Defecting from North Korea is now harder | Hacker News Reader

Defecting from North Korea is now harder

nytimes.com

289 pointsperihelions178 comments

That was harrowing.

There were a couple things I didn't understand:

1. What changed about China's surveillance systems or procedures to make them ~20x more effective at catching refugees in a couple years?

2. There's a bit about how North Korean refugees can apply for asylum in South Korea. I was under the impression (from Barbara Demick's book Nothing to Envy) that all North Koreans are more or less granted asylum by default. My recollection is that she put it even more strongly in her book: that SK in effect treated fleeing North Korean citizens as de facto citizens of South Korea, because they are meant to be one country. Is the asylum process mentioned here a rubber stamp, or did the process get more strict? Would a refugee from North Korea ever be refused asylum in South Korea?

1. The article briefly discusses the impact of COVID, highlighting China's implementation of supplementary measures and limitations during this period. It is evident that having knowledge of individuals' travel destinations would undoubtedly assist in contact tracing efforts. However, as the article states it can also be used for malicious exploitation.

2. If your question is about why they go to Thailand instead of stopping in Laos: Thailand is reluctant to repatriate individuals back to North Korea, while Laos does not share the same reluctance.

For the more general question: It is understandable that South Korea would scrutinize refugees to some extent to prevent the infiltration of espionage agents and similar threats.

>It is evident that having knowledge of individuals' travel destinations would undoubtedly assist in contact tracing efforts.

Any evidence for that? Actually, any evidence that contact tracing has actually had any benefits wherever it has been tried? I'm sure it helps at very, very early stages of a pandemic, and even then depending on which virus we are trying to trace... But I'd like to see actual proof that it helps for pandemics like COVID.

Otherwise it is such an easy way to implement mass surveillance, that requiring very very thorough proof that it actually helps is the bare minimum. This story is proof of that.

Are you asking for evidence that knowing everyone’s locations and travel itineraries would assist in contact tracing? Because I think that one is obvious.

Otherwise, I’m not particularly interested in having a COVID conversation.

It's not a conversation about COVID. It's one about contact tracing. And yes I think that evidence should always be required when talking about potential tools for such mass surveillance. "It makes sense" isn't really proof for anything, as the last pandemic has proven times and times again. For example here in Quebec, contact tracing apps and tracking location of everyone with covid has had pretty much no measurable effect. Even fundamental questions like "what is a contact" are hard to answer, so actual studies might be helpful for this conversation.

And again, even tracing infectious contacts was much easier with mass tracking of every single citizens location, that still doesn't mean it is actually useful to stop a pandemic. It might be! Which is why I was asking for good evidence.

> that still doesn't mean it is actually useful to stop a pandemic

You're arguing against ghosts. That is not what I said, or even implied. I wrote:

> It is evident that having knowledge of individuals' travel destinations would undoubtedly assist in contact tracing efforts.

Tracking movement is obviously helpful for contact tracing, because you can track the proximity of individuals to each other and warn those who were near a confirmed case.

I wrote absolutely nothing on whether contact tracing is impactful, and I wrote nothing about whether you could accomplish the same result in a different way. The usefulness of contract tracing is not a conversation I wish to engage in.

Ok, how do you define a contact then? How can it be evident that tracking locations is obviously helpful for contact tracing without defining what it means to trace a contact? That's why evidence would be helpful here. How does knowing a location helps with determining a contact, especially for coarser tracking like know where someone is travelling.

You keep repeating that it is obvious and again, saying that something is just... obvious is not enough when discussing dangerous, almost "dual use" methods like contact tracing using mass tracking.

> Ok, how do you define a contact then?

You'll have to ask the Chinese CDC, I'm sure they have an answer for you much like our own CDCs do.

It's usually some combination of time and distance proximity to a confirmed COVID case.

I'll actually look into it, it sounds more interesting now that I started reading about it. Sorry if my comments sounded antagonistic, I was genuinely wondering. I'll dive into the rabbit hole now!

Contact tracing (contact investigation, etc.) is a standard practice in public health. In tuberculosis control where I got my start, it's what we do for any active case of TB we identify - we find the people who may have been exposed and widen the circle as necessary. It's also critical for STDs.

The only difference with COVID was the scale, not the methodology. There is an argument that if the disease is everywhere, people can be infected anywhere, and you would need an accordingly exponential increase in monitoring scale to pull any kind of signal from the noise floor. But the principles work for any disease.

source: TB control physician for 17 years

I agree but do we use mass tracking for stuff like tuberculosis and STDs?

And agreed also that my point is probably more true for COVID than anything else. The scale of COVID is such that it automatically requires mass tracking to even consider contact tracing, but I guess my argument was that even then we should have evidence that such massive tracking improves contact tracing for very infectious viruses like COVID.

I'm genuinely asking, not in a "just asking questions" manner here. So thanks for replying! I didn't know contact tracing was useful for TB too.

I live in Québec. We never had mass tracking - this was FUD about the app, which did NOT share data... and that level of privacy protection is also why it was difficult to prove its positive impact.

What we did have was public health which sometimes managed to call people after a positive result - to warn their contacts, so they don't infect others in turn. This is absolutely standard for public health for many illnesses, and helps reduce contagion.

Neither of those is mass tracking. Public health doesn't report you if you went to see prostitutes or used illegal drugs; their job is to stop chains of transmission, and contact the people you were around. That's true for TB as mentioned, as well as smallpox, Ebola, etc

Anyways, since you're in Québec you might be interested in this figure, selecting the 0-49 demographic. Public health isn't telling us about this, or simple methods to reduce risk. Hell, HEPA filters are still near impossible to install in schools.

https://statistique.quebec.ca/fr/document/surmortalite-hebdo...

