>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington DC.
[ Silence ]
>> Good afternoon, everyone.
And welcome to our
afternoon session.
My name is Ryan Moore.
I'm the Executive Secretary
of the Phillips Map Society.
And I'm a technical
information specialist
in the Geography and Map Division.
Before we start this next session,
on behalf of the Phillips
Society Steering Committee
and Chief Ralph Ehrenberg.
I would like to point out to
you that we were handing out,
as you came in, another
piece of paper.
It's a flyer about joining
the Phillips Society.
And we ask that you take
a moment sometime today
to review this document.
The Phillips Society is funding this
conference, as our past conferences.
And we would like to continue to
bring this to you in the future.
So please take a moment
to consider joining,
if you haven't joined already.
And to donate to this
wonderful organization.
We now turn our attention
to the intersection of maps
with the shadowy worlds
of spying, propaganda,
and military intelligence gathering.
In this session, we
will be paying attention
to the era of the Cold War.
And contemporary issues such as the
use of GPS and satellite imagery.
We will have three
speakers in this session.
And following that, a Q
and A session at the end.
The speakers and I have agreed
to keep the introductions brief.
So that they may have
more time for their talks.
With that being said, allow me
to introduce our first
speaker, Mr. Keith Clarke.
He is a professor of
geography at the University
of California at Santa Barbara.
Sounds very nice.
I would love to be there.
Today Professor Clarke
will be talking to us
about the CIA sponsored
CORONA spy satellite program.
It was used to gather intelligence
on the former Soviet Union
and People's Republic of
China during the Cold War.
Please welcome Professor Clarke.
[ Applause ]
[ Background Sounds ]
>> Keith Clarke: Thank you
very much for inviting me here.
It's a privilege to
address this audience.
In about May of 1995, I received a
very curious invitation in the mail
from the Center For the
Studies of Intelligence.
Inviting me to a symposium at George
Washington University here in DC.
The title of the symposium
was "Piercing the Curtain."
And I thought it was
kind of curious,
but worth the price
of an airline ticket.
So I flew down from New York
and was rather amazed to sit
in the front row and see, not one,
but four CIA directors introduce
this conference to get it started.
It was the declassification
conference for the CORONA program.
And I didn't realize it at
the time, but that started me
on about ten years
worth of research.
Including work with my
former student, John Cloud,
who did his Ph.D. on this topic.
We produced a series
of publications.
I should acknowledge that the
National Science Foundation funded
much of this work.
So I call the talk here "The Missing
Decade of Remote Sensing History."
And I'll explain why in
just a second, in fact.
Do I have to do that?
[ Background Sounds ]
Okay. I'm clicking forward.
Nothing's happening.
There we go.
So I've taught remote
sensing for some time.
And Remote Sensing 101,
pretty much every textbook,
other than John Jensen's,
begins by saying
that remote sensing really
began in 1972 with the launch
of the Earth Resource Technology
Satellite, later renamed Landsat 1.
And there are other satellites
that date from the 1960's
that had important significance.
And the implication here
is that remote sensing sort
of sprang fully formed from
its mother's womb in 1972.
And with extraordinary
reliability and success.
But, in fact, the real
story is much more complex.
It's far more interesting and
involved the Cold War very much so.
So in reality, remote sensing in
space began with Mission 9009.
Which you might have
known as Discoverer 14,
if you were around at the time.
The code name Limber Leg.
It's 19th of August 1960 recovery
from the KH-1 panoramic camera.
This was initial proof of concept.
The imagery itself that was
recovered from this mission,
here's one of the very
first intelligence gathered
from a satellite, from a
picture taken from space.
The intelligence aspect
was not so strong.
The proof of concept, the fact
that you could get
overhead reconnaissance
from space was the real lesson.
I mentioned Discoverer 14.
Discoverer was the
cover story at the time.
Discoverer was an open-scientific
satellite series
that was actually CORONA.
That the science cover story was
that they were doing
biological experiments
and flying mice on
board the satellites.
And, apparently, they even had
some mice at Vandenberg just
to go along with the story.
But it was actually a
program called CORONA.
Anything here in uppercase
text is a code word.
And it's used to sort
of classify a program
under the classification
system that's used.
That program had started in 1957.
And it was terminated
in 1972, with the belief
that in 1972 the program
would be declassified.
In fact, they even made a
movie called "A Point in Time"
for the 1972 declassification.
Which, in fact, didn't
happen until 1995.
So I believe CORONA was the
true birth in remote sensing.
And it may have been one of
those turning points that, Mark,
you were not willing to put
your finger on this morning.
But to understand CORONA and what
became of it and how it developed.
We really need to look
at the prehistory.
And that term goes
back to World War II.
So this is from Dwayne
Day's book on CORONA.
"It was as if an enormous
floodlight had been turned
on in a darkened warehouse."
And I'd like you to
hold that thought,
as I move through the slides, of
the floodlight in the warehouse.
So a little bit of context
on the Cold War initially.
Those are actually battleships.
This was from a nuclear test Able
in the Pacific, Marshall Islands.
Those are battleships
flying up in the air.
So I tell my students the Cold War
started before World War II ended.
And it had been predicted before
World War II by von Fritsch
that the nation with the best
photo reconnaissance will win the
next war.
Well, that was, indeed,
true of the Cold War.
Although, it wasn't
true of the Vietnam War.
But that's another story.
Richard Leghorn, who had
overseen reconnaissance for D-Day
and then the Able and
Baker Bikini Atoll tests,
came away from those
tests absolutely convinced
that nuclear war was
unwinnable by anybody.
And became even more of
a convert in the belief
that reconnaissance
was the solution.
The Army Air Force at the time,
there was no Air Force then,
established an optical research
lab at Boston University.
Which was not looked upon favorably.
Eventually span off and
formed the ITEK corporation.
And the ITEK Corporation
remained associated
with the spy satellite
programs for many years.
And became the source of most of
the cameras that went into space.
At the same time there was a series
of what were called crash studies,
rapid studies by the RAND
Corporation to investigate whether
or not orbit in space was possible.
Something we learned very
quickly when Sputnik went up.
And 1947's another key moment.
Because at that point
Air Force Vice Chief
of Staff Vandenberg captures
the space rocketry projects.
And there was a lot of
debate within the forces
over who should have
control over them.
But captured them from the Air
Force and based them at Camp Cooke
in California, not, you know,
30 miles from Santa Barbara.
A site later to be renamed
Vandenberg Air Force Base.
Now, especially, my younger
students, have to be taught
about the Cold War because
it's ancient history to them.
But it was a period of great unease.
The first, you know,
true rocket propelled,
today we'd call them
intercontinental ballistic missiles,
was captured by both the
Russians and the Americans.
And was moved under
Project Paperclip
to White Sands in New Mexico.
And here's a German V-2 on the
launch pad at White Sands ready
to start the American space program.
The nuclear threats continued
to develop with leaks.
The H-bomb that was developed
and exploded in the U.S.
in 1952 was copied by
the Soviets in '54.
SAC, the Strategic Air
Command, was created in 1946.
By 1955, it went 24/7.
Which meant that there
was continuously,
for a period of many years, at
least one and usually many aircraft
in the air, carrying nuclear bombs
with targets predetermined
in Russia.
So beautifully captured
by the war room scene
in the wonderful movie there.
At that time we talked about
China and the USSR and other parts
of the world as denied territory.
Denied territory because
there was territoriality,
as Mark mentioned this
morning, about overflight.
To cure this, Eisenhower himself
proposed the Open Skies concept
in 1955.
In which countries would have rights
for overflight for any other country
for verification processes.
And that was pretty much uniformly
rejected, largely by the Soviets.
'57, the Sputnik story.
Everybody, of course, knows that.
The time it was believed as
a shock to the U.S. system
that the Soviets had jumped ahead.
In fact, since CORONA
was under development,
they were pretty much
on par at the time.
And Khrushchev with his famous
incident at the United Nations,
banging his shoe on the
table and screaming,
"We will bury you,"
and didn't do much.
The '62 Cuban Missile
Crisis was primarily fought
out using U-2 imagery.
And U-2 was the preferred mechanism.
But we had this serious
problem of denied overflights.
Meaning the U-2 was
not particularly useful
over the Soviet Union,
or not eventually.
This was a period of duck and
cover and fallout shelters.
And the belief that we would
probably not survive to grow
into adulthood because
of nuclear war.
So in terms of CORONA itself, the
prehistory really begins in 1950
with a project, sort
of conceptual project
that ran called Project FEEDBACK.
And FEEDBACK was really an
audacious, truly ambitious program.
FEEDBACK was going to orbit a
camera, a dark room, and a scanner,
and a transmitter in space.
They were going to take
pictures of the Soviet Union.
They were going to develop
the film in the spacecraft.
They were going to scan
that film and turn it
into an analog radio signal.
It would be transmitted
back to Earth for recovery.
It was believed that that
was subject to risks.
So it included a back-up system,
whose code name was Lifeboat.
In which the film, after
it had been developed,
would be put into a canister
that would be returned to Earth
to be captured in mid
air by an aircraft.
And then brought back
and returned for use.
Since photography, film development,
even mylar-based film
didn't exist at this time.
This was remarkable.
There was no such thing
as a digital scanner.
They didn't know how
to do transmission.
So, incidentally, that gave us the
digital camera, the FAX machine,
all came out of this program.
1953, this program was
still under development.
It was renamed Weapons System 117L.
And found it's way to Wright
Development Center in Ohio.
Where it kind of languished.
It was defunded, as
we would say today.
And the idea was that the
Vanguard program was going to lead
to establishment of access to
open space for the United States.
Now, an interesting sideline
and a very important,
as far as the CORONA program,
was the GENETRIX program.
The GENETRIX was a
spy balloon program
which took place in '53, '54.
And this was a system in which
ITEK's cameras [inaudible].
HYAC cameras were going to be
used, suspended from balloons
that were going to be put
into high-altitude flights
released over Turkey and Norway.
And allowed to drift
across the Soviet Union.
And then would be captured
in mid air
by aircraft once they
reached the Pacific.
Now, GENETRIX actually worked.
It took place over 26 days in
January and February of 1956.
It was planned for 2,500 of
these balloons to be released.
Actually, only 448 were.
44 of them were successfully
recovered by C-119,
the so-called flying boxcar,
precursor to the C-130.
Of which there were 13,813
photos covering significant parts
of USSR and China.
And it actually had
some intelligence value.
But the real purpose was improving
the value of the panoramic camera
and the ability to get
stuff back from balloons.
There's a truly ironic, about three
weeks ago I was in Tampa, Florida.
And I saw a blimp company, which
for two years has been operational,
flying reconnaissance
balloons in Afghanistan.
So the true birth of CORONA.
TALENT or imagery from aircraft the,
these are classification categories.
KEYHOLE was the keyword for,
the code word for reconnaissance
from outer space.
The AQUATONE or the U-2, we first
flew in '55, was used very sparingly
for a variety of reasons.
