What's The Deal With Google Earth Blackzones?

    Google Earth has been a constant in most of our lives since at least 2005. My first memory of this privacy nightmare of a tool goes all the way back to elementary school. I don't remember the context, only that I was in the computer lab and captivated by the fact that I could view the entire globe from the comfort of a swivel chair. 

    Naturally, with as widely accessible as the service has become, myself, along with many others, have found every opportunity to venture to every nook, cranny, dark corner and alley that we could find. It's no surprise then that since its inception the world has uncovered a trove of interesting, bizarre, creepy and confounding locations that some of us may have never known about otherwise. 

The Beginnings of the Blackouts

    Most of what's stood out and received the brunt of media attention has come from what people were able to find in Street View which, when you think about it, makes sense given the context. Afix a 360° camera to the top of a car and drive it down every publically accessible road the world over and you're bound to catch some weird stuff. However, it isn't what Street View was able to capture that's going to be the focus of my writing today. Instead its what wasn't spotted by the interface's most basic yet powerful tool; its satellites.

Air Base with heavy censorship in Greece 

    Ever since the platform debuted in 2005 numerous users have noticed an unusual amount of censored, blurred, or otherwise blank areas in strange locations across the globe. The amount and magnitude of these censored spots has waxed and waned over the years but there have been quite a large number of relatively unexplained instances that continue to baffle those who happen to stumble across them. 

    From what I've been able to piece together a lot of these censorships can be placed into a few categories; test sites for nuclear weapons, top secret military bases or outposts, and sacred religious sites. For example places like the Mururoa and Fangaraufa Atolls in the South Pacific were once largely blurred or censored on Google Earth and other similar imaging sites due to these locations being ground zero for over 193 nuclear weapons tests conducted by the French government between 1966 and 1996. Places like the China Lake facility in Eastern California are also selectively blurred to dissuade public attention away from the reality that the United States conducted an even more absurd amount of nuclear weapons tests on its own domestic soil before the effects of nuclear weapons on the environment and humans as a whole were fully realized. 

    Religious sites make probably the most sense out of all of these. Although an extremely popular destination for religious pilgrimages, the widely agreed upon location of the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus purportedly spent the last night before the crucifixion as well as the burial place of the Virgin Mary is heavily blurred. Similarly, the inner holy city of Medina is completely blacked out as only those of the Islamic faith are allowed within its borders. 

    Naturally, it also makes sense for world governments to ask for military bases and airstrips to blurred, especially those with high strategic value. According to some world leaders, the sheer amount of detail that Google Earth has come to harness to the benefit of the general public poses a threat to certain nations' sense of national security, citing the very real possibility that opposing foreign powers could use satellite imagery of these bases to identify weaknesses and subsequently plan out attacks. 

    While these three categories sum up and explain most of the censorship across the site, there are some instances that are utterly baffling and have avoided in depth explanation. This is where we get into the real mystery of the blackzones and why many people believe that in some cases they are being used to cover up international crimes, breaches of foreign policy, or perhaps something even worse.

China, North Korea, and Internment Camps

    One of the most recent controversies surrounding these blackzones comes from the Eastern world. In particular, the highly reclusive nations of China and North Korea. In recent years both of these nations have been accused of sponsoring and maintaining modern-day internment camps for individuals that the government considers "enemies of the state". This can vary anywhere from citizens who speak out against their governments, important political or religious figures, religious sects that do not fit neatly into the mold that the state has constructed, and even tourists that are ultimately seen as high priority threats to national security. While the outright existence of these camps has never been confirmed upfront, unexplained disappearances and a high level of secrecy on the part of the Chinese and North Korean governments has led many to ascertain that not only do the camps exist but that the governments of these two nations have at least some direct involvement in their operation. 

Suspiciously obscure location near the Tibetan border

    Despite their existence being widely agreed upon, one aspect of these camps that has yet to receive as unanimous of an agreement is their actual location. Ever since widespread knowledge of these camps first began to propagate online their exact locations have been heavily safeguarded, kept under lock and key unbeknownst to everyday citizens, much less foreign outsiders. However, the advent of high definition satellite imagery and the subsequent dawn of the information and surveillance era poses a serious threat to the secrecy of these somewhat mythical camps. Recently, individuals browsing the satellite imagery available on Google Earth have begun to notice that particular areas of the Chinese and North Korean wilderness are completely covered in grey tiles, revealing nothing about the land underneath, and leading many to believe that these conspicuously censored squares are hiding the true location of these holding camps. If not camps, this censorship is at least used in an effort to obscure other activities that neither government is willing to have fall into the hands of the public.