I purposefully mentioned the tracking separately from the app. I was implying that the app being used for massive tracking (just that it was another example of ineffective contact tracing), and if it came off that way I just wasn't clear about what I meant.

This is the story I was referring to: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/canadians-trips-to-liquor-stor...

And I totally agree about your last point. I'll add a more controversial opinion that our Public health authorities have been completely politicised here. Legault does not want to talk about COVID anymore so we don't. And when it was scoring points politically, they blatantly played with facts and timelines to make political decisions sound "based on science". Very very disappointed about how our public institutions acted during the crisis. For example, that the crazy, criminal, stuff that happened in CHSLDs early on was completely swept under the rug with no government official suffering from any meaningful consequences was... Eye opening.

> but do we use mass tracking for stuff like tuberculosis and STDs?

My understanding (my mother is a doctor) is that we do try to do contact tracing for STDs, but this relies on patients' self-report of who they've been in contact with recently.

Hi; I built all of the contact tracing analytics for one of the Harvard hospitals during the pandemic. Also had a parent that was clin epi for 25 years.

The entire effort, using essentially every technology applied, was useless.

It was for many reasons, but primarily because the asymptomatic rate was very, very high, that there was no way to actually trace anything. Where or who you got Covid from was pure speculation for a majority of positive cases.

Scales and rates matter. With TB you have a very high fidelity, testable, slow spreading causal chain. Which is why TB tracing programs are effective, and good public health policy.

Our national Covid policies were ineffective, to say the least.

    > The only difference with
    > COVID was the scale, not
    > the methodology.

There was a lot of novel contact tracing methodology during COVID-19, e.g. contact tracing though Bluetooth "contacts": https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing

The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t give a shit whether it stops Covid or not. The technology isn’t exactly hard and they’re not doing it with US tech companies

Contact tracing is also phenomenal cover for increasing surveillance on people, and China’s a dictatorship so no one can really complain that much. You can do things like spend more on cameras, use Bluetooth beacons to determine people’s locations even when they’re not sharing them, monitor highway traffic more, crack down on people traveling with strangers, so much surveillance tech has contact tracing related uses and unlike America, the loss of privacy is a positive for the government

> Are you asking for evidence that knowing everyone’s locations and travel itineraries would assist in contact tracing? Because I think that one is obvious.

Ok, I don’t think it’s obvious so let’s have that conversation. Do you have any examples you can share where contact tracing lead to less restrictions compared to another area that did not engage in contact tracing? My intuition is that no such example can be proven, which relegates contract tracing to nothing more than a faithkeeping exercise.

> Do you have any examples you can share where contact tracing lead to less restrictions compared to another area that did not engage in contact tracing?

I recommend thoroughly reviewing what I wrote that you quoted, and then contemplating the relevance of your question to the topic at hand.

If it helps, the effectiveness of contact tracing is not relevant to the discussion.

We would also have to track all the animals that could carry Covid to be accurate. That's hard to do...

Why? Do you have any proof that humans were infected by animals in more than a few cases?

Covid has been carried by multiple domestic creatures and supposedly 'started' with a single animal to human contact.

Because you only need one, and the R0 is so high, missing animals is a huge hole in tracking.

> Covid has been carried by multiple domestic creatures and supposedly 'started' with a single animal to human contact.

That wasn't my question.

> Because you only need one, and the R0 is so high, missing animals is a huge hole in tracking.

You only "need one" for what? To infect a person? Obviously if you don't track animal to human contacts you will miss an animal to human contact if an animal to human infection occurred. But there are thousands of infections per day. Contact tracing is unlikely to be 100% reliable over all cases. So what do you "only need one" for? To increase case load by one? I genuinely don't know what you're trying to get at.

If over all of Corona let's say 10 people got infected by animals, and you miss them. What happens then?

Should we also track rock to human infections? Maybe they could happen, and we only need to miss one...

I think monkey pox was mostly contained through contact tracing and then vaccinating those who were potentially exposed.

It's more meaningful for monkey pox too because vaccination up to 2 weeks _after_ exposure still reduces the chances of getting symptomatic disease

> Any evidence for that? Actually, any evidence that contact tracing has actually had any benefits wherever it has been tried? I'm sure it helps at very, very early stages of a pandemic, and even then depending on which virus we are trying to trace... But I'd like to see actual proof that it helps for pandemics like COVID.

> Otherwise it is such an easy way to implement mass surveillance, that requiring very very thorough proof that it actually helps is the bare minimum. This story is proof of that.

I guess it depends on the type of technologies used. For example, Google's and Apple's Exposure Notifications API that many of the contact tracing application used didn't actually allow accessing locations directly: https://developers.google.com/android/exposure-notifications...

> Your app must have the BLUETOOTH and INTERNET permission in its manifest, but your app doesn't require and can't include ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION, ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION, nor BLUETOOTH_ADMIN. For more information about restrictions on your app, see the API’s Terms of Service.

In particular, in the section 3c:

> i. Your App may not request the Location, Bluetooth_Admin, Special Access, Privileged, or Signature permissions, or collect any device information to identify or track the precise location of end users

How it worked was that you gathered more or less randomly generated identifiers through Bluetooth of devices that were nearby and whose users had also turned on the app functionality. When you were less than 2 meters or so away for around 15 minutes, a contact would be registered.