Even though it was meant
to be a stealth aircraft,
it showed up immediately on radar.
And it was just a matter
of time before they figured
out how to shoot it down.
In preparation for this,
WS-117L went deep black.
It disappeared off
the face of the Earth
and was renamed CORONA
and reformed in earnest.
The space reconnaissance programs
developed their own new keyword,
the code word was KEYHOLE.
So we often talk about
TALENT KEYHOLE imagery.
Project FEEDBACK became
project SAMOS.
SAMOS actually did
eventually happen.
I'll talk about that
in a little while.
And then this all came
to a head May 1st,
1960 when Francis Gary
Powers was shot
down over the Soviet Union
collecting intelligence.
Word on that in just a minute.
His replacement or the replacement
aircraft for the U-2, the SR-71,
which had an enormously
successful intelligence career,
wouldn't come until 1965.
We had this massive gap.
But by August 1960, CORONA had
achieved its first success.
It was called, when Gary
Powers was shot down,
there he is in his civilian
uniform and his all-black aircraft.
And this was intended that the
CIA would operate these rather
than the military.
We had a show trial,
and it wasn't so good.
But within matter of weeks CORONA
was, had its first successes.
So it was a hard slog.
February '59, was the
first test launch attempt.
1960, the 13th, the CORONA 13 was
the first successful recovery.
Then it was an empty capsule.
It was for demonstration.
August 1960, CORONA returned its
first useable image from space.
The one I just showed you.
In 1972, in May, the last
CORONA mission was launched.
It imaged until the 31st of May '72.
And the last images of the series
were taken and the capsule returned.
So just to bring it right up
to date, 24th of February '95,
is the executive order that led
to declassification of CORONA
and '95 ceremonies at the CIA
National Air and Space Museum.
And this conference,
I mentioned, at GWU.
Since then we've had subsequent
declassification around CORONA.
But also one in September 2002, of
the GAMBIT and HEXAGON programs.
And these continue.
These continued up until
a couple years ago.
I'm going to try and give you
some of the details of CORONA,
but I'm critically aware that
I'm likely to run out of time.
The program ran for 12 years.
There were 103 successful missions.
800,00 images.
750 million square nautical
miles covered with the imagery.
Obviously repeat coverage
in many cases.
39,000 tangible film canisters
in the national archive.
With a duplicate at the
Aerostat Center in Sioux Falls.
2.1 million feet of film.
And the impact was revolutionary.
But not just at one, but at multiple
levels in the cartographic world.
So I'll just briefly go over
how CORONA actually worked.
The technological accomplishments
were just extraordinary.
The space segment for
CORONA was based
on the intercontinental
ballistic missile system.
The Thor and then eventually
the Atlas.
With the Agena second stage, the
Agena second stage was designed
to stay in orbit with the
capsule and was very important
for positioning capsules.
The payload was the ITEK cameras.
Which eventually became quite
elaborate scanning panchromatic,
scanning cameras that
rotated in a very unusual way.
The film return system and the
provision for aerial recovery.
The camera series that
it was based on,
the ITEK cameras, included
the Keyhole.
The Argon, the KH-5.
The geodetic mapping camera.
And the Lanyard, the KH-6,
which was an experimental system
for the next generation.
It involved different
spectral suites.
Different spatial coverage.
Different resolutions.
I'll show you some of
those in just a minute.
But when CORONA was retired
in 1972, it was retired
because the next two generations
of spy satellites were
already operational.
And these involved SAMOS itself.
The GAMBIT, the KH-7 system.
The HEXAGON, the KH-9 system.
The DORIAN, which actually
never flew.
It was designed for the
Manned Orbiting Laboratory.
And the KENNAN or CRYSTAL system,
obviously, the KH is increased
after that point, up through 1988.
And all of these missions remain,
as they call it, Deep Black,
in the top secret talent
keyhole classification category.
So the space segment for CORONA,
once the initial cameras became
successful, they moved on to higher
and higher resolution cameras.
Which also moved into
stereo coverage.
And these became heavier
and heavier.
So they invented a system of
booster rockets called the THORADS.
The ITEK cameras continued
to improve primarily
in spectral resolution
throughout the system.
And the film recovery system
the, which was stolen from SAMOS,
basically the Lifeboat recovery
system and used in Gentrix,
became the norm for
recovering CORONA imagery.
Now, the first 13 launches, as
I said, were not successful.
It was up until the last
that it became a success.
So this is basically what very
early CORONAs looked like.
This is an intercontinental
ballistic missile, this part.
This is the payload.
Now, this is the cooling
equipment, keeping the payload cool.
Over here in this bunker building
is several hundred thousand pounds
of liquid oxygen.
And in another one on the other side
is several hundred thousand pounds
of kerosene.
And I marvel at the days where you
could drive a station wagon up there
and park it right next to an
enormous tank of liquid oxygen.
This is the system in
its more developed times,
when these missiles were
really quite unique.
They were designed to
live in these sheds.
And the sheds were on rollers.
So the design was that
they could be loaded
and launched within 20 minutes.
The rollers would roll this entire
building back from the rocket.
The rocket would then be pivoted
straight up, instantly loaded
with fuel, and off it would go.
Incidentally, this, I took
this picture at Vandenberg.
You can't really get very easy
access to these locations anymore.
But at that point it looked,
the reason it looks so ratty is
because they decided
not to tear it down.
Because it had become
nesting habitat
for an endangered bird species.
So here we are.
Here's the tanks.
This is my student, John Cloud.
And the base historian
from Vandenberg.
Now, the spot I have my foot
on right there is the geodetic
marker tablet for Vandenberg.
Which we've argued, John and I,
that it was probably the
most accurately located place
in the world for a
period of decade or so.
Because it was so necessary for
the guidance systems for CORONA.
So this is how at the
launch sequence operated.
The, after launch, the
boosters would be rejected.
The first stage would
separate and return.
The Agena stage would go
into orbit and would be,
the unnecessary fuel
would be dumped.
And the photo-ops would
be initiated, as it says.
Now, the system very quickly
became enormously successful,
and so it became the norm.
So I call it CORONA at full speed.
Because it very quickly ramped up
over a period of a couple of years
from a system with, you know,
a tiny success rate to one
with almost 100 percent
perfect success rate.
Initially, they had to
rely on timers to open
and close the shutters
on the camera.
Unfortunately, that, clouds and
things would get in the way.
So that's where the DMSP
or the Defense Meteorological
Satellite Program came in.
But eventually, once
telemetry became established,
the cameras could be
operated remotely.
Here's a schematic.
It's not what it looked like.
But, basically, here's a
spool of unexposed film.
The film would find its
way through the cameras.
These are the two main cameras here.
Once they'd been exposed, they
would go into these take-up spools
into this reentry capsule
at the front.
And this one, notice,
has two reentry capsules.
So here's what the, what
they actually look like.
The cameras, one pointed
fore and one aft.
They were very long,
folded, focal length cameras.
So they could give you
quite a lot of detail.
This is a DISIC camera, which
is actually still classified.
Which was a geodetic
camera that would allow
for the accurate location of
the more detailed imagery.
I know I'm running out of
time, so let me skip ahead.
Now, this is a CORONA bucket.
Here's one from the Smithsonian.
Now, you can see the
film spool canisters.
These will basically find their
way into here, be closed up.
There'd be a parachute on the top
that, initially a drone chute shoot.
And then a parachute
to allow the capture.
So here's the recovery sequence.
The entire Agena would actually
dip down at an angle 120 degrees.
And the spin jets or gas jets
would be used to spin the capsule
so that it started to rifle
down through the atmosphere.
As it reentered, this would be
initiated over the North Pole
so that it reentered the
Earth's atmosphere over Hawaii.
And the recovery operations were run
out of Hickam Air Force
Base in Honolulu.
The drone chute would
open, slow it down.
The main chute would open
at about 55,000 feet.
And that allowed the, here's
the C-119, to come in and try
and capture it with this elaborate
device on the back of the plane.
Now, this is a later C-130.
A special squadron was
trained at Hickam to,
in these capture processes.
And they basically had
two fishing poles hanging
out the back with hooks on them.
And they would snag the
chutes with the hooks.
And then let it play out.
And then slowly wench it back
in so they had the capsule.
Some evolution of the cameras.
These are, obviously, the
early pioneer systems.
This is single return capsule
but with stereo cameras.
Here's the two perfected
versions of that, the KH-4A
and B. Then this is called the
Lanyard, this is actually KH-6,
A much different film system
that took us into the first world
of multi-spectral remote
sensing at high resolution.
Here's some specks
on the resolution.
I'll just point out the KH-4A and
B collected by far the majority
of the information that
was collected at about 9
and 6 foot spatial resolution.
Occasionally it could do
much better than that.
KH-7, which was short-lived,
was imaging at 2 feet.
The, here's, this is a U-2 image.
But the bulk of the imagery was
these strips that were scan,
they were scanning strips
so the cameras would counter
rotate inside the satellite
so that they balanced each other.
And kept the flight steady.
The camera would open as
it passed the [inaudible].
And then would expose film
and out the other side.
Then obviously you had an enormous
amount of detail at [inaudible]
and not very much when you
were looking out sideways.
So to be able to deal with this
and process the film
was quite a challenge.
So just a brief word on
some successor systems.
HEXAGON and GAMBIT were
two follow-on systems.
These were high resolution.
These were imaging at
0.46, 0.5 and 0.6 meters.
Eventually they were
flying the Big Bird
with two enormous focal length
cameras and 0.6 meter resolution
with missions lasting almost a year.
The actual HEXAGON system was
declassified a couple years ago.
And part of it is now
available at the Hazy Center
out by Dulles Airport, if you
want, get some time to spend there,
you ought to take a look.
Just a quick look at some imagery.
I'm aware that I'm
running out of time.
Here's the nuts and bolts.
What you might recognize, a 9-inch
frame with Rizo's [phonetic] image.
This is from the Argon camera.
Here's the KH-4 at its best,
Santa Rosa Island 1967,
about 2 to 3 feet spatial
resolution on this image.
This is a KH-5 Mosaic.
And that was assembled
in a warehouse in Reston.
And people, scientists
from government
and elsewhere were given
temporary security classifications
to come in and see this Mosaic.
Which covered the entire
floor of a warehouse.
And I imagine the light being
turned on inside the warehouse,
and it's I think where
that imagery comes from.
So Bissell's statement here,
"Overnight, we went from famine
to feast," is quite
literally was the story.
All of a sudden things
became more complex.
We had periods of control, sort
of control wars over the system
between the Air Force and the CIA.
That the CIA's own history
calls the years of acrimony.
Interesting history there.
Competition was seen as
good for the program.
'72, after enormous debate
between the NRO and the Air Force
versus NASA and the USGS, in
which CORONA missions were offered
to the USGS for mapping.
Eventually we got Landset.
And at Landset 7, we were beginning
to talk about stereo mapping.
It didn't actually happen.
So what drove CORONA into its long
path towards declassification was,
of course, the budget office.
The Congressional Budget Office.
