We Hacked North Korea With Balloons and USB Drives

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/01/we-hacked-north-korea-with-balloons-and-usb-drives/283106/

by vonnik • 13 years ago

120 82 13 years ago

Does this strike anyone else as a bit careless and/or reckless? Lets think about this...

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.

markdown3• 13 years ago

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.

joyeuse67012• 13 years ago

Yeah, what's up with that title? How disappointing.

jpatokal3• 13 years ago

They've been doing this for years. This particular launch was stopped, many others have succeeded. Whether they're making a perceptible impact is, of course, a question mark, but given the extent to which the DPRK fulminates against them, at least they're viewed as a threat.

http://www.seoulusa.org/balloons/

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

I believe you misread the article, it talks of a 'current' activity which was successful "after our previous launch attempt was thwarted by South Korean police forces."

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.

tptacek2• 13 years ago

PBS Frontline has footage of them doing it.

dmtzz• 13 years ago

just signed in to say the exact thing.. why is everyone using the the term "hack" for every expression? It's really annoying and cringing..

windsurfer• 13 years ago

    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.

I'd say they gained access to North Korea without authorization. This is hacking.

joyeuse67012• 13 years ago

Nope, reread article.

markdown3• 13 years ago

"Tonight at 9, a damning report on the impact of Mexican hackers on American jobs" - Fox News

Crito2• 13 years ago

By that logic, John Dillinger hacked banks.

grrowl• 13 years ago

I hacked the bus to get to work this morning.

2014: The year of everything being "hacked"

eli• 13 years ago

It also means this: http://hacks.mit.edu/misc/faq.html

verroq2• 13 years ago

Until they dumped North Korea's database on pastebin.com and there's a service out that helps North Koreans check if their details were compromised. It's not hacked.

MrZongle22• 13 years ago

"Does this strike anyone else as a bit careless and/or reckless?"

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?

Crito2• 13 years ago

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.

jedmeyers• 13 years ago

How exactly those balloons helped the people of NK to not remain in Hell?

freshfunk• 13 years ago

There's no freedom of information in the country. They subverted this by cleverly sending technology and information by using low-tech means. Sounds like a hack to me.

gcb0• 13 years ago

Just like in the US, everyone in north korea is guilty of a crime already. if the police officer decides to enforce the law on some citizen randomly, it is not because of the new irrelevant crime, the citizen was already guilty of something else that could have been used to punish him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

Does this strike anyone else as a bit careless and/or reckless?

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.

hyperbovine• 13 years ago

But you've just eliminated 97% of the internet!

anonymfus• 13 years ago

May be better idea would be to use some indirect, steganography like methods. Imagine the book which looks like official Kim Jong-il biography but starting with some page has his real biography and other information. Imagine the book which looks like official school physics book, but with additional paragraphs about rationality methods (are korean translations of lesswrong sequences exist?).

rz2k2• 13 years ago

The book Every Man Dies Alone[1] by Hans Fallada deals with a very similar subject. At the height of the Nazi Party's political power in Germany, an elderly couple left postcards to be found in public spaces with subversive messages like, "Mother! The Führer has murdered my son. Mother! The Führer will murder your sons too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home in the world."

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...

XorNot2• 13 years ago

Actually it's mostly that the people they control are starving (and now, addicted to meth as well).

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.

dredmorbius• 13 years ago

Evidence of just how monolithic the regime was, comes from the percentage that were immediately turned into the authorities being something like 95%.

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.

higherpurpose• 13 years ago

The "ROI"? Really? Some people want to risk their lives if it means progress for everyone else. What was the ROI for Snowden?

zhemao• 13 years ago

Even when conducting a selfless act, you still want your action to accomplish some goal. Snowden's goal was that the American public would know about the government's activities. This group's goal, presumably, is to give North Koreans information about the outside world. It is an open question whether the balloons are actually reaching anyone.

verroq2• 13 years ago

Well clearly they need to send more balloons. So everyone gets arrested.

noonespecial• 13 years ago

They don't need reasons to arrest anyone they want at any time. They just do. The reason gets made up later, if at all.

Toenex• 13 years ago

Surely even the North Korean Government won't object to a USB drive full of kitten pictures. Or are they sending an unrepresentative sample of the internet? :)

MrZongle22• 13 years ago

"Until this year, the U.S. government provided support for these groups through the National Endowment for Democracy and the State Department’s DRL programs. The majority of this funding however, has been cut in the last year."

I wish the author had gone into the reasons why, or even if nobody in the State Department would comment on it.

lostlogin• 13 years ago

I may be too cynical, but I see democracy as something the DoD implements these days.

yahelc• 13 years ago

Chances are it's a boring answer -- lots of things were blindly cut due to the sequester.

VladRussian2• 13 years ago

The episode underlined how many South Koreans regard the human rights struggle in the North as merely a distraction and an annoyance.

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.

wodenokoto• 13 years ago

That one annoyed me too. The police stopped them on the grounds of actual threats of war and his reply is that they are not taken seriously.

riobard• 13 years ago

I'm wondering how many people near the border have access to computers that can read those DVDs and USB drives?