If that person later got sick, the identifier (without PII) would be published and your app could alert you, along the lines of: "Hey, you were in contact with a person that was infected. You probably should self-isolate."

Source: worked on the Apturi Covid project in my country as a volunteer, though mostly developed the webpage: https://web.archive.org/web/20230530141239/https://apturicov... (was nice to see ~100 volunteers coming together to make it happen in my country, personally got a notification about possible exposure as well and self-isolated for a bit, though didn't get sick)

Actually wrote a blog post ages ago about how one might actually try to aggregate GPS data while preserving privacy, though obviously that sort of approach is a ticking time bomb because of the nature of the information: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/covid-19-contact-tracing-wi...

I think this ended up pretty much useless. If you use the app in public transport, you would get a warning every day.

What were you supposed to do with that information then? Most people just ignored it.

> If you use the app in public transport, you would get a warning every day.

Wasn't really the case for me going to work, but maybe that's because of keeping a bit of distance, which might just be possible due to the lower population density over and eventually a gradual shift to remote work.

> What were you supposed to do with that information then? Most people just ignored it.

There definitely were people who got the notifications and self-isolated for a while, to not end up spreading the virus and probably take a test ASAP.

If enough people used it, it could help quite a bit with limiting the spread. It did have some effect from what I've heard, which is still good, when doing nothing would result in more deaths. Thankfully eventually the virus variants got less dangerous, but it's sad when a good initiative ends up being less useful due to people just not caring.

In an alternate universe in which Covid was very rare in a population (say 5 cases in an entire city), then contact tracing might be able to push R<1 if everyone who got an exposure notification quarantined for a few days. Sure, maybe 50 people would be quarantining at a given time due to false positives (potential exposures with no infection), but that would be a fine tradeoff to protect the whole city, especially if those people were appropriately compensated for the service they would be effectively performing and the infringement on their civil rights. The number of people inconvenienced per person protected from Covid would be very small (much, much less than one).

Of course, nothing of the sort happened in the US, and in a situation in which most of the population gets Covid anyway in relatively short order, the number of people getting false positive notifications per person protected from Covid was be very large, and the total benefit was very low.

Here's one study that found the highly flawed, partial, and abandoned contact tracing in the UK nevertheless saved around 10,000 lives.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-36495-z

> It is understandable that South Korea would scrutinize refugees to some extent to prevent the infiltration of espionage agents and similar threats.

That makes sense. It does seem to point to an obvious maligned behavior NK could engage in: send inept spies, let it seem like a problem, and suddenly SK will have to apply extra scrutiny to any refugees. Hopefully the extra scrutiny won’t bump anyone from the “defect” to “don’t defect” camp. I guess it must be a secondary concern, I mean defecting is already a huge decision.

If NK has a relatively recent and relatively good quality photo of you (national ID card) they can just share it with the CCP and run it through their massive CCTV surveillance network

The South Korean constitution treats North Korea as an integral part of its territory, currently occupied by hostile forces. Therefore, anyone from North Korea is automatically, and in fact always has been, a citizen of South Korea. It's not just asylum, nor "de facto" citizenship. It's full citizenship, period.

There's a mandatory program that every refugee must go through, not only to get them accustomed to South Korean culture but also to filter out spies and criminals. You will be under surveillance for a long time afterward. But even if you turn out to be a spy, you are still a citizen of South Korea and will be punished as such. The law simply does not recognize any such thing as "North Korean citizenship".

Who are the occupiers of North Korea if there are no North Koreans?

edit: This was an honest question, I don't understand the reason for downvotes.

>Who are the occupiers of North Korea if there are no North Koreans?

South Korean criminals I'd assume? It'd be like if some American militia suddenly seized some area of land and declared themselves a new independent country and began oppressing everyone already living there. The US wouldn't recognize that (and would move to stop them), but while of course the civilians there wouldn't lose citizenship, the militia wouldn't legally lose citizenship either. They'd just be criminals. Citizenship is a fairly big deal and it's not trivial to renounce it. In the US at least IIRC you literally cannot renounce citizenship domestically at all outside very rare exceptions, you must be abroad and do so at a consulate or embassy, and it's something considered not automatic and instant. Additionally one can be charged an exit tax depending on net worth and tax status.

SK of course will have its own rules, but I'm just saying as a matter of law "everyone in that area of our country is citizens of our country being illegally coerced/controlled by other citizens of country, who are criminals" wouldn't be that strange. Although often countries facing such a de facto split work something out legally, there's no inherent reason countries can't refuse to legally recognize things indefinitely.

> Who are the occupiers of North Korea if there are no North Koreans?

Rebels, traitors, and criminals (at least, those claiming to be the North Korean government, or its active adherents), just as was the case of the self-described Confederate States of America within the terriory of the USA.

What's the legal basis for making their integration program mandatory if North Korean "refugees" are full citizens? What law would a person who refused the program be charged under?

Lots of things are mandatory for full citizens: education, military service, taxation, and generally not breaking any law.

> What changed about China's surveillance systems

In the last few years, I don't think anything substantial. IMO new difficulty (post zero covid) was due to massive human trafficking crackdown after the "chained woman" uproar in PRC. Don't forget some of these people are "rescued" by human traffickers / organized crime that sold them to sex work in first place. There's also geopolitical layer of these defections being run by Durihana, South Korean NGOs (double whammy of foreign + religious), conducting operations on mainland soil without PRC assent - there's no reason to allow these operations in the first place.

I don't think the surveillance system got much more sophisticated but for anyone wondering what china's surveillance system was like before the pandemic, I stayed in China three times for a total of about a month and a half in the 6 months before the pandemic.

