Does this strike anyone else as a bit careless and/or reckless? Lets think about this...
You are a citizen of North Korea and one of these USB or DVDs lands on your property (and you don't even know its there). A police officer happens to see it and picks it up. A day later you are arrested and thrown in jail for being an enemy of the state. Who else gets arrested with you? Your friends? Your family? Co-workers?
So given the potential harm this could cause is it worth it? Whats the ROI on this? This weather balloon filled with propaganda could be the equivalent of a Drone raid gone bad on some poor individuals life.
P.s. You didn't "hack" shit. Stop misusing that word please.
Does this strike anyone else as a bit careless and/or reckless?
Considering the people doing this are supposedly all DPRK defectors, they probably have a much better idea of the risks & consequences than you or I, so I won't pretend to know better than them.
The book Every Man Dies Alone[1] by Hans Fallada deals with a very similar subject. At the height of the Nazi Party's political power in Germany, an elderly couple left postcards to be found in public spaces with subversive messages like, "Mother! The Führer has murdered my son. Mother! The Führer will murder your sons too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home in the world."
They're eventually tracked down and executed after two years and hundreds of postcards, and the question remains whether their campaign had any effect. Evidence of just how monolithic the regime was, comes from the percentage that were immediately turned into the authorities being something like 95%.
On one hand the postcards absolutely terrified the people who found them, but on the other, when a society is in a state where everyone is informing on each other, they may have been the rarest of moments when anyone who doubted the regime would have seen any proof that they were not alone.
I doubt that the DPRK regime could control the entire population without a relatively high level of acquiescence and even complicity of the people it is controlling. It's probably similar to how organized crime survived in communities by convincing people it was better than unorganized crime, or by building up the mythos of it having something to do with honor. In other words they have an information monopoly, because they are certain that small challenges to the official narrative do propose a real threat.
Actually it's mostly that the people they control are starving (and now, addicted to meth as well).
The narrative that the North Koreans are fanatical followers of the regime is basically Americanized fiction. The reality is that they're regular people who fear for their lives.
The problem with a lot of western commentators on regimes they think should just overthrow the government, is they think they'd do that, but haven't had to. It's one thing to say it, it's another thing to run unarmed into machine gun fire hoping to suicide bomb a barracks so others will have a chance to arm themselves.
I think if you spoke to people who grew up in an authoritarian regime you'd be surprised by how large a role the totalitarianism of ideas and complicity of the population plays in comparison to direct violence from internal security forces or control over food. In fact it is likely to be a quiet source of shame, much as abused children might be loyal to undeserving parents.
As for "Americanized fiction", what country's foreign policy community do you believe is a more credible source? China's, South Korea's, Japan's? Of the four, the US probably has the least identifiable motivation for biasing accounts in any particular direction.
> I think if you spoke to people who grew up in an authoritarian regime
Oh, hello!
> you'd be surprised by how large a role the totalitarianism of ideas and complicity of the population plays in comparison to direct violence from internal security forces or control over food.
The complicity of the population usually plays an important role, but only when it comes to the implementation of major policies. Not in the sense that there's civil disobedience about small-scale measures, but in the sense that authorities ignore how people feel about it. Even if they disapprove, what exactly are they going to when the government decides to take their cows? Stand by them and let the policemen arrest them? Yeah, that's pretty much why they're for.
Civilian informers were doing just fine at the downfall of every major communist regime in Europe. In fact, their number might have been at a peak (I don't have a source to back this for every country, unfortunately), so you could say the complicity of the population was, if not at its highest, at least in a stable, well-paced rhythm.
Direct violence played a big role, but only to the extent that it showed the threats of the agents weren't hollow. Control over food played a hugely important role in the more rural communities, or those that had deep-rooted education issues; these communities were largely untouched by the lack of freedom which they wouldn't have exercised much anyway, but when their ability to satisfy their basic needs degraded, things went awry quite quickly wherever armed control wasn't firm and steady enough.
The idea that North Koreans, by and large, are fanatical followers of the regime is fiction, especially so late in the development of their regime.
Evidence of just how monolithic the regime was, comes from the percentage that were immediately turned into the authorities being something like 95%.
You're neglecting to consider a number of factors, though compliance may have been entirely willful. In a situation such as the rise of the Third Reich, where trust is being undermined, people finding the postcards could well have considered that they were being given a loyalty test, and that to do anything but turn in the cards would have meant failing (with ... harsh penalties).
