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U.S. Funds Challenges To North Korea's 'Information Shield' (freekorea.us)
The U.S. State Department is pursuing "a detailed plan for making unrestricted, unmonitored, and inexpensive electronic mass communications available to the people of North Korea." Slashdot reader Greg Jones reports: Plenty of government-designed "information" flows out of North Korea. At One Free Korea Joshua Stanton reports that the U.S. State Department just announced a new grant program for information technology solutions to punch through the wall that prevents the free flow of information into North Korea.
"Those of us who wrote and negotiated the [North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act] were equally concerned with direct engagement of the North Korean people..." Stanton writes on his blog, reporting that there's now grants available to fund multiple projects. "If you have the technical knowledge to make this a reality, or know a place online where people with those talents congregate, please share and repost this solicitation and help spread the word."
"Those of us who wrote and negotiated the [North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act] were equally concerned with direct engagement of the North Korean people..." Stanton writes on his blog, reporting that there's now grants available to fund multiple projects. "If you have the technical knowledge to make this a reality, or know a place online where people with those talents congregate, please share and repost this solicitation and help spread the word."
The best nonviolent way of breaking North Korea is to let the common people know how the other Koreans live. We could try smuggling in flash drives, since the DPRK uses them to distribute official TV programming. Efforts like this are underway, but a more effective means of getting them in are needed:
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
North Korea owes its very existence to keeping people in the dark about the outside world. As soon as that information gets through, it's Venezuela time.
Didn't read the article, I don't think that's how Slashdot works. ;-)
But if the people of North Korea are doing something the government does like, for instance going around it's firewalls, wouldn't they be killed / tortured / or fined at the very least?
So it's not ok for our own US citizens or our allies to have unmonitored mass communications but we are just going to give them to our enemies?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
yeah right, The USA providing unmonitored communications...
Maybe if the West stopped demolishing all its short wave radio towers? Europe and America seem terrified of the prospect that any institution can communicate globally without relying on centralised infrastructure (satellites, underground cables, Internet hubs) - then they complain that countries whose governments aren't subservient to the American Way don't have a means to access information.
It would be nice having an unmonitored device too.
Being able to comunicate without the government snooping... in a free country...
Well, just dreaming.
Start with "unmonitored" free (as in beer) communication in the USA first. Then the world will take notice.
Radio, anyone? Those DoD dummies act like the humble radio transmitter was never invented...
An assload of $29 Android phones with mesh networking software installed and some mighty APs with directional antennas might do the trick. Oh but wait, if we do that for them, our own people will expect us to do it at home.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
y'know... skype used to have this feature, y'know? it wasn't completely undetectable, but it *used* to have the ability to disguise itself as pretty much anything, so that it would "just work" in the face of badly-configured firewalls, DNS servers, idiot companies that blocked *all* incoming and outgoing traffic stone-dead including ICMP (including BGP and other absolutely crucial traffic) with the statement "you've got unrestricted access to port 80, that's the 'internet' isn't it, what the hell are you complaining about yer lame-techie-wannabe-tuck-fard??"
it also had the ability to create any kind of tunneling over pretty much any port and any protocol (TCP, UDP, you name it, it could do it) such that it was pretty much impossible to shut it down.
AND THEN.... for no good reason WHATSOEVER [1], skype changed hands not once but THREE TIMES in succession. now it's under the "control" of microsoft, and anyone considering installing it now is a fool. it's been turned into a "cloud is all" protocol. there's no peer-to-peer capability. that leaves it vulnerable to being mass-IP-range blocked. anyone can work out what the IP range(s) are of the various "cloud" servers used by microsoft are... and just block them (regardless of consequences).
so i *would* have said "just tell them to install skype". except we can logically deduce that it was SOME FUCKWIT IN THE U.S. GOVERMNENT who caused skype, in its current release, to lose its inherent firewall-busting capabilities to be COMPLETELY REMOVED.
and with skype being proprietary, and the "startup" (bootstrap) nodes no longer being run or "supported", we cannot even run older versions of skype any more because the older versions have been shut down. oh, and it's proprietary, so it would be man-decades before it is properly reverse-engineered. oh, and the original creators are likely to have been asked (or threatened) to enter into some serrrrious non-compete contract which, even if it wasn't legally enforceable, they probably understood the full implications were that if they wanted to keep all their body parts, they'd better like, y'know, not even *think* about writing a replacement / competitor, y'ken. they did try setting up a company called "joost", but interestingly, it "failed". i don't wonder why, not any more.