The cost of the program
were immense.
And the government began to
look for alternative uses
of these systems whose Cold War
missions were primarily over.
In 1973, the OMB acknowledged
in a report
that there was a civil
role taking place.
This led to the Civilian
Applications Committee,
the Medea and the Jasons.
These organizations
that do classified work,
largely from an academic context.
And then the system was, got
other uses in, for other purposes.
Let me skip that.
SAMOS did eventually fly.
It flew as the Apollo Lunar Mapping
Camera used to map the surface
of the moon for the lunar
landings from Apollo.
So SAMOS eventually
had twelve launches.
Three of them worked
in terms of readouts.
Nine of them used the
recovery system
that CORONA was used, was using.
We saw all sorts of new
uses for the imagery
after that congressional
budget report.
The USGS, for example,
built Building E-1.
And created what are called the
Special Mapping Centers facilities.
In which classified products
could be placed for civilian use.
And, in fact, as Baclawski
said in the paper,
"The USGS became the largest civil
agency user of the CORONA imagery."
Because it wasn't largely
being, rarely being used
for its intelligence
purposes anymore.
After that came the EPA.
The Forest Service.
FEMA. The CAC or Civilian
Applications Committee formed
in 1975, is the coordinating
agency for federal technologies.
The impact on cartography came
in terms of the original analog
with eventually digital hardware
and software systems designed
to rectify the imagery and to
reproduce the film and broadcast it.
So the UPDRAMS, UNAMACE and the
AS-11, which was still in use
in the 1980's, were very much
the foundation of activity
at the Defense Mapping Agency.
So this really was the
birth of remote sensing,
and you could argue also GIS.
I'm going to skip some of this.
Let me move to my finish.
The CORONA images today,
they're open.
There's copies of all the
imagery at Sioux Falls
and in the National Archives.
The NRO was acknowledged as
part of the government in 1992.
Now, we actually got the Open Skies
Treaty, which was signed 1992.
NIMA then NGA has now moved
on to what they call GEOINT
and multi-source rather than
relying so much on overhead imagery.
However, all of the programs
since 1972 and all of SAMOS
and many other programs,
although parts
of HEXAGON and GAMBIT are now open.
Most of those are still in
the Talent Keyhole archives.
So they're still classified.
In 1995, there was a five-year
promise to release more information.
That was actually carried out, but
less was given than we had hoped.
Meanwhile, there are enormous number
of uses for CORONA in environmental
and historical mapping
and cartography.
Now, I should acknowledge again
my former student, John Cloud,
who did most of the archive
research for this work.
This is what it's like to work
with top-secret documents.
Here's a document where the content
of the document is classified.
The secrecy level of the
document was classified.
The page number is, of the
document is classified.
And the running header
is classified.
Not so easy.
Now, the cost is, I would
argue has been the millions,
and quite literally millions.
We now are clearly archiving
almost a petabyte a day
from intelligence purposes.
Millions of documents and
images are probably classified
for no good reason and at
enormous expense to the government.
And the potential of base line usage
that we never really envisioned
for fields like archeology
and global change studies
has been quite enormous.
And so really the one
argument would be
that you could do this
inside the classified world.
This has been the argument of Medea
for open data and transparency.
But essentially black science,
you could argue that science
where the data is not
reproducible is not really science.
Meanwhile, we've had all sorts
of reasons not to release data.
Like the Wiki leaks and
the Snowden problems.
But I would argue that the
intelligence use of what's left
of the CORONA imagery and certainly
up through KH-9 imagery is still,
has no value to intelligence
anymore.
So I would, well, it's
about four kilometers away.
But I would say, Mr. Obama, if
you're listening to me today,
please digatize and open up
the Talent-Keyhole archives.
Thank you, yes.
Okay. Thanks.
[ Applause ]
[ Background Sounds ]
>> So all of you who thought
Corona was just a beer,
you've learned something new today.
Thank you so much.
We enjoyed the talk.
Now allow me to introduce
Timothy Barney.
He is Associate Professor of
Rhetoric and Communication Studies
At the University of
Richmond in Virginia.
This afternoon Professor
Barney will be speaking to us
about the rhetorical
lives of Cold War maps.
He will illustrate this concept by
talking about a 1951, CIA-funded map
that depicted slave labor camps
in the former Soviet Union.
Please welcome Professor Barney.
[ Applause ]
[ Background Sounds ]
>> Timothy Barney: Well, I
have to thank Ryan there.
I just got tenure there
in the introduction.
I'm actually an assistant professor.
But I like the sound
of associate professor.
So I'm going to take that
if you all don't mind.
Thank you very much for
everybody for being here.
And thank you to the
Geography and Map Division.
And the, Ryan in the
Phillips Map Society
for planning this wonderful
conference
and bringing us all together.
As Ryan says, I'm actually from
a communication department.
And nobody there cares about maps.
And they call me the map nerd there.
And so it actually feels good
to be amongst my people
today, which is very nice.
Although it's a little
presumptuous to think of you
as nerds, so apologize for that.
By I'd like to begin with a
quick anecdote here if I may.
The September 17th, 1951 issue of
"Time Magazine" featured a peculiar
and striking image
over a two page spread.
A map of the sprawling Soviet Union.
The map reveals a network
of red circles, shaded areas
and pink hammer and sickle icons
dotted all over the topography
of a stark gray and
white Soviet landscape.
Each indicating the location
of Gulag system prison camps.
Now, the accompanying
text in Time tells a story
of the map's provocation of
an incident between the U.S.
and the Soviet Union at the
1951 San Francisco Conference
to inaugurate a Japanese
peace treaty.
Here the Gulag-Slavery, Incorporated
map became a cartographic weapon
when Missouri's Congressman
O.K. Armstrong walked
up to Soviet Deputy Minister of
Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko
and asked him if he wanted
to see a map of Russia.
"I'd be delighted," said Gromyko.
Unfolding the map, Armstrong
helpfully explained, quote,
"It happens to contain
an accurate portrayal
of every slave labor camp
in the Soviet Union."
Gromyko blinked at the map.
Mumbled, "No comment."
And handed it to an aide who
tossed it into the aisle.
So you can see that here.
Indeed, below the imposing
map in the
"Time Magazine" article
are before-after-
style photos of the incident.
On the left, we see Republican
representative Armstrong unfolding
the map before a sitting Gromyko.
On the right, we see a
stone-faced Gromyko staring ahead
as the map sits beside him on
the floor of the conference room.
So, of course, the Armstrong-Gromyko
exchange can be added to a long list
of the minor anecdotes
in the history
of chilly Cold War,
diplomatic relations.
Yet a deeper exploration of this
map, which we hope to do today,
reveals a compelling case
about both the strategic
and ideological functions of
mapping during the Cold War.
Before the map became a kind of
diplomatic prank in the hands
of Congressman Armstrong,
it began as a collaboration
in a global labor research
project between the AFL-CIO
and the United Nations
Economic and Social Council.
It was authored by a Russian
immigrant, ghost-writing journalist.
It was underwritten by the CIA.
And publicized internationally
by Voice of America Radio.
The many uses and appropriations
of this piece, then,
has lead to its citation as, quote,
"One of the most widely
circulated pieces
of anti-communist literature."
In this era, maps were
constantly appropriated, debated,
revised and reappropriated.
Cold War maps lived.
They were active and
malleable documents.
Such a seemingly bipolar,
universal and fixed conflict
as the Cold War required immense
work to maintain an image of fixity.
Maps thus had to continually
reproduce
and maintain the essential
artifice of the conflict.
The hardened lines between the U.S.
and the Soviet Union
may appear immovable
and essential on Cold War maps.
However, the hardening
of these lines only comes
from the map's ability
to draw and be drawn
into the active constructions
of the Cold War.
Now, in my research
on the Gulag Map,
as well as my larger book project on
the Cold War, very creatively titled
"Mapping the Cold War," I traced
these active constructions
through a specific critical approach
to analyzing cartographic history.
A map possesses what I would
call a rhetorical life.
In other words, a map
has a particular lifespan
in which it exists as a
communicative practice.
As it works through
the intersections
of public and private spaces.
Institutional and popular context.
And artistic and scientific
modes of collection,
synthesis and expression.
Maps like the Gulag
project, for instance,
reveal what geographer Trevor
Barnes has called the mangle
of collaboration and competitions
between the foreign
policy institutions
of the executive branch
of the U.S. government.
The defense apparatuses
of the armed forces.
Private and independent
organizations, such as the AFL.
The popular journalism that
outlets, such as "Time."
And even super national
powers, like the United Nations.
So the notion of a map's
rhetorical life points importantly
to how a map reflects and shapes its
multitude of contexts as it lives
and functions as a
useable material document.
Rob Kitchen and Martin Dodge have
expressed that a map is, quote,
"Brought into the world and made
to do work through practices
such as recognizing, interpreting,
translating, communicating
and so on.
It does not re-present the
world or make the world
by shaping how we think
about the world.
It is a co-constitutive production
between inscription,
individual and world.
A production that is
constantly in motion."
I always love that quote.
Maps then are always mapping,
attempting to appear representative.
And this process is what
makes maps so dynamic,
I would argue, in Cold War culture.
So today I will argue
here specifically
that the rhetorical life of the
Gulag Map evidences an attempt
by its various producers
and circulators
to give America the power
to label and thus control
and contain Cold War space.
Merely affixing the
specific location
of a secret forced labor camp
to a map represents a
powerful political act.
In the increasingly abstract
spaces of missile trajectories,
pacts and blocs, both sides
in the conflict struggle
to marshal authentic knowledge
of the other's potentialities.
As such, the Gulag Map
reflects America's anxieties
around its ability to strategically
use what historian Susan Carruthers
terms the transatlantic politics of
knowledge in charting enemy space.
In today's presentation,
I'll also trace the origins
and various mediated
appropriations of Gulag-Slavery,
Incorporated in popular government,
military and academic settings.
While also engaging in a close
analysis of the map itself,
particularly in these tensions
between the internal
codes of the map.
Its colors.
Its icons.
Its choice of projections
and the like.
And the accompanying text,
photos and other supporting
evidence that go along with it.
In the process, I contend that the
story of how the U.S. mapped itself
and the world in the second half of
the 20th Century is a vital story
about the synthesis, the
framing, and above all,
the practice in movement of
America's international power.
America required images of
strength and commitment in maps
to legitimize its self-interests
as commensurate with the interests
of the rest of the world.
A few months after
embarrassing Minister Gromyko,
it was Representative Armstrong
speaking at a keynote in front
of the conference on psychological
strategy in the Cold War.
That's a great conference
title by the way.
Who pointed out that, quote, "Our
primary weapons will not be guns,
but ideas and truth itself."
So how a map merges
such ideologies of truth
into informational weaponry,
in both its visual display
and it's circulation, becomes
central to understanding,
not just this case,
but also contributes
to a larger understanding of
cartography as a rhetorical process.
