No.
I chastised Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen, Governor Bill Richardson and the rest of the Google team that visited North Korea recently for not speaking out about the labour camps and calling for them to be closed. Even if they felt they couldn't raise this "sensitive" issue with their prickly -- and dangerous -- hosts directly for reasons of diplomacy or politesse or even ideology (they probably really do believe that sequencing connectivity first is better), there's no reason why they couldn't have spoken out *after* the trip, when the world's eyes were on them for days on end while they spoke of their impressions.
As I noted, Internet connectivity doesn't automagically bring about democracy or freedom when the thing you're connecting to the Internet is the elitist New Class -- or I would argue oprichnina would be the better term -- of the dictator and his family. And when they have the "mosquito net theory" for new technology, which is: let in enough to keep themselves wealthy and in power, but filter out anything that might threaten that power.
Interestingly, apparently as a coincidence but maybe not, the news is now filled about how Google Maps is showing hitherto-unseen snaps of North Korea as the satellite goes by (see below), revealing that even more horrible tortuous labour camps are being built out on the sites of existing ones.
I doubt that the Google team said, "Let out that American tour guide you've arrested or we publish the maps" or "Start letting at least your loyalist apparatchiks connect more or the maps come out". But I don't know what the deal was.
Naturally, TechPresident covers this with breathless joy in a piece titled Blank Spot No More, the way they cover all things Internet and tech with this absolutely rhapsodic belief that merely by talking about stuff or viewing stuff or analyzing stuff online, you're actually "doing something" and "acting". Of course, much of the time you aren't. That's why I always found that Ushahidi "we have/you need" stuff really awful, as so much of it was for show and led only to vanity turns and too much "we have" and not enough articulation of "you need" on the ground by competent relief workers.
"Three weeks after Eric Schmidt’s visit, Google has made its first inroads in North Korea — at least virtually," they say -- although the exact same pictures could have been seen and published BEFORE the trip (and in fact have been for years)-- it's not like the camps or even their new buildings are THAT new! -- and could have been raised during the trip. Oh, except if they did that, they'd be afraid that either they wouldn't get let in or they would get kicked out before the trip is over.
Well, if it's that kind of place, why cater to it?
TechPresident and to an even greater extent The Register capture the faddish "crowd-sourcing" of this shtick -- which had to do with going to specialists (not the "crowd") on North Korea who already had maps and getting them to collaborate -- although, again, why not before the trip?
Look, I have to say something about "human rights activism" and "satellite images". There's an awful lot of hope wrapped up in this concept. And I partly believe in it. For example, I think it was helpful to have "before" and "after" satellite photos of the villages in Darfur to make the case of genocide by Bashir and the Janjawid. Even so, just because we have pictures of a lot of people's suffering, and can now "prove a case", say, at the International Criminal Court, well, we haven't improved those people's lives, really. There is a certain kind of human rights activity -- and God knows, I've taken part in it all my working life for 35 years now -- that has a satisfying "the operation was a success but the patient died" feel to it. The Internet lets you have more and more of such experiences. The Sudanese are still dead and still dying, even though we do have lots of lovely sat photos. And I get it that sat photos are useful in all kinds of other ways.
We all got our hopes up about the explosion in Abadan, Turkmenistan. I remember trying to get Google's attention then -- anybody's -- to get the sat photos to update so we could see if eyewitness accounts that the village was flattend and hundreds were killed was true, and the government's version of less than a dozen killed and no major damage wasn't. And Google ignored me then. Finally some Russian company ran some before and after photos, but not really with enough breadth and clarity to tell much -- and hinted that more might be available, but for a big price.
It's good to know as much as we can about the North Korean labour camps and to keep pointing out this documentation. But we also have something better: we have people who have escaped to tell the tale. Shin Dong-hyuk wrote the book Escape from Prison No. 14 with just that experience. And in this case, a thousand words of his is really worth more than a picture. The picture doesn't make anyone act, really. They look at it, they share it, they tweet it, they ooh and ah at its human rights atrocity prettiness, but they don't feel as moved as they do when the real guy from there tells you his story and urges you to try to get your country's delegation at the UN to raise this at both the Security Council and the Third Committee of the General Assembly in New York (current resolutions don't mention these labour camps and should).
The tech press covering this are covering this because it's cool. And they give Google a pass -- if they ever thought to confront them at all for travelling to this country and never mentioning words about the labour camps there. Because they think that a picture is almost a substitute for action. It isn't.
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