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United States Censorship Government The Internet

U.S. Funds Challenges To North Korea's 'Information Shield' (freekorea.us) 87

Posted by EditorDavid from the uncensored-from-abroad dept.
The U.S. State Department is pursuing "a detailed plan for making unrestricted, unmonitored, and inexpensive electronic mass communications available to the people of North Korea." Slashdot reader Greg Jones reports: Plenty of government-designed "information" flows out of North Korea. At One Free Korea Joshua Stanton reports that the U.S. State Department just announced a new grant program for information technology solutions to punch through the wall that prevents the free flow of information into North Korea.
"Those of us who wrote and negotiated the [North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act] were equally concerned with direct engagement of the North Korean people..." Stanton writes on his blog, reporting that there's now grants available to fund multiple projects. "If you have the technical knowledge to make this a reality, or know a place online where people with those talents congregate, please share and repost this solicitation and help spread the word."
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U.S. Funds Challenges To North Korea's 'Information Shield' More

U.S. Funds Challenges To North Korea's 'Information Shield'

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  • The best nonviolent way of breaking North Korea is to let the common people know how the other Koreans live. We could try smuggling in flash drives, since the DPRK uses them to distribute official TV programming. Efforts like this are underway, but a more effective means of getting them in are needed:
    https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]

    North Korea owes its very existence to keeping people in the dark about the outside world. As soon as that information gets through, it's Venezuela time.

    • The best nonviolent way of breaking North Korea is to let the common people know how the other Koreans live. We could try smuggling in flash drives, since the DPRK uses them to distribute official TV programming.

      We could airdrop flashdrives hidden in frozen turkeys.

    • The best nonviolent way of breaking North Korea is to let the common people know how the other Koreans live.

      The big thing is, at least per the book Nothing To Envy [wikipedia.org] is that the North Korean people have been under such a prolonged and intense campaign of propaganda that to the average North Korean even nothing but completely factual details of everyday life in South Korea would come off as fanciful and ridiculous.

      You expect them to believe that most people eat daily what they'd consider a sumptuous Day of the Sun feast, or that they can speak freely to anyone anywhere in the world instantaneously without concern fo

      • The best nonviolent way of breaking North Korea is to let the common people know how the other Koreans live.

        The big thing is, at least per the book Nothing To Envy [wikipedia.org] is that the North Korean people have been under such a prolonged and intense campaign of propaganda that to the average North Korean even nothing but completely factual details of everyday life in South Korea would come off as fanciful and ridiculous.

        You expect them to believe that most people eat daily what they'd consider a sumptuous Day of the Sun feast, or that they can speak freely to anyone anywhere in the world instantaneously without concern for government agents listening in on every word? Or that they could wear clothes that aren't made of vinylon?

        Why have you 'infantilized' an entire county full of people. Kind of a bigoted thing to do. The Chinese who have grown up under nothing but draconian communism realize reality the first chance they get and own stores, businesses and indulge in entrepreneurship within *months* of leaving China. Hell, now-a-days they are doing it right in China. Why would Koreans be any different?

        Oh yes, a group of people in America love infantilize certain groups of people and then control them and suck their life's blood o

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by umghhh ( 965931 )
          There is nothing infantile about this. If you do not believe what propaganda says you will reveal your evil thinking eventually and this means either labour camp, prison or a bullet. There surely are people that have doubts there of course. The question is how big doubts these are and how many of such people are there. Regime like this is on the other side - the attempts to overthrow would have to reach critical mass and that is impossible. The massive long lasting famine would help change that. Lost war co

          • There is nothing infantile about this.[...]

            Ooookay. You completely misunderstood the word infantilize or ( infantilized ) and went in the wrong direction.

            Infantilize: "To treat or condescend to as if still a young child." You know, like the way politicians talk down and treat their constituency, because though being treated like children they keep voting the same assholes in.

            Infantile:"Displaying or suggesting a lack of maturity; childish: infantile behavior; an infantile remark." Having behavior of a child. Complete and total difference.

            One is a

        • Why have you 'infantilized' an entire county full of people. Kind of a bigoted thing to do.

          Sure, I'm painting in broad strokes that hardly means I'm infantilizing an entire country when I point out that it's been governed by a cult of personality that favours severe punishment and intense propaganda, and has for doing so for literally generations. I even provided a source entirely composed of first-hand accounts. People are suffering in North Korea and they're not oblivious to their own suffering, but that doesn't mean dropping USB keys into the country will suddenly convince them that things a

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        You expect them to believe that most people eat daily what they'd consider a sumptuous Day of the Sun feast, or that they can speak freely to anyone anywhere in the world instantaneously without concern for government agents listening in on every word? Or that they could wear clothes that aren't made of vinylon?

