North Korea Introduces 'Secure' E-mail

An anonymous reader sent in a strange little story running over at ZD that discusses North Korea's new secure email system. There's a lot of strange bits in there about trained North Korean hackers, and the fact that North Korea's news agency is hosted in Japan.

Comments

DictatorMail.com ?

[grub]

How the system (likely) works:

The government assigns you a password.

You send email, people send you email.

You sleep well knowing that your email can only be read by the sender, recipient and.. that.. man.. with the rubber hose.

To me it sounds like Kim Jong Il is getting even more paranoid. He's wanting to control (and snoop) all email in within his borders for fear of net-savvy citizens daring to send subversive email. Pretty soon he'll probably start shooting people with glasses ("intellectuals") as Pol Pot did in Cambodia.

Hint to Kim Jong Il, try feeding your millions of starving children before promising them a corrupt email system few of them will ever live to see.

Re:DictatorMail.com ?

[KrispyKringle]

I think for the most part you are right, but I'm not convinced that this is just a move to be able to snoop on all e-mail. In communist countries like North Korea or Cuba, many services are provided by the government or by government subcontracters, as is the case in the States with public utilities. The reach, though, is far broader than of our public utilities, covering media like TV and radio, telecom and telephones, etc.

It may very well be that Kim Jonh Il feels that Internet access is critical to his nation's development (as many Americans feel about promoting third-world development in general--teach a man to fish versus simply giving a handout) and is trying to promote it through government sponsorship in the form familiar in his economy.

I'm not defending him, but there may very well be more here than you suggest.

Re:DictatorMail.com ?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a regime that forces its athletes to shut curtains on their buses when traveling in foreign countries because they might have to bear the sight of all the unspeakable horrors in capitalist countries if those windows were open. Horrors like traffic, I guess.

At any rate, the last thing the North Korean government wants is an online citizenry.

This latest press release by the Japanese North Korean contingent is just more floundering of a sadly dying nation.

Re: Echelon

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, give it a fancy marketing name like "Echelon" and it's ok, but some crazed ruthless dictator does the same thing and we call him paranoid.

Definition of secure email...

[192939495969798999]

'the data in the email will be encrypted, so only someone that can hack our encryption method can read the text of your email.'
So, I could still harvest your address, right? It'd be pretty hard to encrypt email addresses while the messages are being delivered:
POST to 239frj349fu34nf3498f34nf9u834nf9834f....
nah, I don't think that will work.

Re:North Korean Insanity

[hummassa]

Someone is nuts if it believes a site with a banner "china and iraq knew about 9/11"... Oh, boy.

Fighting oppression

[mcSey921]

From the article: "It remains illegal for any South Koreans to email their northern neighbors without government permission. "

So South Korea is fighting the oppression and censorship of the North with oppression and censorship?

Re:Fighting oppression

[dochood]

It might be a little hard for Americans to understand this concept, since the Canadians don't have a 1 million man army sitting on the border, and SCUDs with chemical weapons on them, waiting for a chance to invade.

The Canadians don't send spies down to pick off our citizens and stir up our students into riots, etc.

The Canadians have not sent assassins to kill our president, submarines to drop off commandos to do who-knows-what, thugs to ax-murder people chopping down a tree, and they haven't bombed any of our airliners using 20 year old girls and 70 year old men.

Democracy, although we'd like to think so, doesn't export as well as Hollywood movies or blue jeans. Democracy is a pretty foreign concept to most parts of the world, and it takes time to build a solid, true democracy in any place that doesn't have the same foundation and culture that we have.

dochood

Re:Fighting oppression

[gilgongo]

If you're implying that America somehow exports democracy and social justice to the rest of world, would you care to explain how and to whom?

What about Cuba, or Nicaragua, for instance? What about Honduras? How about Haiti and Guatemala?

All those countries have experienced what you describe, and worse, against them and their national sovereignty. So if North Korea's doing it - they probably just see themselves as going with the flow!

I case you doubt what I say, lets take this little story about Nicaragua as an example:

20 years ago, Nicaragua was on the receiving end of covert operations, assassinations, funding of guerrilla groups and illegal importation of weapons, etc. all perpetrated by the United States. It was on the receiving end of what most people would call terrorism.

Nicaragua responded not by bombing Washington, but by taking it to the World Court, presenting a case for which they had no problem putting together evidence for.

The World Court accepted their case and ruled in their favour. It condemned what it called the 'unlawful use of force' (which basically means international terrorism) by the United States, and ordered the United States to terminate their aggression and to pay massive reparations.

The United States dismissed the court judgment and announced that it would henceforth not accept the jurisdiction of the court. So Nicaragua then went to the UN Security Council which considered a resolution calling on all states to observe international law. No one was mentioned but everyone understood who was being talked about. But the United States vetoed the resolution.

The US therefore now stands as the only state on record which has both been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism and has vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on states to observe international law.

And you think North Korea is bad?

So - Nicaragua then went to the General Assembly where there is technically no veto but a negative US vote amounts to a veto. It passed a similar resolution with only the United States, Israel, and El Salvador opposed.

The following year they went to the General Assembly again, and this time the United States could only rally Israel to the cause, so two votes opposed to observing international law.

At that point, Nicaragua couldn't do anything lawful. It tried all the measures. They don't work in a world that is ruled by force.

So, um, how does the United States export democracy? How does it help to promote world peace exactly? And how much do you know about what the US government is doing overseas?

Clearly very little I think.

Re:Fighting oppression

[haxor.dk]

Hm. The same Nicaragua in where the Sardinistas ruled, slaughtering in tens of thousands? But now, they've been trown out - democratically - and suddently, mass graves start turning up.

But of course - because the USA intervened in the creation of a cute lil' socialist dictatorship, you have to bash them as un-democratic. Um, yeah.

Re:Time-honored facts...

[HeghmoH]

Perhaps if they would halt their nuclear weapons and long-range missile programs, the other nations of the world would consider the case in a more favorable light.

Re:What I find interesting..

[Anonymous Coward]

Today they still harras Cuba constantly. It's silly.

Because Cuban-Americans want us to harass them.