if that building is still being used, if that still exists? Yeah, it still exists. The grounds are still maintained. I haven't seen any evidence of, you know, like a dignitary visiting or being used in that way. But they've, in North Korea, they use empty palaces, we'll call them, for a number of different purposes. One is used to train staff to go out and work at the other, some are just used as storage. Maybe that's where all of the archives are going

and being stuck into these other palaces, but it is being maintained. There are some other locations that you can tell that they're kind of falling apart, but that one's still being maintained. Now, in 2019, you started writing stories for NK Pro. Tell us about that process. How do you turn imagery into a narrative or an article? Well one way is the topic itself is just inherently of interest. So you know I wrote one

about a fence being built around Pyongyang. Yes. To'm coming to that one. Allegedly to protect it from... Right, that was in November 2023, the story of the Great Wall of Pyongyang, why North Korea is building a fence around its capital, and in that story you show how a 63-kilometer barrier and guard posts have been built. Right, you know, to me that's important on its face. So, you know, you write about what you're seeing in the, you know, the timeline and how it relates to the broader COVID issue. Others, it's looking at a number of sites, seeing, again, trends, how those interrelate. There was an article I wrote also in Pyongyang about water treatment and water supply of

the capital that, you know, that is related to the ongoing residential construction in the capital. And so you're just- How are you able to see water treatment? What are the visible markers of that? Well, the layout of the structures, and they're fairly common all around the world. You have circular ponds and long, narrow settling ponds and equipment that are pretty common. And they're quite large facilities. And so you can see where

they are. When they're being built, you can see the pipelines leading to and from bringing sewage in and treated water out. Different wells along the taedong to bring in water. But then what made the story was that they were building and enlarging quite a few of these facilities and greatly increasing Pyongyang's water supply capacity. On January the 30th this year, NK Pro published an article with you that you co-wrote with my colleague Yifang Bremer

called North Korea expands coastal fencing in likely bid to stop defections by sea. How is it possible to see narrow fencing from satellite imagery? Well, in the good quality images, you can actually see the individual fence posts. So, you know, you know exactly what it is. And then also just the geometry, you know, roads and footpaths curve and they bend with the terrain. Fence paths are much more linear. They have standardized widths and so on. So I already had the location of older fencing. So I already knew where they were and what to look for.

And then you can see during the course of the pandemic, those areas being remodeled and security improved. And then also additions of fencing, I think it was something like 500 kilometers of additional fencing that was built, as well as new guard posts. Now, what can you tell about fencing and what can you not tell?

So for example, can you see if a fence is electrified? Can you tell how high it is? Can you tell if it's double fencing? If you have shadows, you can tell how high it is. It's difficult to tell immediately if a fence is electrified or not. Electrified fences do use concrete pillars and they're spaced out more widely than the pillars would be at a non-electrified fence but that's that's a little hit and miss but you can tell more what you can't have to be near a transformer box or a generator or something would that be a sign no they they use the electricity of the local you know village and they just draw from you know the local village. They just draw from the local grid. But some of the things you can't tell, though, would be electronic surveillance, additional security measures.

Those are just too small to catch. Yeah. Now, on March 1st, NKPRO published another article that you co-wrote with my colleague Yifan Bremer titled, North Korea Renovated Major Concentration Camp During Pandemic Imagery Shows. Now that North Korean human rights are very much on the agenda Guy van Bremer titled, North Korea renovated major concentration camp during pandemic imagery shows. Now that North Korean human rights are very much on the agenda again, they're being talked about in the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, etc. So stories like this will be definitely getting more attention. So tell us what you learned in researching recent concentration camp renovations. Right, well, with that particular camp, which was camp number 25 in Chongjin, we saw some new buildings were constructed, enhanced security around the gates.

And that just shows that these places are still active. Prisoners are still being brought in and out. But there's been other changes in other prisons. A lot of that surrounds heightened security. At the larger prisons, like Camp 14, which has tens of thousands of prisoners and spans 100 some odd square kilometers, all of the prisoner housing districts now have walls around them. And you have internal guard posts where these do not be as many.

So it's like a camp within a camp? Right. And you have an increase in all of the prisons use forced labor and light industry, mining, that sort of thing. You have improvements happening at all of those facilities as well. And again, this just shows even after we started using satellite imagery to expose the existence and to prove the existence of these camps, that it's still a, I don't want to use the word vibrant, but it's still a growing and active network. And there's no indication that Korea is trying to wind these down or anything like that. is trying to wind these down or anything like that. Overall, nationwide, how many prison camps are there? And do you divide them up into different categories of camps and prisons?

Right. Overall, there's, for the entire penal system, from short-term detention all the way through lifelong, there's an estimated 700 detention centers. Some of those are where you just go, you know, when you're initially arrested and you're interrogated, you might be held for a few weeks, a couple of months. You have kiyohaso, which are labor camps. A lot of them, if you look at them, they look like just traditional prisons, a small complex of buildings, walls, towers, all of that. Prisoners that go there, they have the option of leaving eventually if they don't die in prison. And then you have Kwan-Li-So, which are

long-term political prison camps. There are only four of those that we know that still operate. With those four, there's- Sorry, four, did you say? Four, right. There's around 150,000 prisoners in those four. And then within those camps, there are what's called total control zones. Can you visually distinguish them from the Kyohaso? Yes. Those are much larger facilities.

The Kwameiso are much larger facilities. They have perimeter fencing, perimeter guard posts, and you've got to find the fence. Internally, just by looking, they might look like any town, but so you've got to find the fence. Internally, you know, just by looking, they might look like any town, but so you've got to find the fence and then you can start finding the other, you know, security features that mark it out as a prison. But those four have around 150,000 prisoners in them. Wow. In total? In total, yeah. Okay. How many new camps have opened in recent years or how many have closed? Recent is a relative term. Okay, last 10.

