How to smuggle $1K into North Korea | Hacker News Reader

How to smuggle $1K into North Korea

politico.com

167 pointsadmp81 comments

One thing bothers me about the article. This guy Kevin is able to get elderly relatives to practice good opsec. They walk to distant locations to make and receive calls, presumably at predetermined times; they avoid mentioning real names and other personally identifiable information; they speak for a strict 100 seconds or less. Carefully trained people could do all this certainly, but how would you train an elderly relative you left in your backward homeland with all this trade-craft, especially since you can't train them face to face, but you're limited to brief phone calls?

Perhaps the opsec has been exaggerated to make the article more thrilling, or the opsec is true but it's a professional smuggling ring not involving elderly relatives.

I'm not an expert, but I would suspect that life in North Korea is good training for being very careful with things like this.

Yep, I remember reading on another article posted on HN that North Korea's economy depends a lot on the black market, which means that North Koreans must be cunning in their every day lives to get the basic things they need.

Yet another gratuitous cruelty: the killer [famine] targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. It was a phenomenon that the Italian writer Primo Levi identified after emerging from Auschwitz, when he wrote that he and his fellow survivors never wanted to see one another again after the war because they had all done something of which they were ashamed.

As Mrs. Song would observe a decade later, when she thought back on all the people she knew who died during those years in Chongjin, it was the “simple and kindhearted people who did what they were told—they were the first to die.”

-- Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

You're not the only one that is bothered by the article. The thing that triggered my radar was that the entire thing read like fiction. If it looks like a duck,...

The dictionary sounds like bullshit. North Korean and South Korean are completely different dialects, with different orthography and spelling. Bigger differences than different spellings in English. I can't see a dictionary like that being of any use to his family.

There is no way sources can ever be checked, and that means anywhere from 0 to 100% of the article could be fabricated.

(edit: an analogy to better describe the dubious usefulness of the dictionary, it would be like a native Greek using a French-English dictionary to learn English)

You're quite right that a dictionary wouldn't be very useful to learn a language from scratch, but if you already understand it a bit and want to expand your vocabulary, or better understand materials you already have access to, it'd be extremely useful.

> The dictionary sounds like bullshit. North Korean and South Korean are completely different dialects, with different orthography and spelling. Bigger differences than different spellings in English. I can't see a dictionary like that being of any use to his family.

Uh, totally wrong there. Might want to read up some more.

There are some minor spelling differences, pronunciation/accent differences. North Korean doesn't use any loan words, so there's a great deal of different terms for ice cream or radio, for example. But they're not totally different dialects. Any South Korean can understand a North Korean TV broadcast, for example.

North Korea uses loan words, albeit from Russia.

English loan words, that is, which South Korean is packed to the brim with these days. South Korean say aiseukeurim, North Koreans say eoreumbosung-i ("ice pudding" or something).

The article doesn't say "English/South Korean" dictionary, it just says "English" dictionary.

> North Korean and South Korean are completely different dialects, with different orthography and spelling. Bigger differences than different spellings in English. I can't see a dictionary like that being of any use to his family.

I'm actually studying Korean right now, and one of the textbooks I'm using relies on the North Korean dialect. I can attest that the differences are minor, and are mostly limited to things comparable to 'color' in AE and 'colour' BE.

>North Korean and South Korean are completely different dialects

>I can't see a dictionary like that being of any use to his family.

I assume you don't speak any Korean and are talking out of your ass.

The standard Korean used in South Korea and North Korea are both based on the same dialect - Seoul dialect. There's vocabulary differences, but nothing that would prevent a (South) Korean-English dictionary from being useful to a North Korean person.

I think the incentives are high enough for them to make it work, and those who can't make it work are not participating. The parents of the person in the article is probably also not that old and they have a network of relatives back home to train each other.

> how would you train an elderly relative you left in your backward homeland with all this trade-craft

An elderly relative probably knows/knows of various people who've been caught and punished for this sort of thing. Tends to motivate people to learn. Old people aren't stupid.

Right, our "dumb elders" here are people who feel that they've made it and that they don't (or shouldn't!) need to learn anymore. Plus being able to make you child or grandchild fix your computer might not be a bug, but rather a feature!

A society like North Korea is Darwinian in this regard.

If you're a good little citizen, you starve to death. If you're bad at breaking the rules, you go to the reeducation camps or to the firing squad. I'm sure that the example of former friends and family gives them ample motivation to learn good OPSEC.

Elderly people who have lived virtually their entire lives under such an oppressive regime would have opsec ingrained into their way of thinking.

My grandfather is in his 70s and I have heard from him about how some of his friends sneak around on their wives. These are men in their 60s and 70s who employ opsec to keep affairs concealed from their wives and the husbands of their mistresses.