When you get to the airport, you will likely notice the abundance of cameras, including paths which take you right under overhead cameras. Your photo will be taken at the airport border control and your visa will be stamped. You will get an entry card you must fill in before leaving china and present alongside your passport. This card details the hotel you will be staying at. If I recall correctly you also had to provide these details on the visa application form, as well as a recent photo.

When riding in a car, cameras on all major roads will periodically take photos of the front of every car every few hundred meters, accompanied with a literal flash.

Once you arrive at your hotel, you will be greeted with yet another camera, you will be required to check in your passport and have your photo taken. This system, I believe, is a government integrated system as between all the hotels I visited, they seemed to have a very similar computer with a similarly mounted camera.

If you plan to travel between cities, you will need your passport to buy the ticket. Once on the bus to a different city, it's possible someone at some checkpoint will abruptly enter the bus with a hand-held camera to videotape everyone's faces.

In large cities, especially the bigger ones, cameras are everywhere, there's cameras on top of cameras pointing at other cameras. Comedic cartoons of surveillance don't do it justice.

When using the metro (underground) transportation systems you will again be passing through gates with overhead cameras pointed at your face. Presumably to match up the chip-coins (or whatever the particular metro system of the city you're in uses) with routes taken and map these to photos of your face.

If you plan on taking a taxi, expect to have to use didi or something equivalent, didi doesn't take payments via bank cards, didi takes payments via wechat or alipay. To get wechat working as a foreigner in china, you must find Chinese people who will vouch for you to activate your account (let's hope you can chat up some people in a bar to help you with this feat). To get alipay working in china, you need a chinese bank account, unless you're extremely lucky and manage to get it working without one (I managed once out of my three trips). I'm pretty sure both alipay and wechat are tightly integrated into the chinese surveillance system.

I'm pretty sure the information which gets collected would be useless if it also didn't get dumped in a centralised system and processed collectively, so I'm pretty sure there is some centralised system with complex processing.

Your bit about taxis seems hard to believe. I haven't been in China in around 15 years, but there are still tons of foreigners visiting China for business reasons, and they need to get around. Requiring them to jump through these sorts of hoops to merely ride in a taxi seems a bit unbelievable.

Granted, sometimes the business we were visiting would send a car to our hotel, but not always, and not when we were going out on our own. Is cash still accepted by taxi drivers? That's how we usually paid when visiting for work.

I haven't traveled to China as a tourist since around that same time, when we (again) paid cash when taking taxis. China presumably (at least, pre-pandemic) still gets a lot of tourists, and it again seems unlikely that the only way a tourist can take a taxi is to get a random local to vouch for them, and/or an ability to open a local bank account.

The commenter is talking about the local equivalent of Uber, not actual taxis.

Normal taxis exist and you can get them called in by your hotel or whatnot but from the few experiences of using them, they require payment in cash or alipay and some of them refuse cash becoming extremely confused why you can't alipay for the taxi.

They're also way less convenient. Try calling for a taxi when you don't even know how to recognize a taxi advertisement, never mind finding a taxi company where the staff speak English in a non-major city. In Shanghai it's not hard, but try something off the beaten path and you'll seriously struggle. In fact, outside of Shanghai I struggled to find anywhere which would accept payment with anything other than cash or Alipay/Wechat (sometimes you weren't even able to use cash).

I was in China for business reasons, I needed to get around. Jumping through hoops was the name of the game.

Just read Nothing to Envy myself and one important point is that that work is from almost two decades ago at this point. With the advent of computerized surveillance, it is understandable that the difficulty has increased. A country such as China, it’s probably quite easy for the surveillance systems to loop in a human any time that an unknown face crops up. Paired with the pronounced physical and cultural differences between North Koreans and an other people in the world, it’s probably easy to guess when someone is attempting to escape from NK.

Does anyone have book recommendations for modern insight into NK? I have been reading about the country much more in recent weeks.

Re: point 1 -

1. Widespread surveillance camera emplacements, especially in large cities and over highways.

2. Widespread and explicit/implicit use of facial recognition software in conjunction with said camera systems.

Thank you, wide-eyed AI researchers. You are making the world a better place.

For more on what it's like being a North Korean software hacker working for the state, listen to the Lazarus Heist podcast. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xtvg9/episodes/downloads

The whole thing is good but IIRC season 1, episodes 5 and 6 are the ones most specifically about what it's like to be a North Korean software engineer in China stealing money online.

Wow, that was absolutely harrowing. Easily the most emotionally powerful thing I've read in the NYTimes (or any other major newspaper) in a while. It really puts into perspective just how horrible the conditions are for these people; it's easy to hear about NK in the news, or hear about defectors, and think little of it except for "what a shame", but this really puts into context the sheer inhumanity of the situation, the complacency of the Chinese government, and the depraved acts—like that of the North Korean woman and the police officer—that people can do to other, vulnerable, people.

The horror of when humans are seen as a renewable natural resource.

The Chinese government is beyond complicit. It’s active policy to find and capture these people, then send them back to NK. That’s why satellite countries are even intimidated into sending them back.

https://archive.ph/UXyGN

Android 13:

This site can’t provide a secure connection

archive.ph uses an unsupported protocol.

ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

Curiously it's working fine on iPhone Safari.

Also on ipad

use https://archive.is/UXyGN as an alternative, idk why people drop "phake" links ;)

Not helpful for you, but works fine for me on my PC, if that helps anyone else.

Works on Firefox

Are you using CloudFlare for your DNS (i.e. 1.1.1.1)? The archive URLs (ph, is, today) used to block requests from them for some reason (and possibly still do).

