By Alex in the comments section yesterday pointed out this interesting difference between satellite imagery available on Google Earth and Naver Maps. First here is the Google Earth image from Alex’s site of the Seoul Airbase in Seongnam that houses ROK Air Force units as well as USFK’s K-16 airbase where the 2-2 Aviation Battalion is located:
Here is how this same airbase is depicted on Naver:
Alex is wondering why the airbase was covered over on Naver and the best explanation I can give is that the tourist maps in Korea do not list militarybases either. I had asked a ROK Army sergent major about this before and he had told me that maps sold in Korea by law cannnot list military bases because of espionage reasons. Such rationale is obviously well out of date now a days, but maybe the laws haven’t caught up which thus forces Naver since it is based out of Korea to hide military bases while Google does not?
9:42 am on July 24th, 2009 1
They don't show military bases in the car GPS maps either and that makes traveling to another USFK base in Korea interesting. You have to pull coordinates from Google Earth and plug them in.
10:48 am on July 24th, 2009 2
Thank you for that! I'm pretty satisfied with that explanation as I wouldn't be surprised that Korean laws are lagging behind modern technology that renders them useless.
12:33 pm on July 24th, 2009 3
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.
- Dear Leader
1:23 pm on July 24th, 2009 4
What's up Leon?
2:31 pm on July 24th, 2009 5
It was washed away in the floods a few weeks ago…………
5:47 pm on July 24th, 2009 6
[...] Korea of ROKDrop.com had this to add: I had asked a ROK Army sergent major about this before and he had told me that maps sold in Korea [...]
5:24 pm on July 24th, 2009 7
It's not just the Koreans. There is an island off California (methinks near San Diego) where the US Navy, SEALs etc train. At normal zoom it looks fine but when you get closer it's all clouded over, but only over the island. Just off shore, clear and sunny. Oh, it's San Clemente Island Training Facility
Looks fine and clear at this zoom: http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&am…
Zoom in and look at the norther section. Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.
Howdy H&T, hows it hanging?
6:12 pm on July 24th, 2009 8
If you look at a map of Yongsan in Naver, the US base is also hidden under a very suspicious mountain (looks interesting because it surrounds the War Memorial museum on 3 sides). Funny thing is that if you zoom out a little bit you can see the base. The mountain only appears if you want to see too much details.
11:08 pm on July 24th, 2009 9
I have an iNavi navigation system and Camp Walker is in it. I've looked for a few other bases, but they're not listed. It's a good thing Walker is in there, because if you're not familiar with Taegu, it's really hard to find. Whenever I travel down south, I like to stop there to get gas, but until I got a navigation system, it ended up being a waste of time trying to find the place.
2:38 am on July 25th, 2009 10
In a Garmin GPS the civilian designation shows up for all the bases.
11:16 pm on July 25th, 2009 11
Information age.
Whatever the public knows, so do the bad guys.
The public is totally cool with that until another terrorist strike happens and a whole load of people are dead again.
What blows is that there's more information about our stuff than their stuff.