We Hacked North Korea With Balloons and USB Drives
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
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.
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.
Which makes the title of the article even more disingenuous.
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.
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.
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.
2014: The year of everything being "hacked"
Yes. Better to let all those people remain in Hell with no hope for a better tomorrow.
"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)."
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.
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.
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.
[1] some reviews: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/books/review/Schillinger-t... http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Every-Man-Dies-Alone-by-... http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/07/hans-fallada-al...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/11/north-kore...
Cultural exchange is the key way to breaking down barriers, the more they learn about us and vis-versa the quicker things will change.
I swear I can differentiate between NK and SK with nothing but type specimens.
Once found it through the wikipedia page about it. Installed it in a VM and ran it full screen to scare some of my colleagues :-)
or may be they just don't want to burn angry giant troll's whiskers with all the downside while no meaningful upside to be reasonably expected.
I wish the author had gone into the reasons why, or even if nobody in the State Department would comment on it.
Aerial leaflets were first used on a large scale during World War I by all parties.Up until around 1970's N Korea had better economy than S Korea. Shocking, I know.
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.
They were featured in this PBS Frontline special that also covered the balloon launch.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/secret-state-of-nort...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/secret-state-of-nort...
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?
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.