EDIT: Apparently the issue was resolved in 2022 (on mobile and gotta run so can't link wiki page).

I see this too. I'm using Firefox, and 1.1.1.1 for my DNS, and get SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP in Firefox, and the same error you do in Chromium. Curl also fails with a similar error.

1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8 (Google's DNS), and 9.9.9.9 (Quad9) all resolve archive.ph to the same IP address for me, 89.253.237.217.

If I get on a VPN (Mullvad, exit in Los Angeles, CA, USA), I get a different address for archive.ph (41.77.143.21), which works fine. If I get off the VPN, but put that address in /etc/hosts, it still works.

Reverse DNS on 89.253.237.217 (no VPN) gives me "example.spb.ru", while for 41.77.143.21 (with VPN) it's "host.41.77.143.21.binaryracks.net".

If I get back on the VPN, and put the Russian IP in /etc/hosts, it works as well. So I wonder if my ISP (Comcast) is interfering with TLS negotiation when attempting to access some hosts, and perhaps this is related to Russian sanctions, or just some other Russia-related blocking?

Anyhow, try putting:

    41.77.143.21 archive.ph

in your /etc/hosts file (not sure if there is an equivalent on Android), and see if that helps.

If you want to try to help, Liberty In North Korea is a charity I donate to: https://libertyinnorthkorea.org/

At least the new president of SK won't return defectors to NK to appease KJU like his predecessor president Moon.

https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2023/02/28/national/nor...

Recently read the book Escape from camp 13 I think it gives a good insight how life is in North Korea can recommend it

It was harrowing.

Any details you can share? Sounds interesting, but I probably won't get around to reading it.

The Yeonmi Park interview on Joe Rogan is FN nuts ;

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0G5o6GYjWgbSvKG3W2W2xO

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=joe+rogan+north...

Ms Park has gone from tragic and respected refugee, to fullout lunatic being caught in all kind of lies. I feel genuinely sad for her. Find the early interviews with her, without the plastic surgery (mentioning this because of timeline, not for judgement). You will see a different person.

WOW I had no idea - after the first interview, I didnt follow her in any regard... so I had no idea...

But - I did have a secret thought when I first saw the interview on Rogan, that the reason she was largely given credence and airtime was her atractive looks...

Based on your comment, she might be a demented sociopath along the same ilk as Elizabeth Holmes. (who thought getting pregnant would keep her out of prison)

> (who thought getting pregnant would keep her out of prison)

blatantly false and mysogenist!! sorry to say

Yeah i created this for a school project https://www.figma.com/file/UbkESYe64NjlmikA1WeC4k/Angels%C3%...

Wow this is horrible

It's not. The author's own dad publically called him out as a liar about his story (I believe the author claimed his dad was dead). It's a fabricated story, like almost all defector stories from North Korea. Stories like his sells well, and there's no way to verify any of it.

I really wish that bill Clinton could have brokered a deal with china (right before NK got nukes) which would have done a two-pronged invasion with the assurances that China would control all of NK as a direct puppet state.

A Chinese direct puppet state would be far superior to the current situation.

Clinton planned to have a kind of thaw with NK (before they had nuke), maybe using Vietnam thaw model. Post 94 GOP killed the plan.

Well, that didn't work, but there's still time for a similar deal with China in regards to Taiwan.

To save them from....?

This could have never happened because it would have meant sacrificing Seoul.

How are they allowed Telegram if they're constantly being surveilled (including, I assume, their phones)?

I wonder how many more decades of suffering it will take for the NK People to finally rid themselves of their government. Or perhaps it's at a point were the indoctrination is so complete and the control of the government so absolute that it is essentially stable forever.

Human spirit of being independent and free is a feeling which cannot be caged forever.

Kingdoms and dictatorships have happened and fallen before. This too shall - when a certain breaking point is reached, where the human suffering will exceed the indoctrination that it will be impossible to ignore the living conditions anymore. It is a ticking time bomb on the Kim dynasty.

NK would collapse in a month if the CCP cut them off from resources.

NM can't generate what is necessary for their own survival because they have implemented their own torture chamber of a nation.

even worse : my chinese wife saying this is all fake...

Paywall less link?

Happy to pay $1 for article but absolutely won’t get into a subscription. Unsubscribing from NY times is a nightmare.

opening the article link with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser) let me read it without the paywall. thought it's in a terminal so goodbye images or css

The archive link bypasses the paywall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36654027

If you haven't done it recently it's not the nightmare that it was. These days you say you want to cancel, they'll ask you "would you pay $X?", you say no and you're out.

North Korea exists because 5 years after the US liberated China from Japanese oppression, the communist Chinese declared war against the US lead UN forces in South Korea.

Fairly wild, in retrospect.

+ PRC sending back escapees back to NK

PRC should give the escapees the right to travel, instead of deporting.

I expect a lot of wumaos to resort to whataboutisms completely unrelated to the right-to-travel / right-to-asylum / right-to-immigration / etc

PRC restricts the right to travel of its own citizens; seems utterly unsurprising they'd give North Koreans even less.

China has a vested interest in NK remaining a viable country; again, seems unsurprising that they'd do this.

"Should" is aspirational. I agree with you in what China should be doing, but of course they won't.

It's not particularly wild because the South Korean government was almost entirely fascist collaborators who had run the colonial government for Japan, and who were reinstalled by mass violence and the crushing of dissent, with US approval. The SK government killed several hundred thousand of their own citizens, see the pictures of the Bodo League massacre taken by American officers for example.