Old people can be sneaky if the stakes are high enough and I guarantee that any elderly North Korean knows precisely what's at stake if they make any mistakes.

Maybe you're right, maybe there was some exaggeration for dramatic purposes but it's also plausible that the details are accurate.

Any North Korean that can reach old age probably knows more about security than the majority of us "hackers."

Excellent point!

There's a good case to be made for survivorship bias.

Those who are unwilling to or incapable of engaging in proper opsec don't live to be old.

You know what you call a North Korean with poor OpSec skills?

Dead.

> Detection tools and systems to track down international phone calls made inside North Korea are becoming increasingly accurate and more widespread, so calls must be kept under two minutes.

Could someone elaborate on this... keeping calls <2min to stop them being traced seems painfully Hollywood

No idea if this is right, but I imagine that's how long it takes to get the word out to start tracking this number, after which the actual tracking happens quickly.

Speaking from a telco perspective, all of our switches make a CDR (call data record) for ALL calls in and out. Origin number, destination number, number of seconds, date stamp, etc. etc.

There are millions of CDRs per day.

It would be trivial to filter them for calls to/from certain ranges of numbers.

EDIT: To be clear, it makes no difference if your call is one second or one hour, I can easily find the CDR for it and prove you made/received a call from/to X

You are correct, of course, except that I highly doubt North Korea has access to Chinese telephone records. As another commenter pointed out, the North Koreans are probably relying on radio triangulation. With the right resources, I'm sure they could detect that a call is occurring almost immediately, and perhaps even pinpoint where it is coming from, but they still have to go out and catch them. I don't know what resources the North Koreans actually have, but I suspect they are fairly limited.

There are reports that the DPRK government splashed out on mobile-phone radio detectors http://www.dailynk.com/english/read.php?num=12545&cataId=nk0... http://renewal.dailynk.com/english/read.php?cataId=nk01500&n... as part of a major crackdown on the border in the past year or so.

> You are correct, of course, except that I highly doubt North Korea has access to Chinese telephone records

They don't need access to Chinese records, they have their own records.

If you use a phone in North Korea, the switch in North Korea (likely) has a CDR for that call.

They are connecting to Chinese networks from the border areas; it is there in the article.

Radio triangulation can take time.

These are operating off of Chinese cell towers near the border, so the Nork authorities have no access to cellular system records. They have to use plain old RF direction finding techniques to pinpoint the location of a signal, and then catch a person with an illegal cell phone in their possession.

Thanks -makes perfect sense. I didn't realise they were using an out-of-country cell network to initiate communication.

Sure, it was in the last paragraph on page 1 of the article.

In my experience from communist Czechoslovakia, western stuff is not actually prohibited. It is illegal for peasants, but communist elite can enjoy all luxuries they can effort.

Chechoslovakia was never actualy communist. Like in Poland, Eastern Germany and several other countries, it was socialist.

Under the Ninth-of-May Constitution, the Czech government, that was controlled by the Communist Party, nationalised all industrial and commercial businesses that had more than 50 employees. That is communism - the means of production were owned and operated by the state.

The difference between socialism and communism was all in the "communist" propaganda. All east-european countries were "socialist" with the almost utopian goal of becoming "communist". It's a label that could be changed at anytime by the leaders. Technically, according to the doctrine, socialism was "everybody contributes based on ability, and receives based on the contribution", while communism was: "everybody contributes based on ability, and receives based on their needs", which was utopian. Western countries did not (want to) grasp the difference, so they just called the eastern block "communist".

Under those definitions, isn't most of "socialist Europe" not really socialist? I mean a lot of countries have got a safety net and welfare programs and all that which seemingly are standardized, not indexed to your previous income. So you pay in with taxes that are based on what you make (and thus you contribute based on ability).

Or is the idea that you keep a portion of your pay after taxes the "receives based on contribution" portion?

You have to understand that those were just slogans, with almost no practical equivalent. Corruption was rife, and taxes were almost unheard of. You get a salary (cash) and pay for goods with cash. No taxes on either end or annual tax return. Unemployment was officially inexistent, (you could go to jail if you had no job), therefore no welfare programs existed. Socialist parties in Western Europe had no clue about what they were wishing for.

I'll throw in the response that the "socialist" countries of Europe are socialist to varying degrees, and I don't think most of them actually consider themselves socialist. Unlike the US, most western countries think things like a social safety net and universal health care are good ideas in and of themselves, and do not necessarily ascribe any particular political ideologies to the ideas.

It was ruled by communist party and according to our leaders, communism was reached in 1936 in Soviet Union and in 1951 in other eastern countries.

