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Comment by harryf | Hacker News Reader

Much as it's a fascinating story my BS alarm is flashing. Is there anyone at Georg Mason University who can confirm Professor Kim Hyun Sik actually exists?

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The source has a solid reputation, as far as I know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Policy

If he doesn't exist, there's an awful lot of gatherings with him as a guest speaker at universities hitting on Google over the past four years from 07 to 2010, and he was (if Google can be believed) a visiting professor at Yale from 03-06 up until becoming a research professor at GMU.

I attended a talk he gave at Duke University either in 2010 or 2009.

Thanks for the confirmation

I am finding a few things hard to believe as well. In the commonwealth games, the Indian Government rounded up beggars and sent them out of Delhi. In the Iraq war, GWB banned the media from covering body bags. Every state is guilty of this ,so unless the deliberate crippling part is true, it may just be another exercise in FUD, much like the weapons of mass destruction.

The FUD would be a lot easier to refute if NK would actually let people into and (especially) out of their country without a security apparatus monitoring their every move.

The control of information and people's lives in North Korea is incomparably more than the examples you gave. Respectfully, your comparisons are not close.

The difference is not merely quantitative.

North Korea's activity is well documented and overwhelming.

If you want independent corroboration, sources here -- http://joshuaspodek.com/north-korea-bibliography, particularly in the human rights sections -- are a good place to start.

The problem with your argument is that in the West, we immediately knew about those issues. You just can't compare those two things.

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