According to Time magazine, Kaplan's wife had visited the prison a day before the escape with a male companion who seemed to be scoping out the prison yard. He made it to California and was never recaptured, no satellite imagery required. New York businessman Joel David Kaplan, who was serving a sentence for killing his business partner while in Mexico, fled the prison by helicopter. The first, made famous by the 1975 movie 'Breakout,' took place at the Santa Martha Acatitla prison in Mexico.

However, helicopter escapes have happened. More recently, in the summer of 2017, the prison was hit with a series of brawls involving homemade weapons, according to USA Today (opens in new tab).Īround 2006, the images of Elmira on Google Earth were very low-resolution, reportedly over concerns that satellite imagery would be used to stage helicopter escapes from the prison - though it may just have been poor-quality satellite imagery, because the surrounding neighborhoods weren't particularly sharp, either. In 2003, two inmates, Timothy Morgan and Timothy Vail, made paper-mache models of themselves using their own hair, left them snuggled in their beds, and escaped through a hole they'd made with a sledgehammer through the ceiling of their cell. The Elmira Correctional Facility in Elmira, New York, is a maximum-security prison with a wild history. The Elmira Correctional Facility, New York Until 2013, the palace, as seen on Google Earth, looked like something out of an old Atari game. The office building of the country's kind was once painstakingly blurred pixel-by-pixel with a much more delicate hand than usually used on the country's satellite imagery. Most of the censored areas in the Netherlands used the large, pixelated mask still seen in Noordwijk aan Zee to obscure sensitive sites, but Noordeinde Palace in The Hague got a more personal touch.

(There are some spots, like a blob in Noordwijk aan Zee, where new satellite imagery has yet to become available since the law change.)

According to CNN, Dutch law changed in 2013 to lift this censorship, and the Netherlands have become considerably clearer since. On Google Earth, the country was dotted with pixelated splotches covering military bases, government buildings and more. The Dutch are rather famous in satellite-imagery-loving circles for their enthusiastic pixelation.

Google earth live view of my house