Slashdot Mirror
S. Korea Claims N. Korea Has Trained 600 Crackers
maggeth writes "The Financial Times is reporting that North Korea's military and intel services have trained as many as 600 computer hackers specifically for attacks against South Korea, Japan, and the US. South Korea claims that the north has a five-year university program for hacker training and cites recent attacks on government computer systems. The South Korean defense ministry claimed in the report that 'North Korea's intelligence warfare capability is estimated to have reached the level of advanced countries,' and that the caliber of the North's hackers is high. So far it appears that these specific attacks are based in China, although it is not clear if North Korea is using Chinese networks or if China is involved."
The source of the story is the South Korea's defence ministry, sworn enemy of North Korea. They know this will worry western govts and so turn them further against NK. What reason do we have to believe this story? FUD, FUD, FUD.
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This report could also come from Microsoft public relation who' claim it's not their products which are not sure but rather some malicious hackers trained to break into them...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
In any case, it's probably not in their best interest to go through with it.
Yes. I'm in Vietnam and the quality of their comrades here is nothing to be frightened of.
Key word is "trained". Trained by whom? You're not going to learn much when you don't have the equipment, you're hungry, and you have to spend six hours a day in political indoctrination classes.
Anyone with talent *and* internet access will be busy looking over their shoulders because they'll naturally be on the "highly susupicious" list at the Ministry of Culture. And they'll want to devote at least of few hours' worth of that talent to making some extra cash to make sure their families can put an extra cabbage in the pot.
Then remember it'll be easy to know which direction to look for these hackers. The only place a North Korean hacker is not going to stick out, or the only place he can afford to live, is China.
This article is just trying to scare us. They had nothing better to write about. Nothing to worry about; nothing to see here.
Bit self defeatist, isn't it? Now, should anything happen, the main internet links between NK and the rest of the world will "accidentally" be damaged, and magically all the problems will stop. Does anyone know of a site that lists all the ranges by country? I started to do it, but the RIPE whois server blocked me :\
Get your own free personal location tracker
you have to realize that most companies are forbidden to export anything to N.K. And to think the latency of the last explosion getting out - it's no wonder as there are 1.1million phone lines in a country of 22.7m people. cellular phone availability data is nonexistant, and all the phone are routed through beijing and russia.
sort of to answer the origial story, though - N.K. probably is using china's networks to get online not necessarily because china have anything to do it other than just selling them bandwidth (just like MCI could be selling bandwidth to western malicious internet personalities without knowledge). I do wonder if the said hackers have to contend with the firewall of china, though...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Hackers train THEMSELVES!
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
NK has acquired nuclear weapons and isn't even hiding them but wants the world to know it has them
They work better at detering attack that way.
I mean, come on, if any of that was true Bush certainly would have attacked NK and not Iraq, that did not have ties with terrorists, did not posess WMDs and certainly didn't engage in cyber warfare.
Why would Bush want to attack somewhere which actually has WMDs, it would be worst than Vietnam for the US "body" count.
Maybe this is the true aim. You know, people are morer willing to learn about and take security measures if there's some concrete threat, at best from a "known evil". A general "it's dangerous in the woods" is far less likely to be successful than "in the woods there are wild animals which will kill you", let alone "you know, in the woods there's that wulf which already has killed someone, and there's a whole pack of other wolves as well"
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Anyway, this isn't anti-US, I just hope that the near future of people who are hungry contains food, not bombs.
This is where the problem lies. We are giving them food. However, the North Korean government is re-appropriating this food for its own purposes. Besides that, the only reason they can't grow all the food they need is because the best farming land is reserved for opium, by mandate of the North Korean government. (The War on Terror intersects the War on Drugs. And there was much rejoicing.)
So let's see what options exist:
1) Bomb the fuck out of the North Korean military and invade. Problem: a modern government/military is comprised of "the people." Maybe an invasion would turn out like a bloodier Iraq on the front end, but it would surely be more worthy an action.
2) Disable the WMDs covertly, then negotiate now that they have no leverage. This is very risky and not likely to work.
3) Continue the economic sanctions on North Korea, but continue to give humanitarian aid. Same as usual, with no progress.
4) Completely cut off North Korea from the rest of the world, except China (probably). Does no good.
Kim Jhong-Il (sp) is entirely different from Saddam. Kim is a rising star as far as dictators are concerned, and Saddam was old and busted. Besides, North Korea has the WMDs.