In the Kenjo Moon era. Right, well, in the Kenjo Moon era, two have closed. One closed, and it was camp number 22. It was closed, I think, in 2012, so just at the beginning. And then the Yodok concentration camp, we think, closed in around 2017. Is it being overgrown now by weeds and stuff? No. And that's why I say we think.

There's some reporting by outlets like Daily MK that say it was simply being reorganized. And within the camp, there are still factories and mines and housing. The security has changed. It's going to require just ongoing monitoring to know for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, I've read before that some North Korean refugees who live in South Korea, many of whom don't read or speak much English, so they may be unfamiliar with your site, but they're doing similar mapping work using satellite imagery at think tanks run by defectors. Are you aware of such

projects and do you liaise or swap notes with them? Right. I have through the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, HRNK, a very well-known organization. They have contacts with quite a few defectors. And yes, that's been very helpful in understanding exactly what's going on inside the camps and knowing which building is for what purpose. They were helpful in identifying where prisoners were taken to be tortured in some camps and where the camp commandant, where his residence was, you know, lots of the smaller details. Vectors have been very helpful in helping us with that. And I imagine they might be helpful also outside of the penal system, looking at schools and factories and government buildings

and whatnot. Correct. You know, giving names for a lot of these places. Again, you know, you might know a school as a school, but unless it's a school for the elite or has some sort of special history, you're not going to know what the name is. And to know what life is like in those schools, what the teaching is like, what the daily activities. And also a lot of schools have multiple buildings. And in North Korea, schools often raise livestock as well, either to raise money or to help feed the students. And so being able to identify

those buildings, and then once you've identified a couple of them with eyewitness testimony, you can go and identify them elsewhere because you know what they look like. Now, how's your Korean reading ability? Terrible. Is this work that you do something that could be enhanced if you had more Korean knowledge, or does it not make much difference? Well, it would certainly be easier. I would be able to do things faster. When it comes to satellite imagery analysis, I'm not sure having additional language skills would be that helpful. But when you get into policies and interaction and what we should do, the best ways of interacting with or trying to influence, I should say, public opinion within North Korea and what type of media and things to send over there, then yes, understanding language

helps you understand culture better. But in terms of satellite imagery analysis, I don't think that it would help much. What is something that you hope to do in the future with Access DPRK that will take it to the next level? So, you know, the first part of the project was just to map everything and get it all there, get the data there. And now I'm trying to use it to add even greater granular detail. And again, those trends that I spoke about

and what has been going on under Kim Jong-un. I'm undergoing a number of, or taking a number of surveys right now. One is looking at housing stock and being able to tie that into population growth. We don't have any official information about demographics from North Korea. The most recent, I believe, is 2008. And so, you know, being able to count houses helps with that. That's an ongoing project. It's still in a particular while to finish it, but that. That's an ongoing project. It's still going to take a little while to finish it, but that's one of the big ones.

If a house has been abandoned, either because people in it have either moved away or have died or gone to prison, how quickly can you tell visually? I mean, would it be a matter of years afterwards that things start to fall apart and get overgrown, or are we talking months? It does take a number of years for things to get that overgrown and for it to start falling down sometimes the neighbor will knock down the the additional unit so they can make more space for gardening yeah but part of the the problem in determining if a house is abandoned or not is a lot of the old housing already looks pretty derelict

from satellite. There's moss growing on the roofs and everything, so it can be difficult to tell. So you look for other signs of activity. Well, my last question for you, Jacob, is there anything that you want to add that I haven't asked you about that you think is important to tell to our listeners?

I think, just to reiterate the importance of satellite imagery, you know, it can't tell you what policy is, you know, what's going on in the minds of the leadership, but it does tell you what they're willing to spend money on. You know, and one of those, for instance, was that at the start of the pandemic, that there weren't any COVID cases in North Korea was the official line. Well, I located over a hundred quarantine facilities that were built for COVID. And so, you know, despite what the official word was, we could see, no, clearly COVID is raging through the country because you have all of these quarantine facilities being

built. And it just, it gives you an insight into, again, this is 26 million human beings living there. And it gives us access to their lives in in a way that we wouldn't otherwise have if there had been large if there was a case of large deaths due to a pandemic would you be able to see mass graves or piles of coffins or bodies or something like that near near hospitals, yes, especially with mass graves. But North Korea began cremating, increasing their cremations early on. So it wouldn't be like during the famine. You still see, you know, hillsides strewn with thousands of graves from the famine. We won't have that evidence with COVID. Okay, well, thanks very much for sharing with us. And it's obviously very important and useful work

that you do for people who don't have access to military intelligence or organizations with three-letter acronyms. So open source intelligence can gain a lot from the kind of work that you do. Keep doing it. Keep up the good work. I'm playing around. keep doing it keep up uh yeah the good work yes again people can find your uh your project access dpk your blog at the website jacobbogle.com and also they can find jacob bogle on twitter now thanks again for joining us thanks for having me dive deep into the heart of south korea's most pressing stories with the weekly korea pro podcast Thank you. to dynamic cultural shifts, we cover it all. Tune in every Friday on careerpro.org, Apple Podcasts, Spotify,

or wherever you listen to podcasts. Career Pro Podcast, insight, not just information. Ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of our podcast episode for today. Our thanks go to Brian Betts and Alana Hill for facilitating this episode and to our post-recording producer genius, Gabby Magnusson, who cuts out all the extraneous noises, awkward silences, bodily functions, and fixes the audio levels.

Thank you and listen again next time.