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Inside the North Korean Data Smuggling Movement
Sparrowvsrevolution writes A new Wired magazine story goes inside the North Korean rebel movement seeking to overthrow Kim Jong-un by smuggling USB drives into the country packed with foreign television and movies. As the story describes, one group has stashed USB drives in Chinese cargo trucks. Another has passed them over from tourist boats that meet with fishermen mid-river. Others arrange USB handoffs at the Chinese border in the middle of the night with walkie talkies, laser pointers, and bountiful bribes. Even Kim assassination comedy The Interview, which the North Korean government allegedly hacked Sony to prevent from being released, has made it into the country: Chinese traders' trucks carried 20 copies of the film across the border the day after Christmas, just two days after its online release.
I once read that sometimes the secret service in N. Korea would switch off the electricity of a block of houses and then do a raid. DVD players would be stuck with the disc inside, and if it turned out to be a western movie then the owner had a real risk of being executed. The solution was to use UPS. Of course usb sticks are easier to conceal.
We still do the same from Hong Kong into mainland china, smuggling in every thing their crazy censorship government doesn't want them to know, like tianamen massacre (6/4) and scandals with government official