        Sure. From wikipedia:

        "South Korean television programmes cannot be received in North Korea due to incompatibilities between the television systems (PAL in North Korea and NTSC/ATSC in South Korea) and the sets being pretuned. However, in recent years, an increasing number of North Koreans have smuggled VCRs from China and used them to watch South Korean shows recorded on VHS. South Korean soap operas, movies and Western Hollywood movies according to defectors, are said to be spreading at a "rapid rate" thro

        • The source is from 2009 (about the same time the book I linked to was published), so who knows how things have spread, but yeah I could be wrong. At least overstating things. (Of course I read your reply after I write my other one. Oh well.)

    • The best nonviolent way of breaking North Korea is to let the common people know how the other Koreans live.

      It's been said many times, by many knowledgeable people, that a great deal of what changed the old Soviet Union was knowledge learned from smuggled VCR's and VCR tapes that showed many Soviets lived a lie, it was no workers paradise and the West was not anything like their leaders were portraying.

      Knowledge Is Power.

      One of my favorites was of the Moscow mayor claiming there was no crime or prostitution in Moscow while, in the background, a hooker was clearly visible negotiating a "deal" and then the hooker

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by edis ( 266347 )

        Lie. Nobody was renting this, but generic hollywood crap and porn. Blue jeans or chewing gum had more impact than this.
        Change came up from suppressed nation countries, that appeared to be more vivid and persistent than expected, to surf the wave of perestroika.

    • That information has been getting through, via couriers, balloons, etc.

      Thing is, because of the levels of internal policing, even if you got that information to every single citizen living in North Korea, the most likely outcome would still be no change at all, simply because everyone is (rightfully) so paranoid they would be afraid to speak about what they had learned with almost anybody else, for fear of being turned over to the police. And the consequences for that sort of behavior aren't slight, and don

      • Being informed from the outside that your whole life is a lie is a crucial factor in determining what happens to the regime. Right now in Venezuela Maduro is following what he perceives as the winning endgame of Pol Pot in Cambodia: he is ordering the population to abandon the cities, flee into the countryside and grow food for themselves. Pol Pot's people obeyed and were slaughtered because in 1975 Cambodia the regime could effectively keep out knowledge of the outside world. But because Venezuelans have

  • dafauq? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sims 2 ( 994794 ) on Saturday September 24, 2016 @09:55AM (#52953205)

    So it's not ok for our own US citizens or our allies to have unmonitored mass communications but we are just going to give them to our enemies?

  • They should found one for the US too (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 24, 2016 @10:12AM (#52953291)

    It would be nice having an unmonitored device too.
    Being able to comunicate without the government snooping... in a free country...

    Well, just dreaming.

  • Radio, anyone? Those DoD dummies act like the humble radio transmitter was never invented...

    • Great, I'm sure that the North Korean leadership will just let you go around and hand out receivers to everyone.

    • +1

      Sometimes the old ways are best. At worse, catapult a few wind up radios over and give them a couple of OTR style uprising stories at night. change freqs every few days.... give the project a budget and build in some comsec so they cant step all over your signal. Hell, do it Vault-tek style and call each group of radios a social experiment and maybe learn a little something about the way oppressed humans think.

      Call me paranoid, but I find the way western governments keep asking us citizens to show them ho

  • An assload of $29 Android phones with mesh networking software installed and some mighty APs with directional antennas might do the trick. Oh but wait, if we do that for them, our own people will expect us to do it at home.

    • Because Americans are clamouring for 29$ phones with mesh networking software installed?

    • And a month later, North Korea start blanketing all urban areas with high-power 2.4GHz transmitters. Which, given their budget, will look suspiciously like someone took the guts from a microwave oven and mounted it into a new enclosure.

  • y'know... skype used to have this feature, y'know? it wasn't completely undetectable, but it *used* to have the ability to disguise itself as pretty much anything, so that it would "just work" in the face of badly-configured firewalls, DNS servers, idiot companies that blocked *all* incoming and outgoing traffic stone-dead including ICMP (including BGP and other absolutely crucial traffic) with the statement "you've got unrestricted access to port 80, that's the 'internet' isn't it, what the hell are you c

  • The U.S. State Department is pursuing "a detailed plan for making unrestricted, unmonitored, and inexpensive electronic mass communications available to the people of North Korea."

    How are we going to give it to North Korea when we don't even have it in the US? -_-

  • This is not going to work well. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Saturday September 24, 2016 @11:38AM (#52953637)

    Any sort of software is going to be worthless, because NK doesn't have an internet infrastructure. You can't tunnel if there are no wires. You might be able to get some connectivity at the borders, but that's it, and NK has used jammers in the past.