I've known people who were alive during the Nazi regime, and one persistent factor they report is simply not fully comprehending what was happening. Realize that much of the truth of what happened at the time wasn't revealed, even to Germans, until after the war.
The scarier thing is that, when traveling through parts of the US during the height of the 2nd (and hopefully final) Bush administration, there were periods during which a similar level of paranoia seemed to be settling in, and not just affecting me. I was walking down a city street behind a woman talking with two men about one of Greg Palast's books, though she couldn't recall the title. I recognized it and volunteered it. Her response was that she felt insecure even mentioning it in a public space like that. I could understand completely.
Curiously, with all the revelations of NSA surveillance, while I'm now far less comfortable with electronics and such (particularly anything proprietary), I don't have quite the same sense of "watch what you say" when in the US as I did then.
> P.s. You didn't "hack" shit. Stop misusing that word please.
In fact, they didn't even do shit. Unless I missed something, the title is completely false. They had an idea, but were prevented from executing it by the South Korean government.
I believe you misread the article, it talks of a 'current' activity which was successful "after our previous launch attempt was thwarted by South Korean police forces."
They did indeed get their balloons off.
It is entirely unclear to me how far north though you can expect such a balloon to go given the prevailing air currents.
They've been doing this for years. This particular launch was stopped, many others have succeeded. Whether they're making a perceptible impact is, of course, a question mark, but given the extent to which the DPRK fulminates against them, at least they're viewed as a threat.
>why is everyone using the the term "hack" for every expression?
It makes your thing sound cool even if it has none of the things that gave word "hack" the cachet it has. It's a watered down, mailable enough descriptor that you can stick it on anything. See: 99+% of "hack"ing on "hacker" news.
> Citizens of North Korea -- and not the State -- own property?
Semantics. They undoubtedly live in dwellings surrounded by land that would be associated with them. A jailed criminal does not legally own his cell, but he does "own" responsibility for anything that happens to it or is found in it.
This said, the people that are doing this undoubtedly have a better understanding of the situation and the potential consequences of their actions than we do.
hack 1 (hk)
v. hacked, hack·ing, hacks
3 b. To gain access to (a computer file or network)
illegally or without authorization: hacked the firm's
personnel database.
I'd say they gained access to North Korea without authorization. This is hacking.
Until they dumped North Korea's database on pastebin.com and there's a service out that helps North Koreans check if their details were compromised. It's not hacked.
Just like in the US, everyone in north korea is guilty of a crime already. if the police officer decides to enforce the law on some citizen randomly, it is not because of the new irrelevant crime, the citizen was already guilty of something else that could have been used to punish him.
There's no freedom of information in the country. They subverted this by cleverly sending technology and information by using low-tech means. Sounds like a hack to me.
May be better idea would be to use some indirect, steganography like methods. Imagine the book which looks like official Kim Jong-il biography but starting with some page has his real biography and other information. Imagine the book which looks like official school physics book, but with additional paragraphs about rationality methods (are korean translations of lesswrong sequences exist?).
Surely even the North Korean Government won't object to a USB drive full of kitten pictures. Or are they sending an unrepresentative sample of the internet? :)
Even when conducting a selfless act, you still want your action to accomplish some goal. Snowden's goal was that the American public would know about the government's activities. This group's goal, presumably, is to give North Koreans information about the outside world. It is an open question whether the balloons are actually reaching anyone.
One of the most entertaining mindfucks (and there were many) on my trip to North Korea was being shown a "classroom" at Kim Il Sung University with a poster explaining IP and DNS, as if the students would ever have internet access. (http://i.imgur.com/suTx2Rv.jpg) They also let us do whatever we wanted in a computer lab full of Red Star OS machines (http://i.imgur.com/7VyHVQP.jpg), but once I saw how terrifying a console looks to the untrained eye, I gave up trying to traceroute everything I could to avoid the labor camps. I did get to connect my phone to a North Korean wifi network (http://i.imgur.com/UfyjdfP.png), which was as neat as it was pointless.
If you've ever thought about going there, do it. Pretty soon, there won't be anywhere you can go in the world to be ineptly propagandized, and it's a beautiful thing.
They also receive substantial amounts of international aid and profit from endeavours like Kaesong. In the grand scheme of things, the petty revenue from tourism doesn't matter.