In short: Yeah, I'd rather not see bombs. But the food is never going to get into the hands of the North Korean people as long as Dr. Evil over there is still in charge.
It is a criminal organization that happens to control a territory and exploit starving slaves.
;p
It routinely abducts Japanese and South Korean citizens just to keep NK spies trained (Kim, a movie buff, also had a director kidnapped so he could direct movies for his own enjoyment!).
Moreover, NK is the world's largest counterfeit money manufacturer and a major drug manufacturer. Oh, and it's into exporting weapons and missiles, too.
It is not only into illegal exports. It's also into massive-scale blackmail. It's been into nuclear blackmail for quite some time. Turning to cyber-blackmail was only a logical step.
When one is desperate for money, any buzzword-compliant threat will do.
This is not a country. This is SPECTRE.
Maybe the CIA should start training killer angora cats
Or maybe Bush knows you can't really win a war against a country which has nukes, where half the population belongs to a highly indoctrinated army, and besides, NK is a crappy little piece of the world with no money and no oil so it's not worth invading. I mean, I hate Bush as much as anyone else does, but he may have some common sense here.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
A 5 year university programme. That's a couple of years longer than a BSc in the UK. So roughly equivalent to BSc Hons plus a year postGrad. They ought to be bloody good. When did this pgramme start? Are there any graduates? It's not exactly a secret, is it? How come South Korea has only just noticed?
Sanctions may make it harder for the man in the street to buy computing equipment, but they cannot stop a determined state form getting what is so widely available in the rest of the world. So if North Korea wants hacking hardware, they can get it.
It doesn't really matter how poor the average person is, or how little food or power or money most groups have - if something is important to a dictatorship (like their own personal comfort, or security) it can be generously resourced. Think Saddam's palaces. So they can afford to train to hack.
Don't underestimate educational possibilities. Quality of education has very little to do with GNP - look at the dire state of public schools in the US. Training of the elite can be very effective in less rich countries - the most important thing is usually motivation. Actually, the US system also shows that resources CAN be concentrated to produce pockets of excellence! So if NK wants effective training, it's hardly impossible.
So they could train and resoure a significant number of hackers, if they wanted. The casual complacency of some here reminds me of the attitude of the WWII British in Singapore - just before the Japanese Army cycled round the back of the fortifications and invaded.
On the other hand, North Korea may not have done any of that. Or they may have tried, and been ineffective (though you don't have to be THAT good, to crack lots of systems). It's prudent to take precautions, but daft to panic.
As with any security question, consider what is the problem, whether the solution fixes it, what are the disadvantages of the solution, and whether the tradeoff is worth it. Most sensible precautions are already known - to sensible users and not a few slashdotters ;-)
And it's also worth looking at where the story came from, and when. Just because it's a South Korean defence agency doesn't make it untrue (they are in a better position to understand local threats than many outsiders). And the North is ratcheting up tension, by refusing talks. But beware of spin - both from those releasing the stoy, and those who want a pretext for new "security" measures...
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
So Bush is sending a very clear message here: If you want to be save from our preemptive strikes do everything you can to acquire WMDs as fast as possible.
I don't know if I really feel saver now...
Actually, joking aside, the US is more interested in bombing the shit out of North Korea than making any gestures of help for these people.
Do you have any suggestions? The international community would be very happy to hear it if you actually came up with something workable.
The problem is that North Korea is both dangerous and oppressive on a scale that makes Iraq look like Luxembourg by comparison. While Iraq's people were somewhat poor and rather oppressed, North Korea is systematically crushing, murdering, and starving its people. It is more or less the crushing poverty and famine you would think typical of Ethopia with a government so tyrannical and powerful that it would make Stalin proud. The whole thing is run by nutjobs who are so into the cult of personality that the current President has been dead for over ten years and they still can't stand to remove him from the office.
Despite having an economy that is smaller than a medium-sized American city, and being full of starving people, this country has one of the largest and most powerful armies in the world. This is accomplished by spending almost one quarter of their entire GDP (note: not budget, but GDP) on the military. By contrast, the US spends about 3.3% of its GDP on its military.
