North Korea is likely the most technologically backward, economically isolated and generally secretive nation on earth – which would make North Korea altogether unremarkable but for the fact that the country’s Stalinist regime has nonetheless managed to develop the capacity to build and deliver nuclear weapons.

The enigmatic nature of North Korea has inspired a vibrant community of amateur researchers, intent on collaboratively building a more complete picture of that country’s economy through meticulous cross-referencing of updates to Google Earth satellite imagery with rare government-issued video clips and rarer-still in-country eyewitness accounts.

Much of this effort, dubbed North Korea Uncovered (NKU), is organized around economist and PhD candidate Curtis Melvin, who blogs about the project at North Korean Economy Watch.

North Korea Uncovered’s view of the Buckchang “gulag” (click to enlarge).

Consistent with any good open-source project, the product of the community’s labors are made liberally available for others to review and augment, in the form of a wonderfully-limber .KML file.  This is the extension that Google Earth uses to document, organize and overlay changes observed in user-contributed geographic points of interest suggestive of the real-time situation in North Korea. These include critical elements of infrastructure, such as roads, power lines, mines, and dams; in addition to other indicators of the state of affairs in North Korea, such as prison camps (including, in one case, a building chillingly labeled ‘School for prisoner children under age 12’), “elite” housing and public execution sites.

The genesis of NKU was much less audacious, though no less significant. Melvin and others sought to document one of North Korea’s better-kept secrets: the emergence and quasi-official endorsement of open marketplaces, where North Koreans trade basic goods directly with one another. Apparently, these marketplaces are particularly easy to identify on Google Earth.

What’s most striking about NKU is how similar its finished product would seem to be to what full-time CIA analysts are likely attempting to churn out. But unlike the CIA, many members of the NKU community have been on the ground inside North Korea. Given that fact, it’s a sure bet that the intelligence community pays very close attention to what NKU produces.

In other words, even the business of espionage appears to be subject to the increased efficiencies and potential pitfalls of Web 2.0.

You can download the current iteration of North Korea Uncovered here (and, in case you don’t have it, you can download Google Earth here). Warning: don’t start looking at this stuff unless you have an hour or two to dedicate to the process. It’s deeply compelling.