Via the Marmot’s Hole comes news that K-bloggers Curtis Melvin and Joshua Stanton have both been featured in a Wall Street Journal article:

Mr. Melvin is at the center of a dozen or so citizen snoops who have spent the past two years filling in the blanks on the map of one of the world’s most secretive countries. Seeking clues in photos, news reports and eyewitness accounts, they affix labels to North Korean structures and landscapes captured by Google Earth, an online service that stitches satellite pictures into a virtual globe. The result is an annotated North Korea of rocket-launch sites, prison camps and elite palaces on white-sand beaches.

“It’s democratized intelligence,” says Mr. Melvin.  (…………)

Joshua Stanton, an attorney in Washington who once served in the U.S. military in South Korea, used Google Earth to look for one of the country’s notorious prisons. In early 2007, he read an international news report about a mass escape from Camp 16, which the report mentioned was near the site of a nuclear test conducted the year before.  (………….)

Last year, Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas used Mr. Stanton’s maps in a floor presentation criticizing the North’s human-rights record. “Google has made a witness of all of us,” Mr. Brownback said. “We can no longer deny these things exist.”  [Evan Ramstad - Wall Street Journal]

Make sure to read the whole thing because the work both these bloggers do is pretty incredible.  Many of you probably already read Joshua Stanton’s blog One Free Korea already since he has been a prominent K-blogger for quite some time, but if you haven’t started reading NK Econ Watch yet you should.  The work Curtis Melvin does on the site with the use of Google Earth imagery is pretty amazing.

More from OFK here.