WiFi Link speed is nothing like ISP speed. The former just measures how fast data goes between your computer and your router. (and other computers on the WiFi network)
"Until this year, the U.S. government provided support for these groups through the National Endowment for Democracy and the State Department’s DRL programs. The majority of this funding however, has been cut in the last year."
I wish the author had gone into the reasons why, or even if nobody in the State Department would comment on it.
I've been thinking about this exact idea. Shocked that someone actually went out and did it. My idea was drones releasing paper helicopters with short messages, using the design of maple tree seeds. In my version of the idea it was immediately prior to a military strike to topple the regime with minimal casualties. Messages like: "Stay away from military bases / groups of people". "Don't fire on invading troops." "Fake illness/injury to avoid service." and most importantly "Don't take up arms".
A bit of a shame it doesn't look like there is going to be a follow up. The evidence seems to suggest that encouraging domestic dissident movements doesn't usually effectuate short term political change.
Leaflet dropping is actually fairly standard practice and has been so for decades. The US invasion of Iraq did the same thing: http://www.psywar.org/apdsearch.php
I think that regimes (communist ones) were pretty decent economically and technologically, even better than other countries at the same time because they heavily invested in large scale infrastructure and basic education. They introduced electricity and literacy to their rural populations very successfully.
But since they were regimes they had technological embargo placed on them so they couldn't use international exchange to acquire new technologies and they fell behind technologically and as a result economically and finally crumbled.
N Korea was better off economically in 1950 -70s, mainly because of the infrastructure Japan had set up with the goal of using that region as a staging ground for invading Manchuria/China.
S Korea has better infra and education than N Korea.
Does anybody know of an NGO (1 or more), that could be supported by individual, with money originating in EU, the NGO doing activities towards helping people suffering under North Korean regime, which are somehow verifiable/verified? I suppose this is hard (impossible?) to at the same time have little publicity (helping kinda covert operations), but still enough publicity to get "confirmed" by some reputable organization, but maybe here I could find someone who could help me with that? I would be very grateful for any advice... I have this thought for quite long; I've learned somewhere about some organizations, e.g. "Open Doors" (?), but I'm uneasy about paying somebody based only on his own claims...
This blog post about North Korea by Sophie Schmidt, the daughter of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, is pretty interesting too, with lots of weird tidbits about the use of technology:
I wonder if there shouldn't be a place for an activism Kickstarter where an NGO could pitch projects, such as financing a radio station or releasing these balloons, and get them financed by a wider, worldwide audience.
PBS Frontline covered this event as well as other efforts to smuggle popular media into North Korea as well as getting documentary footage out. Well worth watching. It was pretty gut wrenching and uplifting.
I'm wondering how many people near the border have access to computers that can read those DVDs and USB drives?
The article did mention that “DVDs, USBs, and even laptops are making their way over the Chinese border into the hands of North Koreans”, but there wasn't any estimation of how many people actually have access to those, and of those who do, how many belong to the ruling class?
The PBS Frontline episode from yesterday makes it seem as if thumb-drive video playing computers are common (perhaps only among the upper class, though) in NK.
This is thanks to Chinese businessmen, who produce items according to the needs of the North Korean market. For about US$20, North Koreans may purchase a Chinese-made portable DVD player. In the past, a DVD was required; but now, people can watch movies off of a USB stick. This makes it even easier to conceal the set-up from the authorities, and is a perfect fit for ordinary North Koreans.
I would say one time supply of cheap(!) video game equipment is far easier to finance and organize than a reliable distribution of food and electricity for almost 25M people, so i doubt that argument. And I would be anything but surprised if only 1 million or less people would have access to those machines, but my guess would be that a political chance depends more on (semi)-privileged people like those in Pyongyang than on the population of the country side which has even less possibilities of resistance and reform.
Nice "hacking". If I were South Korea I would buy some weapons before sending cute balloons to a country run by a lunatic that can squash you in a single night.
You are a citizen of North Korea and one of these USB or DVDs lands on your property (and you don't even know its there). A police officer happens to see it and picks it up. A day later you are arrested and thrown in jail for being an enemy of the state. Who else gets arrested with you? Your friends? Your family? Co-workers?
So given the potential harm this could cause is it worth it? Whats the ROI on this? This weather balloon filled with propaganda could be the equivalent of a Drone raid gone bad on some poor individuals life.
P.s. You didn't "hack" shit. Stop misusing that word please.