so, this appears to be a golden opportunity for software libre and proprietary software writers alike, but honestly it's a poisoned chalice. one department in the U.S. does *NOT* want such software to even *EXIST*... another is offering money to anyone willing to CREATE such software.... it's either a case of "left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing", or it's just plain entrapment: the NSA wants to know if you have the CAPABILITY to write such software (and you're going to tell them who you are for god's sake!)
bottom line is, there's a phrase which covers this scenario in the security world - it's called "a honey pot". my advice to anyone who reads this: stay the FUCK away from this "offer" unless you're such a huge software libre team (over 100 people would do it) that it would be clearly obvious if one or more people suddenly "went missing", or "received sudden lucrative job offers" or "went on holiday" or "won the lottery" or "had an accident". what would *really* do it is if EVERYBODY who is capable of collaborating on this (including people from proprietary software companies) joined *ONE* single software libre team (with a single person allocated as the front-man), where everybody else used anonymous two-way communications with that front-man), and through them proposed one single entry for the "competition". 100, 200, 300 people, the more the better. if the application *requires* that every single person on the "team" be named individually and separately (either before or after the application), then you can logically deduce that it's extremely likely to be a honeypot. if the application's mysteriously "denied" when there's only the one entry, you can logically deduce that it's extremely lik
What they want is the same thing that they have on every street corner in their own country; for every citizen to be carrying enough Internet-connected hardware that an intelligence agency seems quaint by comparison. Everyone carrying a smartphone in North America, whether they like it or not, is a direct participant AND victim of mass surveillance.
All America knows about North Korea are the ridiculous, state-sponsored propaganda pieces that they post on Facebook. All the military knows about them is what they can see on satellite photos. I wouldn't doubt that their latest missile launch caught a number of people off-guard, particularly at the Pentagon.
The U.S. doesn't want to bring "freedom" and Internet access to one and all, they want more spies on the ground in North Korea. Period. They're scared of their own shadows these days.
"making unrestricted, unmonitored, and inexpensive electronic mass communications available" would be fantastic if they managed that here in the US.
The U.S. State Department is pursuing "a detailed plan for making unrestricted, unmonitored, and inexpensive electronic mass communications available to the people of North Korea."
How are we going to give it to North Korea when we don't even have it in the US? -_-
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
a reaction from both China and the N.K. regime, under the guise of wanting to help the N.K. population, and then score points by looking like the helpful guy, and making China and N.K. bad, as is always on the agenda. The U.S. should stay the fuck out of N.K. and let China handle all that.
Any sort of software is going to be worthless, because NK doesn't have an internet infrastructure. You can't tunnel if there are no wires. You might be able to get some connectivity at the borders, but that's it, and NK has used jammers in the past.
So the only possible approaches will be hardware based - you'd have to be able to distribute hardware into the country. And you'd have to do so with a lot of it, because you need to get it in faster than their government agents can confiscate it. And that hardware has to be able to operate in the face of truly awful communications conditions - even mesh networks have their limits.
The most you're going to get realistically is one-way: Send them radio receivers capable of picking up South Korean media. Which a lot of people will dismiss as propaganda, of course. The grant proposal implicitly acknowledges this with a focus upon getting media *in* to the country, which is hard but not nearly so hard as communications between people already stuck there.
That's the technical side. There's also the legal issue: You're going to end up air-dropping communications equipment on a foreign country without authorisation of their government and the express intention of subverting their laws. This is almost an act of war. North Korea would declare war on the US over that, if they didn't do so about twice a month already.
I'd go for the low-tech approach first: Radios. NK requires all radios sold be hard-wired to only tune to selected government-approved stations. So put in lots of really small, simple, durable radios that can pick up South Korean radio stations. You need a lot of them.
Now, if you wanted high-tech, you could probably come up with an adapted mobile phone for sneakernet use. Something that would be able to play audio and video, read text. Like one of those super-cheap-and-nasty Android tablets, with two USB ports. No networking - it's too easy to trace, and not much good anyway. But enough that a subversive document or media file could be very easily copied and passed between trusted people, quickly. You might want to include a radio receiver too, just so that it can pick up a daily news update from a transmitter in SK. Old-school VHS radio if need be - you don't need bitrate, you need range.