So let's me begin with
the origins and production
of the Gulag-Slavery,
Incorporated Map.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's
"Gulag Archipelago" made Gulag
a global household name upon its
sensational publishing in 1973.
But 26 years before
its popularization,
Russian emigre turned crusading
anti-communist journalist,
Isaac Don Levine was
certainly trying his best
to bring it to public consciousness.
Levine had been a ghostwriter
for a series
of sensational Soviet
defector narratives.
And he also notably introduced
Whittaker Chambers' story
of communist infiltration to the
attention of the State Department.
Setting off a chain
reaction of events
that would obviously reach their
full effect in the Hiss trials
that set the tone for
the early Cold War.
Levine was also the editor of
the anti-communist magazine
"Plain Talk" from 1945 to 1950.
And in the May 1947
issue of "Plain Talk,"
Levine introduces the first version
of Gulag-Slavery, Incorporated.
At this stage more simply titled
the first comprehensive map
of slave camps in the USSR.
Now, Levine's text
refers to it as a documap.
And this labeling is a
pointed rhetorical choice.
As it heightens the
focus and authenticity
as if the map was simply but
dutifully bearing witness
to secret atrocities
across a vast continent.
In this sense, the map packages
itself as an evidentiary weapon
for fighting the Cold War.
A role it would play often
in the conflict's duration.
Now. Much of Levine's data
and style was based on the map
from the 1945 volume
"La Justice Sovietique."
By two Polish military officers,
Sylvestre Mora and Pierre Zwierniak.
"La Justice Sovietique" was
one of the first books to bring
in firsthand accounts by prisoners.
And featured some of
the first attempts
at quantifying slave
labor in Russia.
Their map was a stylized red,
black and white rendering
of camp locations.
With a tiny margin,
you might be able
so see a little bit in this version.
The tiny margin made of
prisoner release certificates.
But without the photos
and captioning
that would mark the later
Gulag-Slavery, Incorporated Map.
Levine and other notable journalists
from the period make
a key re-labeling
of Soviet forced labor as slavery.
A frame that would take on
more and more significance
and dramatic weight as
the Cold War progressed.
As an early review, there's
an earlier view of the map
in a 1947 editorial in
the "Chicago Tribune."
Which noted the map's
appearance overseas
and praised its circulation.
And it valorizes the authentic
production process of the map.
Highlighting that the "Plain Talk"
editors, quote, "Based their study
on nearly 14,000 affidavits
and other documentary material
obtained from liberated slaves."
And, again, that terminology of
"slave" is really important here.
The map thus participates in a key
shift in early Cold War culture.
Where totalitarianism
becomes a transcendent label
for industrialized state oppression.
Allowing for an explicit link
between World War II
fascism and Soviet communism.
Red fascism, for example, became a
useful and widely appropriated label
in post-war American foreign
policy and popular culture.
As president Truman stated in 1947,
this is a great President
Truman quote.
"There isn't any difference
in totalitarian states.
I don't care what you call them.
Nazi. Communist.
Or fascist."
And Representative Everett
Dirksen even suggested
that the red fascist inspired
the German camp system.
He said why it was from Russia
that the infamous Hitler got
the technique for Dachau.
Make no mistake about it, it
was borrowed from the people
who could create an empire
of the mind in the world
and destroy freedom in this country.
These are, you know, this is
the Cold War for you; right?
So thus the rhetoric of
slavery was politicized
under a totalitarian label through
the iconic symbol of the camp.
Rather than say victims of human
cruelty, camp laborers were victims
of political ideology, this empire
of the mind that Dirksen mentioned.
A more abstract formulation
that the abstract lines
of the map supported well.
Now, with these rumblings about the
specific location of labor camps
through Levine's map and
political speeches, the issue began
to gather greater attention.
Beginning in 1947, the AFL tried
to lobby the United Nations
to get involved, the
early United Nations.
But the AFL was ultimately
unsatisfied
with their lack of response.
So through its Free Trade Union
Committee, the AFL decided
to wage a specific campaign
galvanizing both domestic
and international public
opinion in a more innovative way.
And the Gulag Map offered
that kind of innovation.
Now, the Free Trade Union Committee
was covertly funded by the CIA.
According to a historian,
Russell Bartley, as, quote,
"A Cold War foreign
relations arm of the AFL used
by successive U.S. administrations
to combat communist influence
in the international
labor movement."
Jay Lovestone, who was the head
of the Free Trade Union Committee,
had been a CIA operative since 1948.
And was specifically
using agency money
to fund the research for this map.
Lovestone's office then corresponded
with Isaac Don Levine
throughout 1950.
And paid him to commission
a new and improved update
of Gulag-Slavery Incorporated.
So it must be said that the
production of these origin stories
of the Gulag Map is
inextricable from this complex
and tenuous alliance
between labor and government.
Especially as McCarthyism began
to shine a spotlight on unions,
the incentive of the AFL to take
stances on militant leftist unionism
in its own ranks grew to include
hard line anti-communist stances
toward their union brothers abroad.
The AFL was quickly drafted
into routing out communists
and militant unions all over
the world through initiatives
like the Free Trade Union Committee.
Some claim that this
collaboration resulted in practices
that benefited U.S.
corporate management practices
and government power to put
down workers' challenges.
So the irony is that while one hand
the Gulag Map was most certainly a
bold protest document against
oppressive labor practices.
It also helped to suppress political
dissent by serving as an image
of commitment for organized labor
to the government's Cold War goals.
The black humor in the
"incorporated" of the map's title,
which show you here,
serves, is doubly ironic.
It places the USSR as a
corporate slave labor system
that perversely apes capitalism.
While at the same time,
the AFL found itself
increasingly incorporated
into government policies.
Still, to downplay these official
government interests became part
of the map's strategy.
The Gulag Map's label
as a labor project,
with government support being
silenced from its public display,
allowed it to have a more fluid
movement throughout the culture
as it could divorce itself
from the top down objectives
of overt government
sponsored propaganda
and mitigate the ironies
of its production.
Thus the map's origins
show the beginnings
of a productive rhetorical
life encompassing tensions
between private institutional goals.
Government objectives.
And the public opinion function
of Cold War popular media.
So let's look a little
bit at this map together.
To borrow from Dennis Wood and John
Fels, a map has spatial authority
because of its use of
postings or, quote,
"The fundamental cartographic
proposition that this is there."
So the Gulag Map is an
especially potent example
of the power of posting.
To be able to infiltrate
enemy Soviet spaces and claim
that this is there becomes
a way of vying for control
through the use of
spatial knowledge.
The first visual choice
to note, obviously,
in the Gulag Map is simply
how the sprawling nature
of the Soviet Union landmass
fills the entire frame itself.
The map draws the forced
labor problem as spilling
over into the spaces of Poland.
Affirming the Cold War argument
that the Soviet Union is a
continually expanding power.
The Soviet Union's
landmass is slightly rounded
so that the country
appears uncontainable.
We also see labor camps as far north
as Franz Josef Land in the Arctic.
Bordering in the south
on Iran and Afghanistan.
Penetrating into the
Mongolian Republic.
And even stretching all the way
to where Alaska just
barely juts into the frame.
In addition, the higher density
of sickles in the western part
of Russia divorces the camps
from their perceived isolation
in the wastelands of Siberia.
And instead places the camps right
inside the highly populated west.
This implicitly argues that forced
labor plagued the whole landscape.
Even the so-called
civilized spaces of Europe.
And re-enforces the
ability of Gulag-Slavery,
Incorporated to become what
Benedict Anderson would call the map
as "logo."
And associate all of Russia
and Soviet Eastern Europe
as one emblematic camp.
The choice of the hammer and sickle
iconography also creates this kind
of artificiality in the map; right?
The camps are not to be
seen as naturally occurring,
but to be visualized as imposed
by Soviet power on the land.
Similarly, the AFL map also
emboldens railroad lines
in deep black, with the
dotted camps adhering
in formation to these lines.
This choice heightens the focus on
the corporate nature of Soviet labor
by subtly emphasizing that
industrial system that relies
on forced labor to perpetuate it.
Now, you can't see that in this
version here, but the captions
in the original Levine version
are even more interesting.
Because they feature facts
about the types of materials
that individual camps produce.
Szyrokski [assumed
spelling] produces light metal
from nearby mines.
The Usolsky camp contributes to
war industries and construction
of underground airfields.
So the inclusion of these
details about the products
of slave labor serves almost as
a parody of what a typical map
of industries and natural
resources would look like.
A conventional map might
conceal the sources
of production for such resources.
But the Gulag Map subverts
those expectations by revealing
that it is slave labor that
motors these engines of industry.
Here the Gulag Map's use of
parody reveals cartographic form
as almost inhuman.
That the effect of these places
all over the map is the prizing
of communist ideology
over real human cost.
Yet perhaps what the Gulag Map
demands most of all visually is
for the user to affirm
its authenticity.
The map's posting of 175
camps begged for an acceptance
of accuracy and precision.
That these abstract dots
will somehow correspond
to real camps on the ground.
Thus the map producers,
like Levine and the AFL,
are promoting their very ability
to map such forbidden areas.
With its hand-drawn place names.
Simple use of icons.
And lack of other geographic
information about the Soviet Union.
The overall crudeness of the
presentation lacks the emphasis
on cartographic technique and
technology found, for instance,
in National Geographic
Cold War era maps.
The professional origins
of the map are concealed.
It looks almost as if it had
been produced by a camp survivor.
The collection of information is
made to appear more experiential
in its production rather
than compiled by institutions
with these large financial resources
and state of the art technologies.
Now, the map especially supports
these arguments for authenticity
through its use of passports.
Photographs.
And captions in the marginalia.
Here the Gulag Map builds a kind
of architecture around the frame
that attempts to affirm
this truth of Soviet labor.
For example, the AFL widely
distributed a pamphlet in 1951,
which you're looking at here, called
"Slave Labor in the Soviet World."
Featuring a pitch black
cover with red writing
and a stark barbed wire graphic
running throughout the pages.
Now, a version of the Gulag
Map provides the centerpiece
of this pamphlet.
This edition pits the
map of the Soviet Union
against a black background,
divorcing it from its
placement in the whiter world.
The photos of the camp
children are absent.
Here the main focus resides
on the survivors' passports.
While details in each passport
are difficult to make out,
the documents work together to make
these kind of claims of existence.
That these official papers have
been acquired at great peril.
And affirm our knowledge of
what the Soviets are doing.
The caption in the map also
highlights the importance
of the signatures of the camp
commanders on these passports.
Highlighting these
signatures assigns ownership
of forced labor to
the Soviet leaders.
The very existence of these
documents and their placement
into readers' hands places the
United States in the position
to infiltrate Soviet space
with the power of precise
and accurate knowledge itself.
The other key pieces of
marginality, of course,
are the photos of the camp children.
Which we might be able
to go back here,
and you'll see it in
the bottom here.
And these complicate the
map's appeals to authenticity.
In most editions the viewer
sees a half circle marked
by a thick red line, containing
three pie-slice shaped photographs
of what look to be prisoners.