    Like I said before, Google Earth has become capable of a massive amount of detail and as such, allowing the world to see even a satellite image of these locations has the potential to reveal a lot about what might be going on there. If a satellite were able to capture a detailed enough shot of these locations it may even expose actions that, by some theories, would qualify as humans rights violations. However, this isn't even the most bizarre instance of censorship on Google Earth to date.

What are they Hiding in Siberia?

    Across much of the untamed, savage Russian wilderness of Siberia there are massive swathes of land that have seemingly been copied and pasted from other nearby areas of similar terrain and tree cover. Although hard to spot, these instances are incredibly bizarre as most of Siberia consists of a massive amount of undeveloped land. To fully understand how remote this area is, Russia's largest city of Moscow has a population of just over 14 million, all of whom are crammed into a space no larger than 970 square miles. In comparison the 5 million square mile area that makes up much of Siberia, in total, consists of only 33 million people. 

    So, why then have massive areas of what should be open countryside and dense forests been so covertly censored? Theories surrounding the discovery have grown wild, especially in the wake of deteriorating relationships between Russia and the country from which Google hails and with which it shares much of its vested interests, the United States. According to some, much like China and North Korea, Russia has begun to close out the western world to actions within its own borders. Despite maintaining diplomatic relationships with various global delegations, the consensus among online forums seems to believe that this is merely to save face. According to this theory, the country has begun to once again build up a formidable military in opposition to western forces, specifically through the continued development of nuclear warheads. Therefore, these absolutely massive censored areas could in fact be secret military bases, testing sites, or even holding zones for nuclear weapons. 

     Not only would the vast Siberian wilderness be an excellent place to obscure these sites from the chance of being spotted by passerby but it would also be an easy place to censor out of satellite images. After all, in a place where there are, on average, only 3 people per square mile it's safe to assume that there would be very few people looking at this area in the first place.

Antarctica and Secret Bases

    The final location is one where most of us wouldn't imagine there being a lot of censorship. In fact, it's a place where you wouldn't imagine much going on in the first place. Im referring, of course, to the polar continent of Antarctica. Over the years people have begun to spot several locations across the icy landmass that are either completely redacted, very intentionally blurred, or, similar to cases in Siberia, obviously copied from other nearby areas. 

    What makes this exceptionally bizarre and concerning in contrast to the cases i've previously mentioned is thanks to a few pre-existing factors. Namely, Antarctica is largely uninhabited due to its extreme conditions and is only briefly inhabited throughout the year by researchers from a variety of countries. These researchers spend most of their time at a number of disclosed research outposts across the continent. Also, the Antarctic Treaty which was signed in 1959 by over 12 countries, designates the continent as more of a collective property to be used for the sole purpose of research, prohibiting any world power from establishing military footholds within its borders.

    However the existence of these blackzones has led many to believe that there are certain military powers that have begun to ignore the treaty, instead opting to erect strategic, secret outposts within the antarctic interior. While this may seem absurd at first, despite its incredibly harsh conditions there is some historic precedence for this supposition. In the final years of WWII many of the larger players of both the Allied and Axis powers began to set their sights on the Antarctic continent with several having in fact succeeded in setting up military bases along its more forgiving coastline. A lot of these bases were very quickly abandoned (which itself is surrounded in mystery and conspiracy and which I'll probably cover at some point down the line) but it became very apparent following the war's end that the virgin continent held an immense amount of strategic value to whichever country could control it. 

One of the many suspiciously blurred areas on the Antarctic continent

    

    It would make sense then that despite the treaty, those who had a hand in signing it as well as those who didn't might be going behind one another's backs in order to gain an upper hand in whatever future conflict may come. As remote and unforgiving as the continent is and as strict as public travel within its borders can be, it is unlikely that the public will ever truly discover the truth behind these unexplained redactions. While it is possible that, if these supposed bases do exist, they could be declassified to the public at some point in the distant future, long after they have served their purpose, the actual likelihood of this is scarce. This is probably also the case with the similar blackout zones in Russia, China, and North Korea. For the time being, although we can speculate, it is once again more likely that the true nature of these spaces will only over be realized until long after they have shutdown. 

    I mentioned at the beginning of this post that the amount of blackzones known to the public has both waxed and waned as time has passed. Nowadays, the trend seems to be leaning more towards the continued discovery of indecipherable locations while previously known blackouts continue to defy explanation. Perhaps at some point in the future we'll discover something that blows these cases wide open but for now, much like these redacted sites, we remain in the dark.