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Comment by scottfits | Hacker News Reader

in the face of sanctions, NK has to get creative. Sad that a generation of talented people is basically harvested by the gov for hacking and theft

"The process by which North Korean hackers are spotted and trained appears to be similar to the way Olympians were once cultivated in the former Soviet bloc. Martyn Williams, a fellow at the Stimson Center think tank who studies North Korea, explained that, whereas conventional warfare requires the expensive and onerous development of weaponry, a hacking program needs only intelligent people. And North Korea, despite lacking many other resources, “is not short of human capital."

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"harvested for hacking and theft" in the same sense that any military "harvests people to turn them into killing machines"?

You could equally well frame it as "they are given a chance to do their patriotic duty", "they serve their country", "they are given an amazing job opportunity". Your wording isn't wrong, but it is an unusually harsh way to describe a military operation.

It's only bad when we don't like that country, I suppose.

I went to a talk by a couple of defectors, one of which was an embassy employee and they explained that they were always tasked with earning money through means like selling illegal alcohol etc. sanctions obviously make legal trade impossible with many countries.

From what I understood there is a huge flow of drugs like meth from NK into China. They are basically just a mafia state who will do anything for money.

North Korean defectors are paid by South Korean govt and US-funded orgs in order to push propaganda about North Korea.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/13/why-do-north-k...

https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-01-22/problem-north-korea-s...

Neither of those links support your claims.

Here is a video that contains some accusations of bribery of defectors and other shady business by NIS (Korean CIA) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktE_3PrJZO0

Ah yes, Youtube. A trusted source of information.

"Youtube" itself is not a source of information. It is a site where people post videos. Journalists post videos on Youtube through BBC, Economist, Washington Post, Nightline/PBS, etc...

Does their posting content on Youtube make them less credible?

Judge the originator of the content, not who hosts it.

Might as well go "Ah yes, the internet. A trusted source of information."

That's how shallow your retort is.

I'm curious what the AsianBoss would make of the video. His interviews with defectors always seemed so genuine. https://www.youtube.com/user/askasianboss

Probably not the current SK government. The current president is liberal side - less pro-American and more pro-peace-talk. (Conservatives would even accuse him of being pro-China, though, to be honest, that's ridiculous.)

However, SK is a free capitalist country, and NK defectors need to eat, so some of them find gainful jobs telling conservative pundits what they want to hear.

Of course there's no doubt that NK is a horrible, horrible place, but still, sometimes you have to take some of these viewpoints with a grain of salt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Act_(South_K...

Defectors in South Korea are by law not allowed to talk positive about North Korea.

I think you are kind of overlooking that the situation is a bit more complicated than just some of the defectors telling conservative pundits what they want to hear. It seems to me from a little digging that detainment of former citizens of the North by the NIS is indeed a coercive process that happens long before the defector even has opportunity to speak to the pundits. How can this be simplified so much?

It’s likely true that defectors (by reason they defected) have legitimate stories to tell and they are both paid & given a platform to tell their stories by governments. Giving someone a megaphone doesn’t make their story less true does it?

When you can make a living telling stories about how awful the country you defected from is, it probably makes sense to embellish at least a few of them. It's not like anyone's going to be able to tell the awful and true ones apart from the awful and untrue ones.

I once listened to an interview with the head of the Seoul office of the U.N. Office of High Commissioner for Human Rights, and if I remember correctly she said that they had to be careful to base their work on reports from defectors because they were aware that some reports might be exaggerated or made up.

Regardless of whether the accusations about defectors being coerced to make North Korea sound worse are true, honestly this just sounds like an obvious consequence.

If you isolate a country economically by cutting off all legal ways for it to trade with the international community, it will have to rely on illegal ways.

Generalized trade sanctions have time and again proven to be ineffective because they are so indiscriminate. They're meant to work as a deterrent, not a punishment. But the deterrent works with the threat of disrupting the economy, which only works short-term as the existing supply chains come to a halt and businesses panic. If you sit the sanctions out long enough, the economy will have already collapsed and will rebuild itself under the new restrictions. Once the economy has adapted, the sanctions are no longer a deterrent, they're just how things are, and the promise of conditionally lifting the sanctions feels like a trap because it would require changes to the economy that would again make it vulnerable to those sanctions if they were reinstated.

Your heart just breaks for those kids competing in the IMO. Their peers from other nations are going to go to college, maybe stick with math but they have a million opportunities ahead of them to use their talents. Meanwhile these kids are getting conscripted into being crooks.

I really can’t imagine how bitter that would make me feel.

> Meanwhile these kids are getting conscripted into being crooks

They're not crooks from their perspective. They're indoctrinated into hating the west, remember. As far as they're concerned they're likely to feel they're serving their nation and doing a good deed.

I don’t know - did every Soviet mathematician buy into their propaganda?

You can enjoy the intellectual challenge of what you do, while understanding that the political context of it is bullshit.

What?

Very tangential, but the story of Jim Simons is interesting.

He was an American cryptographer who took a very public stance against the Vietnam War. Being forced to leave, he went and set up the world's most successful hedge fund, became a billionaire and led the nerdification of trading.

There are lots of really really interesting interviews with him on YouTube.

Well, enough Americans do for the NSA and CIA to have plenty of highly intelligent math geeks on staff.

Or did you think the US doesn't do propaganda?

They're patriotically serving their country doing an intellectually challenging job.

If you compare it to what many intelligent individuals wind up getting stuck doing in other developing countries it's a pretty awesome opportunity.

> Meanwhile these kids are getting conscripted into being crooks.

> I really can’t imagine how bitter that would make me feel.

That's how I feel about smart CS kids getting duped into working for the CIA or NSA, but I have less sympathy with those because they're coerced with cozy paychecks rather than the implied threat of literally being dragged in at gunpoint.

Any idea on CIA and NSA pay? FBI pay is garbage but no idea on the others

They are just regular US government agencies on the standard US government payscales.

> Sad that a generation of talented people is basically harvested by the gov for hacking and theft

What's wrong with that? Would it be better if they were harvested by corporations to just make far more questionable things?

Products and services are far more questionable than hacking and theft?

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