With the simple title Gulag
children above the center photo.
These photographs participate in
transferring mediated experiences
of fascism onto Soviet communism.
As Levine has pointed
out, most of the data
for the map's compilation came
from affidavit testimonies
from Polish prisoners
upon being discharged
from the camps in late 1941.
This Polishness of both the
map's data and the bodies
of the children draws on
recent World War II memories
that link the Polish nationality
with the enactment of genocide.
The choice of children
is particularly poignant.
These are not men who
could have been encamped
for political purposes
or for petty crimes.
But are innocents
who are potentially still
free of Soviet ideology.
Which make it's easier for
American viewers in particular
to identify with their victimage.
The focal point of the crucifix,
which might be a little
difficult for you folks to see.
The focal point of the
crucifix on the main child
in the center further buttresses
this moral identification.
Infiltrating a Christian symbol into
what is billed as an atheist space.
So even as the photographs ad
specificity and emotional weight
to the map, with the caption
of each child's name so small,
the images ultimately support
a more abstract argument
that the Soviets have created
a vast impersonal system.
Atrocity is generalized
into this moral lesson
about political ideology.
The producers of the map have
worked hard to present the map
as a journalistic eyewitness
to the reality of forced labor.
Yet the Gulag Map marks,
however subtly,
a more militant infiltration
of Soviet space.
The powerful use of bodies in these
photographs politicizes holocaust
memory to present them
as wartime victims
and the end results
of Soviet aggression.
Finally, what compounds the map, and
I wanted to blow this up for you.
But it's fascinating what it says at
the bottom, which I'll read for you.
It says "A reward of
$1,0000 will be paid
by the Free Trade Union Committee
for disproving the authenticity
of the Soviet documents
here reproduced.
So I'm not sure if they'll
still collect on this.
So don't call the AFL
after my presentation today
and demand a reward.
But the reward function
here redirects the map away
from the merely informational.
And the map now demands a
response and a challenge to engage
with its claims to authenticity.
Still, because the map's bounded
completeness and clings to authority
and knowledge, this engagement
with public opinion is less
about interactivity and more
about consensus and social assent.
The large amount of the
reward reminds the viewer
that this visual display
is essentially inarguable.
It dares you to try to disprove it.
Altogether then the
complex visual presentation
of Gulag Slavery Incorporated
supports this weapon function
for the map wherein it could be
used in a variety of contexts
to fight Cold War skirmishes.
Such skirmishes marked the map's
wide and fascinating circulation
to which I want to turn
now in the final section.
Now, after newspapers,
let's go one, there we go.
After newspapers like the
"Minneapolis Star Tribune"
and the "Baltimore Sun" began
to feature it prominently,
the amount of demand for the
Gulag Map and the diversity
of that demand grew heavily.
Publications like the
"Christian Science Monitor"
and the "NEA Daily News"
would take the basic Gulag Map
and then reproduce it in their
own particular graphic style.
In this, Gulag Slavery Incorporated
was becoming an evermore fluid text.
Not simply a finished and bounded
visual image, but adaptable
and contestable, depending on the
requirements of its producers.
The AFL, interestingly enough,
was inundated with requests
for reprinted maps from a wide
diversity of institutions.
And going through the archival,
looks at these old letters
has been fascinating.
The superintendent of the
Minneapolis public schools pointed
out to the AFL that, quote, "The map
would be used and viewed by upwards
of 1,100 pupils and teachers."
A pastor at a Methodist
church in Flemington,
Pennsylvania requested
the map to, quote,
"Use it with several study
groups in the local church
as we study the evils and dangers
of communism to our way of life."
Even individual citizens
requested maps.
A.D. Cuzou [assumed spelling] of Los
Angeles asked politely of the AFL,
"Would you kindly send me the
map of your slave labor camps
of the atheistic Soviet Union."
And William Chamberlain of
Dayton justified that, quote,
"I would like very much to have
a copy for several reasons.
One of the best of these is
that it is a very clever way
of building up American patriotism."
So such a diverse array of requests
contributed to yet a new role
for Gulag Slavery,
Incorporated, that of an emblem
for Cold War citizenship.
Engaging with the map was
seen as a public duty by many
to spread awareness about the
oppressiveness of Soviet ideology.
To know and to quantify the spaces
of the enemy in the Cold War is
to be a consenting
participant in that conflict.
Cartographic knowledge needed
to be actually understood,
taught and disseminated
by citizens themselves
in meaningful social exchanges.
But that's not all.
Adding texture to the
map's strategic function
as a Cold War weapon was
also its growing utility
as an international instrument.
Voice of America Broadcast picked
up the Gromyko story and proceeded
to describe the map
to viewers on the air.
This story circulated especially
widely in Latin America.
And received 400 air mail
requests for maps from these areas.
As a Chilean miner wrote
to the Voice of America,
"Please send me the map you
offered so that I may show it
to my coworkers who
unfortunately are influenced
by the poison of communism."
Thus, the Gulag Map considered
official government objectives
in Latin America by creating
the appearance of this kind
of public service function.
The map would also
serve such purposes
in various ways throughout
Cold War Europe.
In West Berlin the map was
plastered strategically
so that it could be seen by people
crossing the zonal boundary during
the Communist Youth Festival.
The AFL produced, as you see here,
a French version for distribution.
And also in October of 1951,
Soviet military police
seized 500,000 copies
of the German version.
Which is being printed through the
U.S. Information Service channels
in Vienna.
And I found the anecdote
about this really interesting
because the contracted printer for
the U.S. Information Service lived
in the United States
sector of Vienna.
But sent it across town to be
finished by a binder and his wife
who lived in the 10th
district of the Soviet sector.
And then he got arrested for this.
So that ability of the map
to penetrate Soviet space
became more literal here.
The map makes its visual
arguments, but it also exists
as a material force as the
processes of its production
and even its printing become
part of a Cold War offensive.
And, as if the map had not
penetrated enough various foreign
policy initiatives in
international incidents,
the AFL Weekly News Service reported
that a Hollywood motion picture
studio was preparing a short film
on the map to be released in
commercial houses nationally.
And this is my favorite.
The public relations director
for the American Federation
of Musicians actually proposed
to the AFL to record an album
of Russian slave labor songs to
raise awareness of the issues.
This is decades before
"We are the world."
Complete with the suggestion
that, quote,
"The album should carry the
famous AFL slave labor map
as a background."
So this map had an
active rhetorical life.
The public engagement with the map
eventually died down by early 1953.
But the map itself continued
to leave some traces after,
long after its remarkable
circulation.
During Solzhenitsyn's famed
post Nobel Prize winning tour
of Washington DC in June 1975,
his speech brought Gulag
Slavery Incorporated back
into public memory.
He said, "When liberal thinkers
and wise men of the West
who had forgotten the meaning of
the word liberty were swearing
that in the Soviet Union there
were no concentration camps at all,
the American Federation of
Labor published in 1947 a map
of our concentration camps.
And on behalf of all the
prisoners of those times,
I want to thank the American
workers' movement for this."
Here Solzhenitsyn's gratitude
recasts and re-remembers the map
as a protest document from brothers
in labor, disassociating the hand
of American state power in the CIA
that actually sanctioned the map.
And finally, as the second Cold
War ignited in the early 1980's,
Gulag Slavery Incorporated
would continue its flow
through Cold War culture.
In 1982, the U.S. Senate
adopted Resolution Number 449.
Which expressed fears that human
rights violations were being
committed in the construction
of the Trans-Siberian pipeline.
And sanctioned the State Department
to conduct a study
of these violations.
So the November report by the State
Department includes a map detailing
the extent of camps
in the Soviet Union.
That original ideological zeal
of the AFL map had been subdued
and subverted into the more staid
State Department cartographic style.
The report also featured, this goes
with what Dr. Clarke
was talking about.
The report also features an aerial
perspective, blueprint-style map
of the inside of a
forced labor camp.
So the aerial perspective
becomes important here.
Thus, in the evolution
of the Gulag Map,
the State Department can
now dramatically hyper focus
on infiltrating Soviet space
with more sophisticated
and precise technologies.
The AFL-CIO's Free Trade Union
News from November of 1982,
reprinted both State
Department maps.
But also devoted a
spread to its old classic.
Reminding its members that,
quote, "American labor was first
to raise its voice against the
slave labor system in the USSR."
In one of its final
public appearances, then,
the Gulag Map was being
reappropriated for a new purpose.
The AFL reclaims the map as part
of its institutional memory.
And the map becomes evidence,
not just of the existence
of Soviet camps, but
of the remembrance
of institutional labor's
role in waging Cold War.
So to conclude here,
the footnote status
of Gulag Slavery Incorporated is
actually compelling in itself.
The map has long been
buried as a curio
in the cultural propaganda exchange
between the United States
and the Soviet Union.
But a revisiting
of this often-overlooked map
allows rhetorical inquiry.
And allows scholars
and historians an entry
into the everyday flow
of Cold War culture.
The State Department could use the
Gulag Map as a diplomatic weapon
in its mission to cultivate
international opinion.
The AFL could use its evidence of
its commitment to anticommunism
around the world and
in its own ranks.
While citizens could use it
as a frame for citizenship.
To paraphrase a rhetorical
scholar Kara Finnigan,
the Gulag Map was an eventful image.
Materially working its way
through many contexts and marshaled
into skirmishes both
public and private.
And reminds us that any reading
of a cartographic image
should negotiate maps
as both product and process.
One final question to
kind of think about is,
you might say, why
a map in this case?
If the focus is on having
the authentic evidence
to prove the existence
of forced labor camps,
then why not make the camp photos
or the release certificates the
main subject of the display?
A plausible answer to this
question lies in the competition
for the power of placement
between the United States
and the Soviet Union.
The photos and the release
certificate need the map
to anchor them in a
particular spatial network.
That act of mapping commits
the existence of forced labor
as authenticated through
photos and documents
into the bipolar geopolitics
of the Cold War.
And in an era of this heightened
conflict between two superpowers,
the need for scientific
abstraction, again,
going back to Dr. Clarke's talk.
The need for scientific
abstraction and management grew.
A map could manage facts in
abstraction with efficiency
and cleanliness in ways
that photographs could not.
And yet, the Gulag Map has
a peculiar relationship
to both accuracy and authenticity.
The entire story of the map revolves
around this defense of its claims.
And attempts to affirm the validity
of the abstract visual evidence.
Hence, the reward that
they're offering.
There thus existed
an obvious anxiety
about the potentially provocative
artificiality of this map.
Producers and audiences were tacitly
acknowledging that the Gulag Map was
in fact a rhetorical document, not
just a self-evident scientific aid.
Ultimately, the anxiety around Gulag
Slavery Incorporated also reflects a
larger anxiety, I would argue,
about the abstract nature
of the varied Cold War conflict
the map helps reproduce.
The act of rhetorical life
can be read as a demonstration
that the Cold War had to be
continually manufactured, readapted.
And truly required a dynamic
material engagement with a host
of international audiences.