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?

tptacek2• 13 years ago

The PBS Frontline episode from yesterday makes it seem as if thumb-drive video playing computers are common (perhaps only among the upper class, though) in NK.

ekianjo• 13 years ago

In a country where you can't even get reliable food supply and where you suffer from frequent black-outs, let me doubt about that.

omegaworks• 13 years ago

This has been done before, and it's not pretty. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_leaflet_propaganda

grizzles• 13 years ago

I've been thinking about this exact idea. Shocked that someone actually went out and did it. My idea was drones releasing paper helicopters with short messages, using the design of maple tree seeds. In my version of the idea it was immediately prior to a military strike to topple the regime with minimal casualties. Messages like: "Stay away from military bases / groups of people". "Don't fire on invading troops." "Fake illness/injury to avoid service." and most importantly "Don't take up arms". A bit of a shame it doesn't look like there is going to be a follow up. The evidence seems to suggest that encouraging domestic dissident movements doesn't usually effectuate short term political change.

astine• 13 years ago

Leaflet dropping is actually fairly standard practice and has been so for decades. The US invasion of Iraq did the same thing: http://www.psywar.org/apdsearch.php

azernik• 13 years ago

About a century, actually: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_leaflet_propaganda#Ear...

    Aerial leaflets were first used on a large scale during World War I by all parties.

dba7dba2• 13 years ago

N Korea has been sending leaflets to S Korea, well back when N Korea really was the better Korea (in terms of economy).

Up until around 1970's N Korea had better economy than S Korea. Shocking, I know.

Renaud• 13 years ago

I wonder if there shouldn't be a place for an activism Kickstarter where an NGO could pitch projects, such as financing a radio station or releasing these balloons, and get them financed by a wider, worldwide audience.

Freeboots• 13 years ago

I'd like to see these pro democracy leaflets if possible, Im interested to see what aspects of society/culture are displayed.

vxNsr• 13 years ago

Yeah, it would be kinda cool to see what it is you guys sent them.

aortega• 13 years ago

Nice "hacking". If I were South Korea I would buy some weapons before sending cute balloons to a country run by a lunatic that can squash you in a single night.

natrius• 13 years ago

"[North Korea] has no Internet."

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.youngpioneertours.com/

bane2• 13 years ago

There's a lot of notion that North Korea has cyber-espionage groups that operate against external nations.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/11/north-kore...

jpatokal3• 13 years ago

Internet access in the DPRK is strictly limited, but they do have an intranet, which uses IP, DNS, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwangmyong_%28network%29

sb232• 13 years ago

Wow. 12mbps is way faster than mine. I guess Australia really is behind.

jonknee• 13 years ago

Your WiFi network isn't 12mbps?

Svip• 13 years ago

I love the self-invented TLDs, like .store and .firm. Maybe they use them for their internal DNS.

Jakob• 13 years ago

http://www.onlydomains.com/gtld/generic/.store

brador• 13 years ago

Doesn't the money you paid to visit help fund the oppressive regime?

scotty792• 13 years ago

Isn't it true about any money that goes into North Korea?

nextw33k• 13 years ago

That is a very dangerous way to think.

Cultural exchange is the key way to breaking down barriers, the more they learn about us and vis-versa the quicker things will change.

sneak• 13 years ago

Is there some type designer that makes extra-gross hangeul typefaces for DPRK use?

I swear I can differentiate between NK and SK with nothing but type specimens.

codfrantic• 13 years ago

Red Star OS is available from http://www.openingupnorthkorea.com/DPRK%20Red%20Star.iso

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 :-)

aluhut• 13 years ago

I would love to go there but working for a government contractor and visiting an "Axis of Evil" state won't work out :/

huskyr• 13 years ago

This blog post about North Korea by Sophie Schmidt, the daughter of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, is pretty interesting too, with lots of weird tidbits about the use of technology:

https://sites.google.com/site/sophieinnorthkorea/home

easy_rider• 13 years ago

Too bad you can't eat a CD.

akavel• 13 years ago

Does anybody know of an NGO (1 or more), that could be supported by individual, with money originating in EU, the NGO doing activities towards helping people suffering under North Korean regime, which are somehow verifiable/verified? I suppose this is hard (impossible?) to at the same time have little publicity (helping kinda covert operations), but still enough publicity to get "confirmed" by some reputable organization, but maybe here I could find someone who could help me with that? I would be very grateful for any advice... I have this thought for quite long; I've learned somewhere about some organizations, e.g. "Open Doors" (?), but I'm uneasy about paying somebody based only on his own claims...

tootie2• 13 years ago

http://www.libertyinnorthkorea.org/

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...

tootie2• 13 years ago

PBS Frontline covered this event as well as other efforts to smuggle popular media into North Korea as well as getting documentary footage out. Well worth watching. It was pretty gut wrenching and uplifting.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/secret-state-of-nort...

jablan• 13 years ago

What's the point of the dollar bill? An epitome of democracy?

We Hacked North Korea With Balloons and USB Drives

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