[1]

> Estimates of the death toll vary. Historians and experts on the Korean War estimate that the full total ranges from at least 60,000–110,000 (Kim Dong-choon, who stated that this was likely a very conservative estimate) to 200,000 (Park Myung-lim).

> The massacre was committed by the government forces of president Syngman Rhee and falsely blamed on the communists led by North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. The South Korean government made efforts to conceal the massacre for four decades. Survivors were forbidden by the government from revealing it, under threat of being treated as communist sympathizers; public revelation carried with it the threat of torture and death.

Moreover, the Chinese did not enter the war until UN forces had driven all the way to the Manchurian border, along with regular "accidental" cross-border air attacks. MacArthur, Kai-shek, and Rhee all fully desired war with China and were hoping to escalate the conflict.

I've posted these quotes before, copied below:

[2]

> In the fall of 1946, the US military authorized elections to an interim legislature for southern Korea, but the results were clearly fraudulent. Even General Hodge privately wrote that right-wing "strong-arm" methods had been used to control the vote. The winners were almost all rightists, including Rhee supporters, even though a survey by the American military government that summer had found that 70 percent of 8,453 southern Koreans polled said they supported socialism, 7 percent communism, and only 14 percent capitalism. [...]

> Chung Koo-Hun, the observant young student of the late 1940s, said of the villagers' attitude: "The Americans simply re-employed the pro-Japanese Koreans whom the people hated." [...]

> Seventy of the 115 top Korean officials in the Seoul administration in 1947 had held office during the Japanese occupation.

> In the southern city of Taegu, people verged on starvation. When 10,000 demonstrators rallied on October 1, 1946, police opened fire, killing many. Vengeful crowds then seized and killed policeman, and the US military declared martial law. The violence spread across the provinces, peasants murdering government officials, landlords, and especially police, detested as holdovers from Japanese days. American troops joined the police in suppressing the uprisings. Together they killed uncounted hundreds of Koreans.

> American anthropologist Cornelius Osgood, spending much of 1947 in a village west of Seoul, watched as police carried young men off to jail by the truckload. A "mantle of fear" had fallen over once peaceful valleys, he wrote. The word "communist," he said, "seemed to mean 'just any young man of a village.'" On August 7, 1947, the US military government outlawed the southern communists, the Korean Worker's Party. Denied a peaceful political route, more and more leftist militants chose an armed struggle for power.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre

[2] - quotes from The Bridge at No Gun Ri

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_uprising

[4] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwangju_Uprising (note that this was in 1980, under a different dictator that the US also backed)

That’s a whole lot of words to say the US was demonstrably right. South Korea is an actual country and North Korea is an open air prison.

South Korea is a vastly richer, freer and more prosperous country than both North Korea (and China for that matter).

It's like saying Hitler was right because Germany is doing pretty well today and Russia isn't, which unfortunately would also not surprise me.

You know, not everything and everyone is a hitler-comparable situation.

Now, there is currently a genocide going on in one of the discussed countries so if you were going to draw a hitler comparison I think it should be there.

> You know, not everything and everyone is a hitler-comparable situation.

Explain why the mass killings I mentioned do not qualify.

Your request for rigorous justification is selective.

"Rudolph Rummel estimated that the North Korean Army executed at least 500,000 civilians during the Korean War with many dying in North Korea's drive to conscript South Koreans to their war effort. Throughout the conflict, North Korean and Chinese forces routinely mistreated U.S. and UN prisoners of war. Mass starvation and diseases swept through the Chinese-run POW camps during the winter of 1950–51. About 43 percent of all U.S. POWs died during this period. In violation of the Geneva Conventions which explicitly stated that captor states must repatriate prisoners of war to their homeland as quickly as possible, North Korea detained South Korean POWs for decades after the ceasefire. Over 88,000 South Korean soldiers were missing and the Communists' themselves had claimed they had captured 70,000 South Koreans."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_crimes#North_Korea...

The korean war was a shitshow on both the south and north korean sides but the south koreans were still better and the US was still on the right side.

The 38th parallel was originally drawn up based on Soviet troops invading Japan-controlled Korea from the North, and US troops invading from the South.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Republic_of_Korea

I'm not saying North Korea is a paradise or anything, but the country is technically still at war with the South Korea, which is heavily backed by the US. I wonder how much can be trusted from a NY Times(a US media company) article written by the "Seoul bureau chief for The New York Times".

You are perfectly right. Still "not a paradise" is an exaggerated euphemism once you look at available data (not only American).

Absolutely. I would definitely not like to live or even visit there. I just think that every story has 2 sides, and we don't hear the other side very often.

I absolutely despise this "every story has two sides" quip. No, every story doesn't have two sides. Yes, every story has multiple versions full of complete bullshit, but when we talk about a "side" we mean a reputable reliable side, and it is not the case that every story has two equally debatable and reputable sides. Sometimes a spade is a spade.

Reputable, reliable (tm) American sources also led to a million deaths in Iraq based on what turned out to be false premises. Yet your very own logic would've called "a spade a spade" and would've meant actually believing Iraq had usable WMDs because I mean, that's just the hard truth! Every reliable source on your side said so! Who would even believe Iraqi/arabic media that shouted for a year that Iraq didn't have them, over prestigious and western institutions like the NYT!

I have absolutely no doubt that North Korea is hell in earth, but there is a very very very good reason to say that every story has two sides. But maybe you just haven't experienced being the victim of "the reputable side" lying without any consequences. As a Muslim that grew up during the war on terror, I can't really say the same.

