North Koreans are subverting their government's censorship by sharing files on USB sticks and MP3 players, claims a report.
A Quiet Opening, by Nat Kretchin and Jane Kim, uses testimony from defectors and refugees to build a picture of how popular media originating from other countries is within the isolated dictatorship. The answer, you may be surprised to hear, appears to be "very".
North Korea—or to use its official name, the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea—is also known as the "Hermit Kingdom", a reflection of its isolation from the outside world. North Koreans are fed a strictly controlled and limited diet of media, and officially have no access to unvetted material. However, the collected testimony paints a picture of a people who are slowly gaining an understanding of the outside world—a process which began when the severe famine of the late 1990s shook many North Koreans' faith in their government.
Connected officials and elites are able to buy MP3 players, DVDs, and USB sticks from connections in China, and the contents are handed around surreptitiously. It's a modern twist on what was called "samizdat" in the USSR—forbidden books and pamphlets, copied and spread among activists in secret.
A 44-year-old male from Chongjin (the third largest city in the DPRK, close to the Chinese border) told the authors of the report: "About 70-80 percent of people that have MP3/4 players are young people. When you do a crackdown of MP3/4 players among high school and university students, you see that 100 percent of them have South Korean music."
The report also quotes several people who say that families and friends often gather together to watch the latest episodes of the most popular South Korean shows. Soap operas from the South are incredibly popular—and the gap between what they're told about the South (that it's poor and repressive) versus what they see (young people in designer clothes having parties) is contributing to widespread disbelief in the regime's propaganda.
The most important officials have always had access to material forbidden to the wider populace, but the implications of this latest report are that these illicit materials are filtering down to other families—and they're not scared to share their illegal media with others. A 47-year-old female from Pyongyang says kids in her childrens' class would use the class computer to copy files for each other—a crime that not long ago would have been considered unthinkable.
Recent visitors to North Korea will have noticed that mobile phones are a common sight even in the poorest areas of the country (the country has one of the highest levels of 3G penetration in the world), and in some of Pyongyang's more elite districts iPads are not unusual. While the penalties for accessing foreign media content are incredibly severe—ranging from three months to five years of forced labour, depending on how subversive it is—the proliferation of so many electronic devices is making it easier for people to communicate both with each other and the outside world.
While the North Korean government may restrict the access its people have to the Internet, it's nevertheless believed to have one of the most effective online foreign espionage operations in the world. In the wake of widespread GPS jamming in South Korea in May, information security professor Lee Dong-Hoon claimed that North Korea had the third most powerful cyberwar capabilities in the world after the US and Russia, and organisations which cover North Korea in the West are frequently subjected to hacking and DDoS attacks.
It's worth noting that this report, like most that come out of North Korea, relies on sampling a very small subsection of DPRK society. Most refugees come from either Pyongyang or other richer border regions with China, as those are the sections of society with the material wealth and connections that give them a chance of defecting in the first place. The majority of the population lives in much poorer rural conditions and with more chance of being persecuted if caught with forbidden media. The report points out that only 16 percent of those questioned for the report said they had access to some kind of computer. Frequent power shortages make it unlikely that number will dramatically increase any time soon.