North Korea is many things Iraq was not. It is genuinely, horribly oppressive. (Iraq's regime was evil, but not any more evil than dozens of other countries.) It has an actual, credible military threat to our allies in the region. (Seoul would be more or less flat within hours of the beginning of a war.) It has a great possibility of making life very difficult for any invaders, because of its gigantic army, the fact that the terrain is incredibly mountainous, and its people have been trained from birth to believe that their government is all that stands between them and a world bent on turning them into slaves. North Korea is also a pariah in the international community in a way that Iraq never was. The only country that even pretends to be friendly with them is China, and they only do it because it's a bad idea to piss off an army of a million fanatics sitting on your doorstep.
Oh, did I mention that this delightful place either has nuclear weapons or could produce them within a year if they so chose? Did I also mention that they have ballistic missiles with enough range to hit some targets on the west coast of the US? Another thing that's different from Iraq; they actually have WMD, and their leader is probably crazy enough to consider using them even if it meant the certain death of himself and 99% of his people.
Sending food, money, or anything else will not help these people. The North Koreans are suffering not because of abject poverty or famine, but because their government is totally insane. The poverty and famine is just a side effect.
The current plan seems to boil down to saying "nice doggy" and hoping that something changes. Leaving things as they are is not really acceptable, given that they will only increase their capacity to do murder and mayhem in the world at large. Invasion is pretty much out of the question, given the difficulty of protecting our allies in the region and the difficulty of actually winning. Engineering a collapse is out of the question for similar reasons; the only thing worse than having a million-man army lead by total wackos on your doorstep is having a the remnants of a million-man fanatical army suddenly stripped of its leadership and left to fend for itself, not to mention the nuclear weapons factor.
If you can come up with some kind of plan to help out, that would be great. The current worldwide consensus seems to be "pretend that there really isn't a problem, and hope that I'm out of office by the time it reaches the crisis point."
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
But the real question is, why would the US want to invade North Korea? They are showing signs of accepting a free market economy -- some areas have been designated as special free market zones, and this may spread throughout the rest of the country. Sure, they're far behind, but they can drag themselves out of this mess.
Lalala
I myself am personally offended
don't
when people think that hackers are malicious
They do, and they will for a long time to come.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Maybe not directly as in bombing or shooting people. But computers are at the heart of a lot of things that have lives on the line. I realize there's massive backup systems but lives could be lost if something goes wrong with: air traffic control, hospitals, emergency response, or military weapons. Financial lives could be ruined if banks, investment, or pension instatutions were attacked. And what about our dependence on power and comm? If a grid or communication system could be hacked in a large enough area, people could go without food, water, medicine, etc.
Man -- that many crackers -- in a North Korean military unit. Lot of rednecks to be concentrated in one place. Sounds to me like the country's going to infiltrate a NASCAR race and start stealing chassis designs from major race teams. They could use the engine designs for something too.
;-)
;-)
Maybe they're considering a first strike invasion of Atlanta. They're terribly misinformed, if that's the case, 'cause north Georgia here is a little more Northern transplants than crackers these days. If I were an insane little Korean communist dictator, I'd be concentration my cracker infiltration force in Charlotte. They're more likely to blend in, what with all the NASCAR teams based there. Lots of Earnhardt Jr. fans = lots of cover.
There's always Alabama, too, I suppose. But even crackers don't really claim 'bama as their own these days.
I wonder if they'll show up wearing Cabela Winter 2004 orange camo and riding in on jacked up late model Ford F-150s.
IronChefMorimoto
P.S. - This had me cracking (no pun intended) up this morning, 'cause I grew up in all these various places. 600 Korean crackers -- LOL!
And how can we be screwed? Pray tell. Do those hackers have magical powers or something? Do you think they can take out the internet permanently with clever VB viruses? Or DOS attacks? Do you think that those hackers can social engineer their way into getting US government/corporate passwords/manuals?
I doubt it. Any attack they make will only make the internet stronger and more resilient. Besides, it's the virus of the mind N Korea should be worrying about. Just you wait until those hackers get infected with Slashdot and Searchlores. Those hackers are probably the sons and daughters of the elite in their government. This elite will regret exposing their kids to so much foreign information.
You're right General! That worked amazingly well in Vietnam! The US really kicked that backwards low tech piece of shit country didn't it! The first war on Iraq kept them quiet FOREVER! Heck, everything is under control in Iraq and Afghanistaneven as we speak!
It is very difficult for an army that uses conventional tactics and tries to be mindful of the Geneva Convention and the Rules of Engagement to combat a group using guerilla tactics.