To be fair, it’s important to point out that the Bush administration politicized the intelligence apparatus. Specifically, Darth Cheney pressured the CIA into supporting his pet theories.

I bitterly told people before the second war with Iraq that there were no WMDs. Any well read, educated, intelligent person should have been able to confidently say the same.

An even more bitter pill - a lot of Americans still apparently believe there were WMDs found in Iraq.

Doubling down is a well known ego protection mechanism.

There is no reason to say "every story has two sides." Some may, and you can call that out, but no, not every story has two sides.

For example, a report about a new science result, the science is "one side." The "other side" is not the crystal healing quack that believes in magic. Two, you have video evidence of something along with multiple eye-witnesses. That is one side. The other side is not "oh but maybe all the witnesses are really part of a huge conspiracy and the video is fake!"

Some claims are not strong, and if a specific claim is not strong then you can explain why. But you cannot just flippantly say every story has two sides, that's bullshit. You need to say why a particular claim should be doubted.

There are multiple links in this thread showing how the media lied multiple times in the past, a whole documentary interviewing defectors who want to go back and telling how the South Korean Intelligence Service coerce and pay people to speak against the NK regime, but you probably didn't bother to open a single link and read about it.

You talk about science, yet, every anti-NK article sent in this thread are extremely poorly written and lack evidence to their claims. How is that "science"? Unless you are claiming that "science is when it matches my beliefs".

When people say that every story has two sides, it means that you as an observer might not know the full truth. Not that the full truth does not exist. Again, I gave a pretty good example of a story that was pretty solid "truth" but turned out to be a complete lie. Without taking a step back and wondering if there was more to the story than the obvious(tm) truth, you are completely vulnerable to believing bullshit as long as it's credible bullshit

Again, the saying means that we as mere observers of huge, complicated geopolitical moves cannot know the full context and are vulnerable to propaganda. Yes even from the good(your) side. No conspiracy is required for that.

I see where you are coming from, and I'm not saying that North Korean media or propaganda is reliable or the absolute truth. But does that mean the US "side" is reliable? Is the US really on the "right side" of the history of the world?

For exemple, did you know the US launched 3 bombs for every person in Laos? There are VILLAGES in Laos built with unexploded bomb left overs from the Vietnam War.

Did you know that there are children being born with life threatening health problems in Vietnam due to the amount of orange gas the US dropped there 40 years ago?

And quoting from a recent speech from Trump this year: "How about we are buying oil from Venezuela? When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse, we would have taken it up, would have gotten all that oil, it would have been right next door"

Is this the reliable country we should blindly believe? Are they really insterested in telling us the truth or are they just saying/doing whatever is needed to protect their interests?

> Are they really insterested in telling us the truth or are they just saying/doing whatever is needed to protect their interests?

regardless of that, shouldn't you also truly believe on "let North Koreans travel freely"?

Sorry, I'm not following. Could you rephrase your question? Are you asking me if I believe North Koreans should have the right to travel freely? If so, yes, I do believe that.

It’s also a country where the people are indoctrinated to believe their great leader is born under a double rainbow and descended straight from heaven, didn’t defecate ever, learnt to walk aged 3 weeks (yup) and to speak 5 weeks later at 8 weeks (yup), wrote 1500 books over 3 years, along with 6 operas (the bestest in the history of music, no less), and scored a 38 under par with 11 holes in one on the one and only North Korea golf course the first time he ever picked up a golf club before retiring from the sport for ever.

Oh and also if your family is deemed a dissident, the next 3–4 generations (including unborn children) will be imprisoned and raised in prison labor camps where children get killed by bashing their skulls open for stealing one (yes a single) grain of rice.

Not a paradise indeed. I’m not convinced the sanctions have much to do with any of the above though.

I'm sure you learned all that from other US/South Korean articles like this one, right?

I watched a documentary about North Korean defectors that wanted to go back to North Korea, one of the many reasons was to be with their families. They never mentioned their family were imprisioned. And it wouldn't make much sense to want to go back if their family was imprisioned.

Again, I'm no North Korean supporter or whatever, I just think there is a LOT of propaganda and misinformation about NK, and I think we should take everything with a grain of salt... Unless you think the US is a saint and would never lie about enemy countries.

And about the sanctions, I dind't mention any sanctions, you are just assuming that I support X or Y, when I never said such thing.

Unless you think the US is a saint and would never lie about enemy countries.

You seem to think the USA is just a monolith, and as such can be modeled as what the face of our government says. This is silly.

While it's true that business and especially the media is "in bed with" our government quite a lot of the time, it remains true that all have distinct interests.

Oh come on

Now that's a good argument.

The US isn't the only country in the world. Find sources from European or British agencies, unless the U.S. has them under control too?

I'm not the one insinuating that North Koreans are indoctrinated into thinking the great leader has magic powers. You should be the ones to present the sources to such bizarre claims.

Jesus, the guy is saying people are indoctrinated into thinking the great leader "didn’t defecate ever". Do you really think North Koreans are that stupid and have zero biology knowledge? Or maybe, uh, this is just fake? Pure propaganda? Are you really that dumb to believe something like that?

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/story-of-a-former...

Yoyre like someone who thinks gravity doesn’t exist. Literally everyone knows this, they’re not stupid, they’re lied to their entire lives. There are tons of defectors who will back this up and you can’t talk to anyone in North Korea outside of carefully guided tours set up by the state

And what does this article proof? Again, it has zero evidence. If everyone knows, should be easy to back up your claims with atual evidence.

This thread feels almost like a fever dream.