    So the only possible approaches will be hardware based - you'd have to be able to distribute hardware into the country. And you'd have to do so with a lot of it, because you need to get it in faster than their government agents can confiscate it. And that hardware has to be able to operate in the face of truly awful communications conditions - even mesh networks have their limits.

    The most you're going to get realistically is one-way: Send them radio receivers capable of picking up South Korean media. Which a lot of people will dismiss as propaganda, of course. The grant proposal implicitly acknowledges this with a focus upon getting media *in* to the country, which is hard but not nearly so hard as communications between people already stuck there.

    That's the technical side. There's also the legal issue: You're going to end up air-dropping communications equipment on a foreign country without authorisation of their government and the express intention of subverting their laws. This is almost an act of war. North Korea would declare war on the US over that, if they didn't do so about twice a month already.

    I'd go for the low-tech approach first: Radios. NK requires all radios sold be hard-wired to only tune to selected government-approved stations. So put in lots of really small, simple, durable radios that can pick up South Korean radio stations. You need a lot of them.

    Now, if you wanted high-tech, you could probably come up with an adapted mobile phone for sneakernet use. Something that would be able to play audio and video, read text. Like one of those super-cheap-and-nasty Android tablets, with two USB ports. No networking - it's too easy to trace, and not much good anyway. But enough that a subversive document or media file could be very easily copied and passed between trusted people, quickly. You might want to include a radio receiver too, just so that it can pick up a daily news update from a transmitter in SK. Old-school VHS radio if need be - you don't need bitrate, you need range.

    But that's really over-engineering, you'd get a much better effect for your money if you just airdrop millions of DVDs. Even in North Korea, DVD players are readily available. If nothing else you'd waste their resources as they assign thousands of people to sweeping the country looking for shiny discs to destroy.

    As this is a US proposal, and legality be damned, they could just load a stealth bomber. I don't know how many DVDs you could load into one of those, but I think it's a lot. It'd be great fun when Jong-Un wakes up one morning to find eighteen tons of DVDs covering Pyongyang, containing all the best television the world can offer both factual and entertainment.

    I expect by lunch he'll have just declared the sale of DVD players a capital offence, though.

    • VHF, I mean. I edited that post a lot chucking out ideas that sounded good at first, but were obviously impractical on further thought. Most of those suggestions are barely-workable anyway. The awkward truth is that this is a very hard task to accomplish - even if you solve the engineering issues, how many people will be executed because they are caught with one of your mini comms devices or banned DVDs?

    • I would "salt" the DVD drop with AOL CDs/DVDs to multiply their propaganda disposal efforts.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by aliquis ( 678370 )

      What about tables pre-loaded with Wikipedia?

      Lots of information to be had.

    • Everything you mention is already happening. North Korea has a major trade link with China at Dandong. North Korean border guards are easily bribed, though they have raised their fees recently in the face of stricter controls. A cheap Chinese made portable media player known locally as the Notel [reuters.com] is popular in North Korea. Note the brand in the image on that page, SANSUNG :-). People can buy these on the black market since around 2005 for about $50, cheap enough for them to buy with their own money without o

  • NK represents a whole country of people that for the first 6 months will actually believe the targetted advertising claims.

  • Most of that hardware would flow from China and its regional markets. TV shows, what was once dvd/usb players, now new cheap media players with vast amounts of very cheap storage and better hardware codecs. All the NSA has to do is ensure a vibrant flow of Korean movies, TV shows via China keeps flowing every year. Radio works but nothing is as addictive and subversive as decades of ready to enjoy TV shows and movies on one small imported playback devices.
    Get the CIA to fund addictive and charming Korea
  • If they saw the writing on the wall, would they make good on what they've been threatening since the cessation of the Korean War? I get the feeling that they're always in fight or flight mode anyway and an existential threat, making them feel cornered might incite them to lash out. I'm not saying it's a reason the U.S. shouldn't fund this project. I have no idea. I just hope those that do have an idea tend to things through well.

  • The U.S. State Department is pursuing "a detailed plan for making unrestricted, unmonitored, and inexpensive electronic mass communications available to the people of North Korea." Slashdot reader Greg Jones reports:

    Shouldn't they make sure we have that here at home first? Just sayin....

  • We are bringing Democracy to North Korea! Once we liberate their internet, we can install Google's Conversation A.I. to enable completely uncensored conversations and finally put an end to the tyranny.

  • They could try doing that for the people in their own country, too.

    Or at least quit trying to thwart their own efforts to do it for themselves.

    If the FBI existed in 1789, they would have sought to ban opaque envelopes.

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