I'd suggest you read the Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence (of Arabia) before spewing your expert opinion on military strategy.
Most of the comments here demonstrate a complete ignorance and naievity of grade school students...it is fairly well known in that part of the world that the very latest computer technology from neighbouring Japan is routinely smuggled across the sea to NK...if you think obsolescence will protect you from an indeed brutal, repressive, insane government intent on the destruction of your government, you need to think again. I'm sure their best crackers are well taken care of, just like the NK elite, while most of the people are tortured for any thought against the government, starved, beaten and treated as slave labour.
Overdone, you say? Not really. Have lived in the afluent south for a couple of years, I saw school children routinely beaten/tortured for poor school performance. I can only imagine the horrors that go on in the north...
That's entirely legitimate. Motive, means, and opportunity.
Means I already discussed.
Opportunity is there every day. It's just one order to send their army rushing across the DMZ into South Korea, start producing nukes, or launch those nukes at the US.
That brings us to motive. As you recognize, that's the most complicated piece of the whole thing. I don't entirely understand this part, but I'll do my best.
Korea's history in the 20th century isn't very happy. It spent most of the first half of the century under Japanese occupation. The Japanese were not known as particularly friendly occupiers (this is putting it much nicer than it should be). As the Second World War came to a close, Korea got liberated from two directions at once, with the US coming in from the south, and the USSR coming in from the north. Just as in Germany, the two sides immediately set up governments that were loyal to them. Of course, the US claimed that South Korea was an independent ally, and North Korea was a puppet to the Russians. The USSR claimed the opposite. Presumably the truth was in between.
Anyway, to cut the story short, war happened, with each side getting lots of assistance (and presumably more than a few orders) from their superpower allies. Each side saw the other side's system as fundamentally evil, and something that had to be stopped, but pragmatically there was nothing more to do. Like in Germany, the two sides were forced to deal with each other. Unlike Germany, the two sides had spent years fighting each other in war, and relations were much colder. The two Germanies kept reasonably close all through the Cold War, but the two Koreas were (and still are) separated by the most heavily fortified border on the planet, just waiting for somebody to twitch and start another war.
Fast forward a few decades, to the 90s. Communism collapses or transforms worldwide. By 1992, the remaining countries that are still actually Communist (and not just calling themselves that) have dwindled to, basically, Cuba and North Korea. North Korea's two big traditional allies, Russia and China, have basically converted to the other side and are busily making friends with the West. China is still Communist in name, and still making friendly gestures to North Korea, but nothing significant.
Motive for the leaders depends on whether you think they are idealistic or pragmatic. If they're idealistic, then North Korea is pretty much the last bastion in the world for Communism. The Imperialist Capitalists have conquered pretty much the rest of the planet. If they're pragmatic, it's almost the same, just with a cynical touch; the entire power structure depends on the rigid Communist system. They fear, rightly or not, that reforms will destroy their government.
Motive for the people is simpler, since they hear what their government wants them to hear. The fact that the US has had troops in South Korea for over fifty years doesn't help. Never mind that it's not an occupying force; government propaganda excels at twisting the truth in subtle ways.
The three disaster scenarios are collapse, conventional attack, and nuclear attack. Collapse doesn't need a motive, of course, since it wouldn't be intentional. Both attack scenarios share a motive; they provide hostages to secure the country's safety (the inhabitants of Seoul for the conventional attack, the inhabitants of Seattle or San Francisco for the nuclear option). Conventional attack has another potential motive, which is conquering/liberating the South. Take the fact that diplomatic communications with North Korea are almost nil, combine it with the fact that the North's leaders are incredibly paranoid, and you have a situation which is ripe for misunderstandings. MAD only works well when both sides are rational and communicating with each other. It is entirely conceivable that a move which we think is non-threatening could be interpreted as something which needs a response.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Why mandate anything? The banks that have insecure systems will bear the cost of their insecure systems. And the merchants that accept insecure paiments with delivery addresses to South Korea will also bear some of that cost. There is no need to panic.
33% of shit still means shit. An Aegis costs as much as North Korea's military budget. 70's artillery, infantry and fighting vehicles are worthless against the US military machine which is built around smashing artillery, infantry and fighting vehicles. Saddam had better equipment in '91 and '03 than North Korea has in '04. He also had the 3rd/4th largest army in '91. He got creamed.