But that's really over-engineering, you'd get a much better effect for your money if you just airdrop millions of DVDs. Even in North Korea, DVD players are readily available. If nothing else you'd waste their resources as they assign thousands of people to sweeping the country looking for shiny discs to destroy.
As this is a US proposal, and legality be damned, they could just load a stealth bomber. I don't know how many DVDs you could load into one of those, but I think it's a lot. It'd be great fun when Jong-Un wakes up one morning to find eighteen tons of DVDs covering Pyongyang, containing all the best television the world can offer both factual and entertainment.
I expect by lunch he'll have just declared the sale of DVD players a capital offence, though.
I don't think we should be doing this at all, think about how many people will get killed in North Korea when they are found with one of these gadgets.
State run science, funds program to destroy, state run science.
It is almost as good as, you can't build GNU, until you have built GNU.
You can't fund anti-communist rhetoric, without state run funds.
And when the NK people are caught using it - death.
Guess that's one way to reduce the size of NK's standing army.
NK represents a whole country of people that for the first 6 months will actually believe the targetted advertising claims.
Unnecessary and a waste of taxpayer money.
Do not poke stick at bear.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Let other people live how they like. Or a better question, how can we get unmonitored Internet for Americans and eliminate the government designed news... or should we invade to help them?
Most of that hardware would flow from China and its regional markets. TV shows, what was once dvd/usb players, now new cheap media players with vast amounts of very cheap storage and better hardware codecs. All the NSA has to do is ensure a vibrant flow of Korean movies, TV shows via China keeps flowing every year. Radio works but nothing is as addictive and subversive as decades of ready to enjoy TV shows and movies on one small imported playback devices.
Get the CIA to fund addictive and charming Korean TV shows and dramas just for exporting.
The other neat part about digital devices making it over from China is the ability for the NSA to alter the basic electronics via cheap front factories in China.
The entire production of media playback hardware is a NSA front or entire shipments get diverted for alteration and activation between the production and local broader region markets. The China product is kept as a simple player with no alterations, the export version is made collection ready.
A low cost media player with 100's of shows as bait makes it deep into a nation, why not see what it can detect on its way with wireless? Storage is not an issue with the vast amounts of consumer media as cover. USB power plugged into an isolated desktop computer to see if anyone has any documents at home?
The user recharges to enjoy the shows, the altered low cost consumer device would be perfect for collection along the way, all day long.
That free or low cost refill of new shows would be the passive collection weeks or months later.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
If they saw the writing on the wall, would they make good on what they've been threatening since the cessation of the Korean War? I get the feeling that they're always in fight or flight mode anyway and an existential threat, making them feel cornered might incite them to lash out. I'm not saying it's a reason the U.S. shouldn't fund this project. I have no idea. I just hope those that do have an idea tend to things through well.
The U.S. State Department is pursuing "a detailed plan for making unrestricted, unmonitored, and inexpensive electronic mass communications available to the people of North Korea." Slashdot reader Greg Jones reports:
Shouldn't they make sure we have that here at home first? Just sayin....
What is really interesting about this article is the use of the term "Challenge". Were the roles reversed, I feel sure that it would be described as North Korea "attacking" the USA.
There are hundreds of thousands of North Korean nationals or former North Korean nationals (now South Korean or Japanese nationals) living in Japan. There is NO anti-North Korean organization in Japan formed by them. But the pro-North Korea organization exists and it has worked together with the pro-South Korea organization demanding the "protection of Korean's human rights in Japan". In fact, when the North Korea-controlled private school in Yokohama argued that it should be given public fund despite failing to meet conditions (such as the accurate financial record), the central argument was that 80% of students are South Korean nationals so it should be given a special treatment. So, many North Koreans are pro-North Korea even when they have free-access to information and even South Koreans aren't actively opposing North Korea.
No technical solution will work as North Koreans living in Japan are constantly proving its uselessness. Even low tech solutions, such as newspapers, pamphlets and books aren't affecting them. If you doubt me, you can go to the pro-North Korean organization's HQ, "7-2-6 Ueno, Taito-ku, Tokyo" (few minutes from Ueno Station) and see that North Koreans in Japan ignores any information they can get that doesn't praise North Korea.
We are bringing Democracy to North Korea! Once we liberate their internet, we can install Google's Conversation A.I. to enable completely uncensored conversations and finally put an end to the tyranny.
They could try doing that for the people in their own country, too.
Or at least quit trying to thwart their own efforts to do it for themselves.
If the FBI existed in 1789, they would have sought to ban opaque envelopes.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.