I think you are confusing it with other countries such as Nazi Germany, which was ruled by National Socialist German Workers' Party ;-)

in a same was People's Republic of China has its own common people at its heart. Or Democratic People's Republic of Korea is... you get the rest ;)

That's actually true. Communism was suppose to be the next step after socialism. In communism we would abolish money, and people would take from stores only according to their needs. So we were taught in elementary school :)

Indeed, Kim Jong Un has an iMac: http://news.images.itv.com/image/file/183576/image_update_aa...

The stranger on the other line is usually a girl, a Joseonjok girl. The woman gives Kevin a South Korean bank account number, to which Joseph wires $1,000.

Joseph was not mentioned before in the article. Is that another fake name for Kevin, that the author forgot to replace? I don't understand otherwise.

From what I can comprehend of the article, Joseph is the name of the person that "wired" the money into the Sth Korean bank. I guess that this is another obfuscation layer for identity hiding.

Honestly sounds like a 'real name' for Kevin (it mentions his Christian faith, and Joseph is a 'better' Christian name than Kevin).

Here's a piece from 2014 about sending propaganda to NK via balloon.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/01/we-...

Since i once read that North Korea has a team of PR-people for online communities ( like Russia does), could HN check for the ip range of North Korea for possible propaganda here and indicate it? ( kinda interesting)

If someone of HN read this, the ip range is : 175.45.176.0 – 175.45.179.255 & 210.52.109.0 – 210.52.109.255

Russia do this too.

I imagine they're smart enough to use VPNs or something.

You know what should interest you, is that YOUR country is astroturfing (and probably much more than NK). There's probably 99% chances that you will detect NK astroturfing (they're not natives), but how well can you detect astroturfing from your country ?

~Easily. If they espouse opinions contrary to my own, they must be government shills.~

~Oh, hang on. I accidentally left my foil hat on. Let me take that off.~

It only takes a slightly elevated level of awareness. Usually, just knowing that it is possible that a participant in the discussion could be a paid propagandist is enough to spot likely candidates. While you can never really know for sure, if you check their posting history, and they only seem to care about exactly one thing, that's a strong indicator of suspicion.

On some of the message boards I frequented in the past, the general subject matter was such that it was extraordinarily easy to spot the cop whenever one showed up. They always did exactly the same thing, and it never worked even once. It usually went something like this.

  A: Hey guys, we should get together and *do* something.
  B: Sure.  Tell us your plan and we'll tell you if we're in.
  A: [*describes an overtly criminal act, usually involving violence*]
  C: Go back to writing traffic tickets, undercover cop.
  D: Do you actually get paid to annoy us, or are you doing it on a volunteer basis?
  B: You should take a look at your bosses instead of spying on us.
  E: [*spouts unrelated crackpot claptrap*]
  (end of thread)

On a more general forum, such as HN, with a much larger and more diverse audience, it is a bit more difficult to spot the paid propagandist. And the professionals have honed their skills in the past few years. They spend more time setting up for the payoff, building reputation and credibility, before using an identity for a mission-critical message. They almost certainly have voting rings set up on every site that uses voting.

Anyway, any genuine NK astroturfers would probably be doing it from a non-NK IP block. They're just brainwashed by their cult-like government, not stupid. They ones trusted to access the Internet to further the interests of their leaders almost certainly have access to Chinese, Russian, and American IP addresses.

Spot the shill might be an interesting game. How would you go about writing software to do this?

Might be harder as operations are aware that people can sniff out a shill or sock puppet if they have five minutes and cared.

Tempted to give this a shot anyway.

There is a growing amount of cheap contraband smartphones and electronics in DPRK. When it reaches a critical mass, the only thing stopping a revolution will be ISP access. Well-timed satellite or balloon based WiFi could foment a revolution?

"Well-timed satellite or balloon based WiFi could foment a revolution?"

Assuming the key players want a revolution, i.e. China, US, South Korea. We've seen how those sorts of revolutions can play out and they're not always better than what came before, at least in the short term (I'm mainly thinking about Syria and Yemen).

A democratic DPRK that hates the US is still probably better than a totalitarian DPRK that is ambivalent/slightly negative.

Unless the democratic DPRK uses more terrorism against us.

Even more? Fear is a terrible advisor.

Worse for us, sure. Still probably better for the people of the DPRK, assuming it's truly democratic.

Not necessarily. If the culture sucks, then democracy results in something like Iran.

A more likely scenario is reunification with South Korea.

It will make the German re-unification costs pale by comparison. Fewer people but a much bigger infrastructure gap.

There's a fascinating thought. The GDR hovered around what, maybe 20 years behind the West by the time of reunification? The DPRK has to be at least 50 years behind the South at this point.

My impression is that Chinese nationalists (a lot of CCP) are not excited about the idea of throngs of hungry North Koreans flooding the border area, nor of the prospect of a failed communist state right next door. However I think a lot of them would candidly admit that DPRK is already a failed state, and kind of an embarrassment to CCP policy and philosophy.