Problem with the US army is that it can't fight insurgents and doesn't want to learn how. As an aside, the moment that the military started boasting about bodycounts, I knew the insurgency was winning. The military should be boasting about how many guerillas didn't appear and weren't killed, rather than how many grabbed guns with glee and got bombed (along with civilians), dying in glee (going to heaven...).
The US (as part of the UN) fought China and North Korea to a standstill. Only Chinese intervention saved North Korea - at the point a million Chinese 'volunteers' intervened, more than 90% of North Korea was occupied by US/UN troops.
North Korea is accepting a market economy to the same degree that Castro is a nice guy whose only vice is smoking cigars. Believe it and you're believing the complex lies of a regime who only excels in lies.
In the DRPK annyone with internet access at all is already part of the state's techno elite and de facto an agent.
Will have connections, yes. The thing to remember is that these regimes spy on, and distrust, their own much more than the populace in general.
On a serious note, this story does help explain why they are doing so poorly. The government seems like it is being run by a 12 year old boy who is experiencing testosterone for the first time. All they do is stupid things like this. Building bombs, training hackers. It is all just a bunch of non-practical wastes of money.
Dubya's screw up was in terminating talks with the North Koreans because they violated terms of the existing agreement.
Everybody else in the world understands that North Korea violating an agreement means "I want to re-negotiate the terms of this agreement." The Bush administration, under the tutelage of that complete moron Wolfowitz, decided that "toughness" would yield better results. Talks ceased. The only result is that N. Korea (in their minds) were forced to up the ante.
So we went from close inspection of their nuclear facilities, to none, from dialog to no dialog, from potential for nuclear weapons, to actual nuclear weapons paired with ICBMs that can reach the continental US. Way to go George! Now you see why Kerry was hammering Bush over this issue in the Debate last week.
Bush thinks that acting tough solves all problems. The reality is, it only works with certain countries, in certain situations. Bush has proved pretty much conclusively that it doesn't work with North Korea. As previous posters have commented, the reason is simple: North Korea has too much leverage over its neighbors in the region. And now, thanks to the moron Dubya, North Korea has leverage over the west coast of the US. In case it isn't completely obvious yet, we need a new president if only to save us from the very real possibility that Dubya's diplomatic retardation will bring on a regional nuclear catastrophe that might very well include the west coast of the US.
> The Iranian government in no way had anything to do with the X-prize.
Sure it did... it let its people emigrate. NK doesn't seem to do that.
Given how much profiling is being done to find terrorists of arabic descent, you might want to be careful about saying the US gov't doesn't claim place of birth as making you potentially evil, by the way. That's what profiling does.
A.
That's pretty much the most insightful thing I've read here in a long time, and pretty much sums up what's wrong with democratic capitalism as we have it at the moment.
Personally, I'm curious which other *ism has a better idea.
"Do you have any suggestions?"
Stopping politicians calling them an 'axis of evil' might help, as it only seemed to provoke a clampdown in the steps they _were_ making to come into the fold of reasonable nations. Calling someone 'evil' is a purely subjective judgement anyway, as they're trying to do their own thing within an ideological structure that they think is right. You don't score points by being critical.
"Oh, did I mention that this delightful place either has nuclear weapons or could produce them within a year if they so chose?"
So you're told, but from what I've checked out they have have no delivery systems worth a damn; bear in mind that you pointed out that they're using 33% of the GDP akin to LA to even fund research into this, making the scary picture of the next big threat seem a little more contextual. If they did anything with a nuclear weapon we'd be looking at a nice glassy crater within a couple of hours of deployment.
What you fail to have pointed out is that the threat is the loaded gun behind the handouts, aid packages and the like. It's a trading chip and entry into the nuclear power club that they want. That the current regime is utterly corrupt and dumb is an indication that you just need to step back and let them implode. If they don't implode, then you have to watch your original assumptions.
"The current plan seems to boil down to saying "nice doggy" and hoping that something changes."
It's better than the alternatives. In context of the article, we just firewall them and cut their trunks...big deal. We have more than a million partially trained hackers in the Western world who have better infrastructure and equipment and a commerical aspect to keeping the internet running. It's a vast press release bit of FUD by a scared S. Korea. Incidentally, exactly the same message is coming out of a bunch of developing nations.
"Leaving things as they are is not really acceptable, given that they will only increase their capacity to do murder and mayhem in the world at large."
Give over. That's like saying that Iraq was a clear and present danger to Ohio.
