Revealing N Korea's gulag and nuclear sites

Google's newly updated maps show unprecedented detail in aerial imagery of isolated labour camps and missile launch pad

While citizen cartographers have been compiling detailed information on North Korea for years, on Monday Google announced the publication of mapping data that had previously been missing.

The release follows a private "humanitarian mission" by Google executive Eric Schmidt to Pyongyang with Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico.

After the trip, commentators speculated on the mix of business and political motives by Schmidt, while the US government emphasised that it had no connection to the visit. Commenting on what he saw, Schmidt criticised the North Korean decision to be "virtually isolated".

Schmidt was apparently unable to meet with a detained Korean-American, but said he urged the country to increase internet access. The country has minimal connectivity with the outside, and only a small percentage of citizens can even log onto the domestic intranet.

Yet some North Korea experts have warned against relying too heavily on the new Google maps for understanding news developments by attempting to peer into the hermit kingdom.

"The timeliness and frequency of satellite imagery is an issue. You cannot see things move around and change," said Daniel Pinkston, deputy project director at the International Crisis Group's Northeast Asia Programme. "You only see intermittently - a frozen picture."

Pinkston continued about any inferences drawn from viewing the maps: "Yet people are able to corroborate a lot with testimony from witnesses coming out of there ... The accuracy is not perfect, but it could be good. Still, the exact validity is hard to say."

Google's new maps include highly specific information about six forced labour camps throughout the country, where some 200,000 detainees are thought to be kept in poor conditions. The difference in the amount of visual data presented in the new maps - compared with the old versions - is stark.

The updated information has even prompted some analysts to speculate about the existence of an additional gulag.

Woo Jung Yeop, a research fellow at the Asan Institute in Seoul, told Al Jazeera: "I'm pretty sure that the info revealed from the Google map is not coming from [any] agreement between Google and North Korea ... since Google doesn't need the consent of a host country for that."

Sceptical that Google had obtained any kind of special access on the ground in North Korea, Woo concluded: "North Korea does not have the intention to open its internet to its own public or to the world."

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