As the United States produced
knowledge about the Soviets,
it had to place that with authority.
And so the archetypal Cold
War map of the early 1950's,
at least from a popular standpoint
often found in magazines such as
"Time," show, as you have all
seen, a Soviet Union with arrows
or sometimes tentacles tracing
its reach across the earth.
Yet typically, the Soviet Union
in those maps is presented
as one homogenous mass.
With legends and captions admitting
that there exist a lack of knowledge
in what its borders contain.
The Gulag Map, then,
instead subverts this
by locating the Cold War within
the borders of the Soviet Union.
And this marks a kind of rhetorical
coup for the United States.
But in the end this
subversion can only go so far.
Geographer Sanjay Chartevetti
[assumed spelling] points out that
in Cold War geopolitics,
often the singular attributes
of a particular place were
subordinated to its precede position
in the abstract spaces
of the Cold War.
The Gulag Map remains an
interesting case because,
while it emphasizes the
placement of particular camps
and even includes the emotional
human connection to those places.
Children's bodies.
Signatures on passports.
It still serves the abstract
objectives of the Cold War.
Allowing the Soviet Union to become
pure negative space on the map.
And blunting America's ability
to socially protest
against forced labor.
The map might poignantly
protest a play to prisoners,
but the map is equally situated
as a tool of surveillance
that affirms the era's bipolarity.
So in the end, by filling
Soviet space
with points representing labor
camps and then circulating the map
into actual Soviet
territory and at home.
The U.S. coalition of labor
unions and foreign policy elites,
as channeled through
this map, spatialized
and literally projected their
power onto the flat page
and into the culture
of the Cold War,
evidencing the rich rhetorical
lives of maps in a contentious era.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
[ Background Sounds ]
>> Thank you, Professor,
that was a wonderful talk.
Lastly, allow me to
introduce Laura Kurgan.
She is an associate professor of
architecture at Columbia University.
This afternoon she will explore
themes from her new book "Close
Up at a Distance: Mapping,
Technology, and Politics."
She will touch on how
satellite imagery and GPS tools,
once reserved for the
military establishment,
are affecting how we see and
explore the world around us.
Professor Kurgan.
[ Applause ]
>> Laura Kurgan: So I
want to really thank you
for the invitation
to this conference.
I, too, like my colleague over
here, although I make a lot of maps,
I'm not often invited
into conferences about,
specifically about cartography.
Lately, I do a lot of lectures at
data visualization conferences.
And I'd like to actually explain
to you back trajectory and sort
of how this all came about
and why I do what I do.
So I think I'm going to start
with just a couple of paragraphs
from my book, presuming that
most of you haven't read it.
So let me start here.
Okay. Every spot on Earth can be
located, calculated and represented
in multiple descriptive systems.
The digitization of the
globe was prefigured
by the ancient Greek system of
latitudinal and longitudinal lines.
Translating the surface of the Earth
into an abstract and universal grid.
Irrespective of politics,
place names, borders
or changing environments,
places were fixed
within mathematical
descriptions of their locations.
A network of atomic clocks, cameras
and computers has built a
virtual globe on which any point
of physical space is easily
coordinated with digital space.
With this change comes the potential
to move digital information very
quickly from one place to another.
We are familiar with the idea
that new spaces are
today being constructed,
spaces completely different
from the ones
in which our bodies normally move.
But we don't quite know
what to think about them.
And I really, I presume we
still don't know quite what
to think about them.
They are the nether lands
of electronic money,
information warfare
and dataveillance.
But they're also the everyday
spaces such as mobile phone calls,
radio stations, navigation
systems and online social networks.
To call this the coordination of
physical space and digital space,
as I just did, perhaps
understates things.
The digital and the physical
globe interact in profound ways,
constituting in effect a question
about which globe has the priority.
In these days when virtual
coordinates direct missiles
to their targets.
And social networks have allowed
phone companies and other collectors
of our data trails to predict
our next move in physical space,
as Mark Monmonier was
pointing out this morning.
The shift has resulted in
a radical transformation.
We can never be sure which
coordinate system takes priority
in terms of representing our
identity or our spatial movements.
Okay. And then just
one other paragraph.
[ Background Sounds ]
Oops, sorry.
Okay. The idea of the word "data"
in all of my work means nothing more
or nothing less than
representations, delegates
or emissaries of reality to
be sure, but not only that.
Not presentations of things
themselves, but representations.
Figures. Mediations.
Subject then to all the conventions
and aesthetics and rhetorics
that we have come to expect
of our images and narratives.
All data, then, are not
empirical, not irreducible facts
about the world, but exist as not
quite or almost alongside the world.
And I started to call these
things para-empirical.
To put it another way, there's
no such thing as raw data.
Data are always translated such
that they might be presented.
The images, lists, graphs, maps
that represent those data
are all interpretations.
There's no such thing
as neutral data.
Data are always collected for a
specific purpose by a combination
of people, technology, money,
commerce and government.
The phrase "data visualization"
in that sense is a bit redundant.
Data are already a visualization.
Okay, so that's from the
introduction to my book.
And the main premise of everything
that I do is, I do my work through,
as research through making maps.
Making projects.
I very rarely write about things.
I experiment with things.
So the book is actually a
trajectory of post Cold War.
Although there is some of
the Cold War in what I do.
But in some ways it was the last,
this past year was a perfect time
to publish the book
because it had become
in the introduction a
prehistory of Google Earth
and other platforms nowadays.
Like Mapbox, which for most of
my students are so naturalized
as data they barely know
that satellite imagery was
declassified ten years,
classified ten years ago.
So in my work I followed
the declassification
of satellite imagery and
mapping technologies.
And as the technology
was declassified,
each time I did a project
with the actual data.
Okay. So in that sense
it's an archeology of maps.
So the book starts with
these two very iconic images.
"Earthrise," taken
while orbiting the moon.
And you can almost
imagine standing there.
You know, the moon in
the sense, the horizon.
But the "Blue Marble," as it
has famously become called,
is a much more abstract image.
Dennis Cosgrove quotes Frank
Borman who was on Apollo 8 saying,
"When you're finally up looking back
at the Earth, all those differences
and nationalistic traits are pretty
much going to blend together.
We have one world.
Why can't we learn
to live together?"
So we still don't live in one world.
And we never will.
And there's actually never going
to be only one map of the world.
There are always going
to be multiple maps.
But this particular icon of the
one world map has really sort
of inspired the imagination of a
lot of new work that has been done.
And in this image here
of this button,
does anybody know what it is?
Stewart Brand, yay.
Okay. So in 19, I forget when it is,
1970-something, Stewart Brand rode
across the country on a
bicycle with these buttons.
And protested wherever he went,
demanding this classified
satellite image of the Earth; right?
Because the ones taken by Apollo
satellites were photographs.
But he had heard that there was
a satellite image of the Earth,
which in fact became the cover
of the "Whole Earth Catalog."
So it wasn't that same blue
marble that everybody thinks
of as the iconic image as taken by
a human standing on Earth which came
to represent the borderless world.
But it was a satellite image.
And he got it from this
particular [inaudible].
That doesn't matter, okay.
So that became the image on the
"Whole Earth Catalog;" right?
And then the introduction of the
book goes a little further to talk
about the new generation
blue marble.
Which has been produced by NASA.
And is a digital image,
which also has clouds.
But it's not taken, the image
is not made in the same way
as an astronaut, again, standing
on Earth taking a picture of the,
you know, from hundreds
of miles away.
This is produced from remotely
sent satellite imagery.
These are weather satellites.
And the image is taken
once a month for 12 months.
And then the clouds are
stripped away from the image.
And then it's wrapped around a
three dimensional digital globe
to look naturalistic.
So the 2002 blue marble,
which ended up being the image
on the iPhone when
it first came out.
And the NASA scientists were,
in fact, very proud about that.
And this, again, is
the 2005 blue marble,
which was published
as a cloudless image.
And there's now the next
generation blue marble from 2012,
which is even higher resolution,
0.5 kilometers per pixel.
And it's also produced
out of, you know,
these composited images
of the Earth.
So I don't know if Robert
Simmons is in the audience,
but we've communicated over
e-mail once my book came out.
And he had apparently
written a blog post
which came a little bit
too late for my book.
Which is very unfortunate
because he actually wrote
about stitching together
this composite image.
And over here he says, put
together by 10,000 satellite scenes,
each 300 megabytes,
collected over a hundred days.
Stripped out the clouds and created
a 43,200 pixel map of the Earth.
And this was the hard part.
Everything I did afterwards
was just adding the chrome.
And then the next image here,
which is the way he separates
out all the layers of the image.
And he said, but now that
we had to sort the image,
we needed to create
something more evocative.
Something that would show
the potential of the imagery.
To us at least the obvious choice
was to render a few 3D views
of the world as it
would look from space
because of the famous
Apollo 17 photograph.
So he even admits that he's using
that same iconic Apollo photograph
to make this globe look
more naturalistic; right?
Okay. So that's how the book starts.
The fifth project in
the book was based
on this one, which was from 1990.
And was actually an image I found
in an architecture magazine called
"Progressive Architecture."
And it really shocked me so much
to my core that it began the work
that I was going to do for
the next, I'd say, 20 years.
So over here you see Intergraph,
which is a software company,
wants to be your partner
in building Kuwait.
Now, they didn't advertise in this
image that they were also the people
who built the map for the
Kuwaiti government before the war.
A map that cost $30 million to make.
And recorded down to every
single tree in the city.
It was composited of a
Landsat image and a spot image.
So it was something
called an image map.
And it was a highly detailed image
of every single block of Kuwait City
with a lot of GIS layers
layered on to satellite imagery.
But they, what they
were marketing was
that as an architect you
could use this map to go
and rebuild Kuwait
to its former glory.
And they were the very same people
who helped the U.S. military
guide missiles, you know,
to the right location to destroy
every tree in Kuwait City,
amongst many other landmarks.
So I was interested in the fact
that this image became
a preservation image.
And that it was, you know,
a map used to fight a war.
And a map used to rebuild a country.
There was something in
that combination of things
that really kept me
interested for a long time.
So at the same time there were
also advertisements for GPS
in various newspapers
and magazines, et cetera.
And for some reason it was
really quite naive at the time.
It captured my imagination
that a person walking
around could draw a map of their
path by themselves, you know,
with this very simple technology.
So in that sense I started this
project with very little training
in GIS or in cartography.
But I was interested
in the stupidity really
of this highly accurate
positioning machine.
And the fact that all it does is
draw one point every two seconds.
So, yes, you know, it can
guide a missile to its target,
but knows nothing about
world politics.
About the borders between countries.
About anything else.
All it knows how to do is
to draw a geographic point.
At the time also the
military scrambled the signal
for civilian users.
So the technology was
spun off at the same time
as the military technology.
Civilians did not have the
same degree of accuracy.
But we were all very clever and used
to geo-reference the scattered
points against a known point
so that you could correct for
the scrambling of the signal.
And then you average a point,
which is really between three
to five meters of accuracy.