"Invasion is pretty much out of the question, given the difficulty of protecting our allies in the region and the difficulty of actually winning."
And China.
"Engineering a collapse is out of the question for similar reasons"
And that the tame insurgent leader has a habit of turning around 20 years later and biting you on the ass.
"not to mention the nuclear weapons factor."
Which would be a massive PR blunder for any nation; use of 'WMD', to use the current buzzword, carries the heaviest penalty available in the world today...intense scrutiny and hi-tech weaponry guide by GPS. Even China would step aside in the face of something happening along those lines because of the idea of them.
"The current worldwide consensus seems to be "pretend that there really isn't a problem, and hope that I'm out of office by the time it reaches the crisis point.""
It's already in progress and has been for the past decade...it was only the vast PR fu**up I mentioned at the start of this that actually made them recoil. You don't go comparing regimes to other regimes without triggering comparisons, and if that regime is 'insane' it will act in an insane manner. THIS WAS OBVIOUS.
Saber-rattling at this point will provide defiance, but it's best to simply ignore N Korea before it does something because it's looking for a stage. South Korea is looking for reassurance from the west that it would be unwise to give because it escalates the problem.
Yes, the current opinion is to wait and see, but it's better to do that than _really_ mess things up.
Oddly Draconis
Too cynical to live, too stubborn to die.
alone.
In most cases the real cause is something political or economic. If a country threatens another economically or politically, the threatened country may react.
In this case, N. Korea would have to ask itself if it really wants war with the U.S.. Attacking our ability to survive economically would most likely be an act of war. I don't think N. Korea wants war with the U.S., it's a no-win situation for both sides. Their goals with this is probably just more leverage and another type of cold war defense. Having the capablity to launch a cyber attack is a form of self-defense.
Anarchism. It works for *all* the rest of nature.
For a suitable definition of "works".
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Er, no.
To defend against information warfare is not to conduct an offensive of your own. Rather, you need to secure your own infrastructure, which is not happening.
You're joking, right? What do you expect hospitals to do, isolate a bunch of servers in miscellaneous locations and force people to print and walk medical records from one place to another? Do you expect air traffic control to build it's own cutoff communications medium that only interoperates with other towers and facilities? Do you expect banks to force people to perform all of their transactions in isolated physical locations?
That is probably the dumbest piece of technical input I've ever heard in my entire life, and I'm not the least bit surprised that it came from a clueless /bot. The logistics and cost behind isolating ever single institution would be staggering and would go against the core promise of the worldwide communication capabilities of the internet anyway. The solution isn't to isolate every damn thing, it's to make sure that those things are sufficiently locked down. From a technical perspective, in fact, much of the banking industry IS well protected. The human attack vectors may not be very solid, but the technical ones, largely, are.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
I disgaree with much of your post, but I'm going to focus on this part: NK doesn't care about a PR disaster. They have no compunction about starving their own people and creating concentration camps on a scale not seen since the Soviet Union; there is no indictation that they would have any qualms about using nuclear weapons in a war. Even if NK isn't in a war, they've demonstrated a willingness to sell virtually any technology they possess, and that may include operational nuclear weapons. As bad as invasion may be, it would still be better than The Bomb smuggled into Los Angeles*.
We can't ignore NK because ignorning the problem makes it grow: today they may have five nuclear weapons; tomorrow that number may jump to 20. Today they may have operational 2-stage missiles; tomorrow they may have true ICBMs.
Our approach to Islamic terrorism was ignore it and hope it goes away. The failure of that approach has already been demonsrated.**
* This doesn't mean I advocate invasion: I don't for a variety of reasons. I'm only presenting a hypothetical scenario and am not implying a future in which situation A OR B will happen, because obviously we live in a more complicated world than that.
** I'm not equating the parent poster's position to advocating for terrorism, and I don't think if you're not with us you're against us, or whatever else the current administration claims. But the threats (terrorism, NK), although not identical, both show a tendency to grow with time.
"Calling someone 'evil' is a purely subjective judgement anyway, as they're trying to do their own thing within an ideological structure that they think is right. You don't score points by being critical."
You just summed up, in one paragraph, what's so utterly wrong with the left. Evil, sir, is not subjective. Oppressing and starving your people is not just "doing your own thing within an ideological context". By this reasoning, no system can ever be wrong. Nazism can be excused because invading your neighbors and shipping Jews off to ovens just becomes "just doing your thing". Communism becomes just fine because creating gulags becomes "just doing your thing".