Excuse me for my ignorance but why do you think internet access has anything to do with a revolution?

Isnt a revolution a complex sociological phenomenon?

Im pretty much sure whatever holds DPKR together isnt lack of internet access.

Source: Iranian who lived through Iran's Green movement

It enables free-ish communication.

For Iran is your point, "what ultimately changed in the long run?". DPRK is more despotic - I don't think their current government will actually work, or last many years with a connected population. For them being able to communicate with, or even see the outside world would be revolutionary. The internet would begin to unravel the effects of 60 years of Juche.

There's pretty good internet access in most despotic countries, few of which have the advantages of social stability and breadth of surveillance apparatus as North Korea

Of course the likes of Lukashenko and Mugabe have seldom tried to claim that they're keeping their country perfect, and there's a risk that North Korea's propaganda is so unsophisticated it could end up looking utterly laughable even to pretty well-indoctrinated North Koreans[1], but its pretty hard to organise an effective resistance movement even when everyone in the country hasn't been educated in the values of the current regime since birth and the leadership hesitates to send entire families to gulags at the slightest provocation. It's worth pointing out that those who might be best to depose the Dear Leader, or at least undermine the hardliners in his inner circle, have had always had the privilege of access to communications with the outside world.

[1]but probably not as laughable as we think. If people with access to the same education and media as us find ISIS' rather crass blend of simplistic theology and beheading videos to be sufficiently appealing to trade their comfortable developed-world lives to don burkhas and marry ISIS fighters, then people occasionally watching broadcasts appearing to challenge those approved by the propaganda police can quite happily continue believing in the probably less-absurd cult of the unique virtues of the Dear Leader and the nation of the cleanest people enough to not die in a protest.

I think the poster is saying that revolution is a complex sociological phenomenon that is enabled/catalyzed by increased information and communication.

> Smuggling goods is highly punishable, and letting people pass through the North Korean border, rather than shooting them, could get the border guards killed instantly.

This made me think the border guards have Running Man-esque bomb collars around their necks. I'm sure there's consequences, but compared to shooting smugglers I don't think their punishment would be that instant.

Summary execution is pretty expedient, especially if you don't care about the facts.

I sometimes fantasize about setting up a website or a kickstarter that lets people send balloons with the $9 chip, GPS, and tiny fans that will guide it any point in the map. The problem with weather balloons that are being sent from South Korea is that 1) Korean government are too much of a pussy to aggravate North (given their lack of response after naval ship attack and island shelling) so they attack activists 2) The weather balloons mostly end up in unreachable places, no way of knowing if it was successful.

It would be like a website or a kickstarter where people could pay to send packages that include communication equipment, non perishable food items, medkits, insurgency, guerilla warfare, etc.

Imagine the impact this would have on North Korea when suddenly the citizens are communicating anonymously with each other and outside world.

This can only be done if the balloons could self guide themselves using GPS with a high degree of accuracy, and they be launched outside of South Korea. Maybe it can be done from America but the pacific ocean is turbulent and it will be tough to make it all the way in to North Korea. Japan is the best bet but South Korea will probably pressure them. So this leaves out launching it directly from the States, the challenge and costs go up dramatically since the journey must be made across pacific ocean.

"too much of a pussy"

Poor choice of language aside - South Korea has much more to lose in a direct or indirect conflict, and even if victorious (very likely despite the "size" of the NK force) would still sustain casualties that make them countering any NK aggression ... complicated.

> Korean government are too much of a pussy to aggravate North

Perhaps they are more concerned with the well being of their citizens in Seoul than with being the big tough guy.

"How to smuggle 1K..." Technically it was $700

It's a good point. Kevin's mother asked for $1000, but she ended up with less. Feels like sloppy reporting.

So this article just detailed for north korea government how people are smuggling. Which means people are going to be found and killed.

How is this a good idea? This is people's very lives.

If even one person is executed over this, do the journalists just shrug and go browse amazon some more or wander around the mall?

If you want to expose North Korea, expose the government, not the people desperately trying to survive.

I love how we are freaking out about Iran, meanwhile North Korea makes Iran look like disneyland and actually HAS nuclear weapons AND missiles they can be attached to. The deep hypocrisy with only caring about Israel is thick and deadly.

I think it (should) work both ways. By having it exposed (which I believe the NK govt know already), probably some sympathetic people smarter than me could come up with a better solution.

They already know. When they catch people, they have ways to make people tell them anything.

> So this article just detailed for north korea government how people are smuggling. Which means people are going to be found and killed.

The article is generalities. Don't you think the government would already know all that? If the government had caught and interrogated even a single smuggler or a single person who'd received foreign goods, they'd know far more specific information than this article gave.

The NK not only knows about that smuggling, but also probably takes cut of the profits from it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_39

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