Which is the most accurate
a civilian could get.
I did sort of museum installations
where I was, had like small claim
to fame of being the first
artist to use GPS as a pencil.
And I walked on the Richard Meier,
top of a Richard Meier
Museum in Barcelona.
And traced out the words "museo."
I don't know if you know, but
it's become a sort of a trope now
for artists to draw things with GPS.
But I was much more interested
in understanding the architecture
of this very precise system.
And how stupid in some ways it is.
Okay. Here's an image I got from
Keith's fantastic website on CORONA.
But the next project that I
did was using CORONA images.
And I was really impressed
by his resistance
to not showing one CORONA image
in his talk, 30 minutes long
on the history of CORONA.
Because they really are
incredibly evocative images.
But at the time I was following
the progress of the launching
of the one meter resolution
satellites.
Which were, you know, in 1995,
as soon as the CORONA images were
classified, it came along also
with the declassification of
and privatization of
satellite technology.
And there was supposed to be
a one meter satellite going
up into space very
soon and very quickly.
But it never got, it took another
four years to get launched.
It failed about 13 times as it
was being experimented with.
So the first project I ended up
doing was with CORONA images.
Which happen to be of my hometown
in Cape Town, South Africa.
And I don't need to tell you
very much because Keith went
into such incredible
detail about it.
But these are these long strips
of film, literally negatives.
I actually got some of these
negatives from a project
because they were so early
on they hadn't even
digitized everything yet.
So I actually printed
from the actual negatives.
I was given the canister of film.
So I actually have some
film which doesn't have
"top secret" crossed out.
All these photographs
of the capsules.
So these are images of the
ocean just off of Cape Town,
which were printed really big.
And it was more about
the mystery of why was,
what was the satellite
looking for there?
I didn't go as far as
requesting a Fourier document
to tell me why the
satellite was there.
And [inaudible] played
on the mystery
of that in the art exhibition.
And really tried to understand
the resolution of the pixels
and of the grain of the film.
And also, you know, this
kind of universal grid
that was being overlaid
onto the Earth.
And actually, Keith,
I did want to tell you
that there is a project going
on at Columbia now called
the Declassification Engine.
And what they're doing is
comparing classified documents
where everything is crossed out to
reinstate what was crossed out back
into the historical record.
So by knowing the declassified
document, you can go back
and find the unclean or
the document prior to.
And they're putting all the history
back into a lot of these documents
and using natural language
processing.
It's a really smart project.
So anyway, as I was doing
this project, of course,
just about in time for the exhibit,
the high resolution
satellite did get launched.
And I was able to compare this
road right outside of Cape Town.
The big, the highway which was
built from the airport to the city.
And the, that big swath
of earth over there is one
of the biggest informal
settlements just outside
of South Africa called Khayelitsha.
So, you know, at the same time
that this whole classification,
declassification of satellite
imagery was going on,
there were trials going on in
the international criminal court.
Which proclaimed that there
were satellite documentation
of these people standing
in a football field
who were then murdered
and put into a mass grave.
Those images were never
released to the public.
So even though Madeleine Albright
talked about them at the UN,
they were not allowed to be
published in the newspapers.
Then about four years later in 1999,
during the NATO invasion of Kosovo,
this image appeared
in the newspaper.
Which was a mass grave and
the upturning of a mass grave.
And if you remember,
for those of you
in the audience who
were following this.
It was the first time that satellite
imagery was released to the public
as a way of gaining public support
for the humanitarian intervention.
Now, I believe there
was a mass grave, I did.
So I should come straight
out with that.
But what I was interested in is
that the military did not
release the evidence to the public
in the form that they
could do anything with.
So they released these
documents as images, not as data.
So if this is a high
resolution, I probably don't need
to tell this kind of audience.
But if there's a high resolution
satellite image, you should be able
to roll your scroll, your mouse
across the screen and be able
to read out the longitude
and latitude of these images.
So this image became a "Time
Magazine" photo of the year in 1999.
And so what I decided to do
was to purchase the imagery
that was available
to me at the time.
The highest resolution was 20
meter per pixel spot imagery.
And 10 meter per pixel
black and white spotted.
Which color was 20 meter.
Black and white was 10.
And I, you know, talked
to various people.
Looked at various news reports.
Found the longitude and latitude
of the coordinates of the grave.
And, you know, as we all know,
satellite interpretation is
both an art and a science.
You have to kind of know what
you're looking for to find it.
I had read many places
and particularly found
with this German drone
image that there was a road
that had this kind of squiggle.
When I looked in the 10 meter
resolution satellite imagery,
that squiggle looked pretty similar.
And I eventually isolated
the longitude and latitude.
Which was, had been published,
you know, in other places.
And I added tons more pixels in
photo shop, I admit, to this image.
And came out with what I thought
was a pretty similar image.
So I called this a digital memorial.
I was not trying to
refute the military.
I was not trying to prove
that it was accurate or false.
I was merely, you know,
trying to provide a kind
of an image literacy
to a broader public.
And to get people to understand how
the data should have been released
to the public; right?
So as that satellite was launched,
the "New York Times"
was the first newspaper
to use satellite technology
as investigative journalism.
This was at a moment
where it was too dangerous
for any journalist to go to Grozny.
And they did the before and
after one meter resolution
satellite imagery.
We're now at a point where this is
the newest resolution satellite,
which was launched
and captured an image
of a North Korean rocket being
launched in April 5th, 2009.
So these images are now
0.5 meter resolution.
And [inaudible] reported that at
least on British, that at least on,
the British defense analyst thought
that the North Koreans
timed the launch to coincide
with the satellite's arrival,
maximizing the publicity
of the launch site.
I don't know, but this is what was
written about in "The Guardian."
So this takes us a little
further back to the, Iraq in 2002.
And when Colin Powell went to
the UN to try and prove to them
that there were indeed weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq.
And he said to the
UN, "Let me say a word
about satellite images
before I show you a couple.
The photos I'm about to
show you are sometimes hard
for the average person to
interpret, hard for me.
The painstaking work of photo
analysis takes experts with years
and years of experience, poring for
hours and hours over light tables.
But as I show you these
images, I'll try and capture
and explain what they mean.
What they indicate to
our imagery specialists."
At the same time they were throwing
these leaflets down from airplanes,
trying to explain to Iraqis
that they could see
everything from space.
And then I did a project
a little later in a museum
in Germany called the
[foreign word].
And I was wanting actually to do an
image of the Cameroonian Rainforest.
But there were so many clouds that
the satellite imagery never arrived.
And the opening of the show was
October 5th or something like that.
And on September 11th, of
course, the very next day,
images of ground zero were
published in the newspaper.
So I just printed it really,
really big across the,
and installed it on the floor.
And was really, the purpose of
which was to say that, you know,
with all the surveillance
in the world,
you can't explain why
something like this happens.
So it was really trying
to look at the limits
of what you can find
through imagery.
Through imagery like this.
Just the image there at that
specific time was very powerful,
especially in relation to sort
of the quietness of everything
that was happening in
the rest of the city.
All the bridges are empty.
All the highways mostly have trucks
on them going to the,
to Ground Zero.
Things like that you could
only really experience
from walking on the image.
But the pile of dust itself
had really nothing to say.
Whereas, at the same time the
U.S. had purchased the rights
to all imagery over Afghanistan.
So even though the U.S. has
never exercised what they call
"shutter control."
Where they actually, within all
these laws of the privatization
of satellite imagery,
they do reserve the right
to exercise shutter control.
They never have, but
they have purchased,
they did purchase the
rights to all imagery
over Afghanistan for two months.
And when I did do this next
project, which I'll describe,
I tried to purchase imagery
of Iraq on one day of the war.
And the satellite company refused
to sell me imagery because they said
that it would put U.S.
troops in danger.
This was their own choice.
It had nothing to do
with the U.S. mandate.
But I was asking for too
specific an image for them
to feel comfortable with.
So I resorted to abstraction.
And so these are four
monochrome landscapes.
White is ANWR in Alaska.
Where at the same time as the
invasion of Iraq, Bush was,
George Bush was mandating trying
to drill for oil under the,
one of the largest
wildlife refuges in Alaska.
Blue is the zero-zero point on Earth
to which every digital point
in the world is aligned.
It happens to be just
arbitrarily on the Atlantic Ocean.
Gold is one of the first
days of the Iraqi War.
There's, it's just the desert.
And green is the rainforest
in Cameroon
where they were building
illegal roads in the rainforest.
And so when you, these are the
actual imagery that I purchased.
This is what they looked
at on the wall.
And when you zoom in, you actually,
there were two helicopters.
It's just that they were slightly
invisible at that expanded field.
And we did use the illegal road in
the rainforest in a court of law.
The, through this organization,
Global Forest Watch,
which is now part of WRI, the
World Resources Institute.
Where they use both satellites
and on-ground people, you know,
watching to uncover all these
illegal roads being built.
They're incredibly lush imagery.
And mostly environmentalists use
Landsat imagery not high resolution
satellite images.
But this is how they used it
in the court of law to explain.
Okay. And then did I images
of also Indonesia and Brazil.
Trying to look for, Indonesia's
forests are being destroyed
because of palm oil growth.
And in Brazil in the Amazon
because of soybean
planting and cattle farms.
Okay. So since, so
that, the last project
in the book actually uses GIS.
So there's GPS, GIS
and remote sensing.
But this is the GIS part.
And it's the work that
I've been doing since then
through the Spatial Information
Design Lab At Columbia.
This was a project on architecture
and justice where we took data
from the courts, which
were sentencing people to,
of course, incarceration.
And in instead of mapping the
crime that they committed,
we mapped their home address,
of a person who was about to go
to prison, where they said
their home address was.
So when you look at the
data in geographic context,
if you have a point,
you can put it on a map.
When you correlate it to all
kinds of political borders,
you can make terrible mistakes,
as Mark Monmonier has
often pointed out.
But you can also reveal
very striking
and invisible parts of the city.
So in this case the bright
red spots are the places
where there's higher concentrations
of people being incarcerated
than in comparison to the
rest of the urban population.
So the data and geographic
context shows
that people are highly concentrated
in specific neighborhoods.
And added up block by
block, it cost millions
of dollars to imprison people.
In this case I'm showing
you Brooklyn.
So from a demographic point of view,
the spending facilitates a mass
migration of people to prison,
95 percent of whom return home.
So, but what we did was we joined
up the line of the home address
of a person in prison to where
they are housed Upstate New York.
And then when you zoom in on
the highest concentrations
of incarceration in Brooklyn,
we found out that this was
in Community District 16.
Which has 3.5 percent of Brooklyn's
population, but 8.5 percent
of its prison population.
So we were trying to show
this kind of disproportion.
These are the census blocks.
These are the people living in them.
This is how much it costs to
incarcerate each one of them
over the course of their sentence.
So in these 11 blocks there were $11
million spent to incarcerate people.
And we called them
million dollar blocks.
So these are really,
this is really part
of the poorest part of Brooklyn.