When those airliners smashed into the Twin Towers, were the hijackers just "doing their own thing"?
Ideas have consequences, especially when put into practice. And evil exists, and must be oppossed. We can debate how best to do it, but to suggest that it doesn't exist at all, that we shouldn't judge on conduct or ideals, is to become complicit in the act of monsters, to become part of their crimes ourselves.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Dude, they can wax Seol in an hour. There isn't enough high tech shit to stop them.
On the other hand, you wouldn't win any brownie points for being a nice guy, but an extremely hard hitting preemptive strike could disable them, and this is the sort of situation that Tactical Nuclear weapons were made for. Otherwise, the old fashioned stuff can kill just as effectively as ever before.
Propaganda and food might also work. Dump a few million pounds of food and other such supplies on them, along with leaflets, radios, and the occasional case of cigarettes, and you might just see how high their morale really is. Hell, if you're really perverse, just dump cold, hard cash on them. Of course, they can't spend it there....
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is living in a state of sin." -- John von Neumann
If N. Korea wants to join the "big boys", they should start a space program. First, send small animals up. Next, prisoners, in exchange for clemency. Next, full-fledged KoroNauts, probably from a pool of pilots. Once they've acted as a proxy for other nations wanting live human research (without the tarnish of being public backers) N. Korea could have a schload of cash in hand. Hopefully, they'll buy food with it.
But, what I'd REALLY like to see --but probably won't happen in the next 50 years -- is for N & S Korea to reunify. If China doesn't have too much of a problem, and if the US can be forced off the peninsula by popular vote, then it could happen --eventually.
However, what might smooth the process is if they don't engage in the US-bullshit-styled bicameral party where votes are stolen and the voting process is, at best, illusory. What the Koreas/Koreans can do is this:
First term of unification peninsular leadership
-- NK Premier/President sends the NK VP to be VP of SK.
-- SK President sends the SK VP to be VP of NK.
Replace BOTH the NK and SK presidents, since the NK Pres will likely be too unsavory to lead, and the North will undoubtedly balk at the sitting SK Pres leading.
--Have NK and SK both select a palatable president, and call it provisional, but have the two VPs administratively run things domestically while the provisional presidents make the global circuit to get food and construction aid to the North.
--The North and South, reunified, could consider scrapping their current parties and renaming them --purely in the name of accelerating the Reunification. They could remove references to "democracy" or the like that the North regime/administration officials would find heart-stopping.
In Term Two:
--Re-elect the current P & VP -- if there is no public lack of confidence. Hold off replacement elections for the third term
-- Swap the North and South provisional VPs' duties, both still as VPs.
-- 6 months into the (hopefully smoother) admnistration, promote them to twin sitting presidents. After all, as delicate as this Reunification will be, dual-accountability and public trust/confidence would be paramount, compared to what we have going on here in the US (where' our votes are bought and paid by corporations, where national voting is reduced to a "feel-good" excercise, and where some consider the words theocracy, plutocracy and democracy to have less emphasis on democracy, since we're (the masses) so wound up working to pay bills or keep up appearances and where we're disillusioned by being fed lies from sitting officials who in all likely hood just want us to shut up and leave them alone.
Third Term:
-- Remove US military set pieces and dismantle the bases
-- Reconfigure the bases for commercial work, so that starving Koreans still in the north can get travel permission ahem, travel fare and arrangements to do manufacturing and piece work on the Tech Parks at the former bases
Global Duties and Responsibilities:
Early-Stage Actions:
Nations claiming to be interested in PEACE need to:
-- dismantle their foreign-shore-based military set pieces or reduce them to token presences to alleviate domestic displeasure
-- Strip resources from NATO, ASEAN, SEATO, UN, and other GOs and NGOs and the various former war-fighting nations and create an international, multi-cultural, global naval police, sans the "military "destroyer" class connotations
-- War-footing nations with their floating set pieces MUST see their flag-waving navies deprecated to nothing more than "own-shore coastal patrol units" (In the case of the US, the USCG might get a promotion, and if this were treated like a rough election, the USN would lose a cycle and maybe fall under the DHLS, where the USCG would get from under foot and start getting some real money, real missions, and duties to escort merchants or high-value products, since the USN will likely bitch at being dep
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"