"Hey, I have some doubts that the DPRK isn't Satan incarnate."

"You do realize that's the same as not believing in gravity right!?"

Alright, let me setup a experiment in my room to divine their mathematical _evil_ constant.

I suspect that it's not that they really believe Kim has never pooped, but that doesn't mean that North Koreans don't tell each other these stories. I think it might be closer to "Chuck Norris Facts" that we tell ourselves. Obviously nobody believes any of those things about Chuck Norris, but we continue to do so, and in so doing confer to Norris some degree of reverence.

Or maybe even more mundanely, it's like Santa Claus. Adults don't believe that he lives at the north pole with flying reindeer. But we continue to teach children that he does - not because it's literally true, but because we seem to feel that having children believe this somehow makes our culture better.

I imagine that similarly, Kim is getting this reverence - but since it's channeled into a framework of him being their supreme leader, it reinforces his hold on the nation.

That is a much better analysis. I believe they do have some weird cult of personality going on, but that is very different from being "indoctrinated".

I'm not the most educated in this area, however this episode of darknet diaries (which seems to be well researched of the many I have listened to) paints a similar picture to OP https://open.spotify.com/episode/0DsGyzP9fYQ9LM6YiT5NS7?si=L... and includes interviews from several defectors.

It seems disingenuous to try and brush off the well documented brutality that is the way of life in North Korea, as being something made up by US / South Korea..

"A big thanks to Yeonmi Park for sharing her story with us"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeonmi_Park#Veracity_of_claims

The reason why we learn about North Korea almost exclusively from the Western sources is because it's a totalitarian dictatorship that suppresses information. You can check out their media online and see for yourself that it's full of propaganda.

We don't get tourists from North Korea because they aren't allowed to leave the country. We don't talk with North Korean people on the internet, because their access to the internet is tightly controlled.

There's no grand western conspiracy to suppress information about NK. It's North Korea itself that does that.

I know that on HN many consider blind contrarianism to be synonymous with rationalism, but seriously...

None of what you've just said justifies believing what the media or government say about North Korea, though, does it?

Apparently, "blind contrarianism" is when you don't take random blogs and news articles spouting ridiculous and unsubstantiated claims as gospel.

The media has a propensity to basically report anything people say about North Korea, no matter how ridiculous [1]. For example back in 2014 a bunch of news sources reported that Kim Jong Un fed his uncle to a pack of dogs, the only source for the story was a random blog that turned out to be a Chinese satirist but the media ran with it because it fit the narrative of "the crazy hermit kingdom". In fact even golf story you cited here is completely invented [3]. There are a lot of problems with North Korea, but at the same time there is a lot of misinformation being willfully spread by the media.

[1]: https://www.dw.com/en/north-korea-fake-news-on-both-sides-is...

[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-25621324

[3]: https://www.youngpioneertours.com/top-five-best-fake-north-k...

Other sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_coverage_of_North_Korea#...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/01/true-or-false-...

> It’s also a country where the people are indoctrinated to believe their great leader is born under a double rainbow and descended straight from heaven

Doesn't sound too much different from countries where the people are indoctrinated to believe their leader was born from a virgin, doesn't it? You'll say the difference is 2000 years into the history, so, we just need to give NK ~1925 more years.

The situation is drastically different. When considering your example, the source isn’t the leader himself nor are you imprisoned or killed for going against the narrative surrounding the leader.

Not a day goes past where I don’t see someone try to minimize commie atrocities…

Double rainbow leader also blasts family away with giant cannons point blank.

As with any news, you take it with a pinch of salt. Nothing new here.

Are there particular things in this report which you don't agree with, or consider suspicious, or know that it's an outright lie?

This article could have come straight from a fiction book. There is no evidence for anything that is being presented. It might be true, it might not be.

I'm not arguing they are lying or not, I'm just saying that we shouldn't blindly believe it.

But watching this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkUMZS-ZegM made me a little bit skeptical about those defector stories. It's a very good watch, and I guess it doesn't hurt to hear a different perspective.

I think understand where you're coming from - people can tell whatever they want, and the media definitely loves to run stories like this. These stories are both popular and the diplomatic risk is also low. And we also have the accounts of Yeonmi Park.

On the other hand, there's no reason to doubt the story too much. NyT's stories are generally highly factual, even though their primary bias is left-center. And we know that NK is a hellhole, not just from defectors, as the "Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul" video states, but from a myriad of other, independent sources.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeonmi_Park#Veracity_of_claims

The NYT regularly lies for US intelligence agencies. Or just publishes garbage from them as truth without verifying. There is every reason to doubt this story.

News about North Korea should be taken with a very large grain of slat given the medias history of reporting fake news about them [1][2][3][4] (note: I am definitely not pro-North Korea and this story is obviously very bad, but I think people should be a little more skeptical about North Korea news)

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/01/true-or-false-...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-25621324

[3] https://www.dw.com/en/north-korea-fake-news-on-both-sides-is...

[4] https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/fake-news-north-k...

How dare you presenting facts that the media has lied multiple times about North Korea in the past? Be prepared to be downvoted and flagged.

but in this case what would they lie about? i don't think anyone would deny existence of defectors or how hard it is for them to move around.

It's more like a poor quality article though, they start off by claiming massive new difficulties for these people in the last couple of years but don't tell you anything about why that happened. Mass surveillance and greedy traffickers who ended up stealing the money and ratting everyone out existed years ago as well, so they didn't really add any new information here, or at least didn't explain it very well.

More trusted than you, mate!

LOL. Alright then, Mr New York Times.

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