And this is a pattern actually
across the United States,
that you find this kind of
disproportionate scales.
Okay. So from there I've actually
been doing work like this.
Not so much remote sensing, but
data-oriented mapping projects.
Where any data set that has
geographic characteristics can be
put on a map.
And we often chose not to show the
whole borders of the map itself.
How much more time do I have?
Five more minutes, okay.
You know what I want to do actually.
I'm going to go to the last project.
Because I really, it's a brand
new, and I'd like to show.
[ Background Sounds ]
Okay. So I do want to do this
because it sort of points to,
I think, the future of mapping.
And this whole question of
what's the predominant space,
the physical space
or a virtual space?
So we've gone really in this talk
from secrets the size of the globe
to secrets the size of cities.
And nowadays I think what we're
talking about are secrets, you know,
the unscalable secrets
the size of networks.
Oops, okay.
And so we've just done a project
about the Chinese micro-blogging
site called Weibo.
And it's a project called
"Jumping the Great Firewall."
So there is no physical space,
so to speak, of the map.
But I think it's a really
important political border.
And we all know that a lot of
things are censored in China.
But what we'd heard about and as
you can tell, a lot of the projects
that I've shown today are
about taking military imagery
and reclaiming it for other uses.
So although I'm very critical of
a lot of data-oriented projects,
I also find an incredible
optimism in the way
that we can repurpose this
sort of plethora of resources
that have become available to us.
And social media is one of those.
So apparently what Chinese
resistance is doing,
they know that there are
algorithms being written
to read what they write on
the Internet and to censor it.
And so as a way of jumping over
that firewall, they post images
of their text instead of character,
you know, like computer characters.
And in that way the censor,
the computer censors can't
read the text as quickly.
And so this is what it looks like.
It's called a "long Weibo."
And so what we did was we
scraped, it's a, you know,
it's a way of capturing
what's being done.
And we checked back in.
We scraped a whole lot of things,
and then we kept checking
back every 15 seconds
to see whether a post
was still there.
If it had been deleted, we knew
and then we came up with a lot
of different ways of figuring
whether it had actually been
censored or not.
And then put together an interface
which shows the height of the arrow.
Shows how many times the
post had been retweeted.
And the depth of the arrow shows how
much time it took to be censored.
And a lot of the things
that we found were censored
were these long Weibo posts.
And then we collaborated with a
journalistic site called ProPublica.
And we had a couple of pizza
dinners where we sat around
and translated all these images to
try and understand what the content
of all these images were.
So, you know, so just to, I
wanted to end on this project
because it's a very
different way of thinking
about a map and of virtual space.
But also of the way that
even something as punishing
as censorship actually provides
us with a database of something
that we can then analyze
in the future to try
and understand what was going on.
So thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> So we're going to have
some time for questions.
At this point, if you have
a question, please stand up
and allow a microphone
to get to you.
And we can go from there.
>> Thanks, Ryan.
I'd like to ask Professor Barney,
assuming that there were Soviet
labor camps, have any scholars
or any organizations undertaken
a relatively unbiased census
of where they were?
And what was going on?
And if so, has any attempt
been made to try to correlate
that information with the Gulag Map?
>> Timothy Barney: Yeah.
That's a great question, yeah.
I would say, oh, you want to hear
me when I answer the question, sure.
Yeah, yeah.
That's actually a really
good question.
And I think it goes to some
of the stuff that I've looked
into on the origins of the map,
where a lot of this
data actually came from.
And so a lot of the stuff that was
coming out in the 1940's, I mean,
you have to take a lot of
this with a grain of salt.
It's hard.
It's hard to call one
thing more objective
than another in these cases.
But the David Dallin text that
comes from, I think it was 1947.
That Levine based some of his
affidavit testimony on for
that original map, sort of read in
a more sort of objective kind of,
you know, they've done a study.
But a lot of this comes
from affidavit testimony.
So, again, we didn't have the
sophisticated technology at the time
to really know where a
lot of this stuff is.
So a lot of it was based
on locations of passports.
And these things that they
put in the margins of the map.
And so, yeah, it's interesting.
And then a lot of the UN stuff
that the AFL was doing at the time,
they were continually billing it
as we're doing an objective
look at this.
And, but then you see the map,
and obviously the map doesn't have
that kind of, it clearly
is making an argument
and an ideological one at that.
So I think it's an interesting
tension between where the,
how you use the data to
create a particular map.
And so it's hard to
say if, you know,
which is the most accurate
version of this, you know.
So, but it's a great question.
>> Next question, please.
>> Hi, I have a comment.
[ Inaudible Comment ]
Oh, okay. Hi, I'd like to make
more a comment than a question.
The Africa photomosaic
has showed up twice
in this afternoon's performance.
And so I'd like to say
something about it if I could.
Because there's some issues
about attribution and agency
that are underlying a
lot of these things.
I really enjoyed your
last presentation there
about the particular
exhibitions that you've done.
But your name is always
associated with those things.
You go into the wall, and people,
when you go into the exhibition
and there's things on the wall,
people know that you've
put them together.
So back to the Africa photomosaic.
That was done by Clinton Peppard.
And I think it's really fundamental
that, to the nature of that thing,
that he be identified as such.
He was working for
Autometrics, Incorporated.
Which at that time was
the systems integrator
for a bunch of things about CORONA.
And he was the one who
produced that photomosaic
of Africa using Argon photography.
Now, this didn't happen in the CIA
or inside the beltway
or anything like that.
Autometrics, Incorporated
at that time was a wholly owned
subsidiary of Paramount Pictures.
And the top secret lab he was in
was in a Paramount production studio
around West 47th and 6th Avenue
in Manhattan, in Broadway.
It was a Broadway production
studio that had sound stages
and rehearsal halls
and costume shops.
And in one anonymous bomb, you
know, protected steel door,
behind which was a security corridor
into a top secret photometric lab.
So that's where Clinton worked.
And he was a smoker in that era.
And if you watch "Madmen," you
know, you get the impression
that everybody in America
smoked all the time,
and they smoked everywhere.
But there were at least two places
in American society where you,
smoking was absolutely forbidden.
One was top-secret photometric labs.
And the other was Broadway
sound stages.
So there was an area that was
neither in that big building,
high ceiling whirlwind
ventilators and so on.
And if you were smoking
you had to go there.
And there was a ring
of couches and chairs.
And, you know, and a
Coke machine or two.
So one day Clinton Peppard
was in there smoking.
And then there was, a buzzer rang
and a whole bunch of chorus girls
in their underwear on a really
quick break came out into the deal.
And being gallant he
opens up the pack of his,
a fresh pack of Marlboros.
And he watches all those
cigarettes just disappear
in Rockette precision.
And everybody's having a
good time sharing cigarettes.
And then the buzzer goes again,
and all the chorus girls depart,
leaving Clinton Peppard there.
And he had this thought
that he told me later
on when he was explaining
all these things.
That it was so funny that, you know,
they all work for Paramount
Pictures,
they were in show business.
But then he would go
through the steel door,
and he was deep in the Cold War.
And he was fighting the
communists scientifically.
But then he would come
out that steel door,
and he was in show business.
And that impulse led to him, in
addition to doing the photomosaic.
>> Keith Clarke: John, that's
why I said the real story is
so much more interesting.
>> Laura Kurgan: Yeah.
But I, just one thing.
I did not ever put that image in
an exhibition with my name on it.
It's in my book.
It's in my book.
The CORONA.
>> No. I've seen, I was
given a copy of your book.
I'm just saying this is
important to know this.
>> Laura Kurgan: Yeah.
Sorry.
>> So, because what you see
in that image is not the
original photomosaic.
It's long gone.
It's disappeared.
What you see is the small,
reduced version of it.
>> Laura Kurgan: Yeah.
>> That Clinton Peppard took.
Made it of a size that he
could stick it into his pocket.
Went through security pat down.
So he forgot to remember or
remembered to forget to take it
out of that Paramount lab.
That's the only way
that it survives.
Because he was in show business.
And he wanted to show that; right?
So show business trumped
Talent-Keyhole.
So that, so when you see that
image, notice how, you know,
if you can envision it again.
If you don't know the
story of Clinton Peppard,
then you have one sense of it.
But if you do know the story of
Clinton Peppard and the chorus girls
in their underwear, then you
have another sense of that thing.
So I would really like to insist
that you two folks and anybody else
who uses that photomosaic
from now on,
please credit Clinton
Peppard, P-e-p-p-a-r-d.
>> Laura Kurgan: I got it
actually from your website.
And that story is not
on your website.
But actually I would love to
reproduce that image really big.
So if anyone wants to collaborate
with me on that and tell his story,
I think that would be fantastic.
So, but it's not published anywhere.
I would have found it.
I'm a good researcher, yeah.
[ Inaudible Comment ]
Great.
>> Yes, sir.
Go ahead. Please stand up.
>> I don't have such a nice story.
But possibly I can
contribute something
about the verification
of the Gulag Map.
I'm from Germany.
So we had quite a lot of
prisoners of war after 1945
in the Soviet Union similarly
sent to prison for 25 years
because they were all fascists.
And they were scattered
around Siberia.
And the former military intelligence
service force under, after 1945,
we have heard about
Wernher von Braun
and T. Rucker [assumed
spelling] projects.
A military wing of the secret
service -- oh, sorry --
of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Our version in World War II
was taken over by the CIA here.
It was the Organization Gehlen.
And each returning prisoner of
war was asked where have you been?
What is the name of the camp?
Who was there?
And by 1953, 798 locations
of Gulags were verified
by Organization Gehlen.
And since the Organization
Gehlen was run by the CIA
until at least '58, it was known
here also in the United States.
So about three, four years the
latest after the publication
of the map you showed, hundreds
of these Gulags were verified
by German prisoners of war.
>> Timothy Barney: Thank you
so much for that comment.
That's really interesting.
And one of the things that it
would be interesting to see and,
as far as my research has
gone, and it's gone pretty deep
into the AFL archives
and some other places.
I would love to have
seen a sort of update
on what the map would have looked
like say a few years down the line.
And seen what kinds of differences.
What kind of evolution that it had.
You got some of that stuff
in the early 1980's upon the,
when they were sort of
commemorating the map.
But after around 1953 or 1954 the,
they didn't necessarily do any new,
there's rumors in the archives
that they did a version
of this for China.
But I've not been able
to locate that anywhere.
And so that's really interesting.
And so I'd be interested to see
down the line how this plays out.
But the CIA involvement
obviously is a huge piece
of what we're dealing with here.
And it's interesting, the
themes that we talk about,
the tension between private
and public really comes
out in the things that
we're talking about here.
Where sort of clandestine,
behind the scenes,
sometimes classified mapping.
You know, it's interesting
to see the pathways it
takes when it goes public.
How it goes public.
What goes unseen.
What goes concealed when
it does become public.
And so I'm very fascinated by that.
So thank you for that comment.
[ Background Sounds ]
>> Anymore questions?
Okay. Let's have a round of
applause for these great speakers.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.