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."

Comments

dafauq?

[sims 2]

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?

Re:dafauq?

[Burz]

They mean "unmonitored" by NK government, but monitored by the US.

They should found one for the US too

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice having an unmonitored device too.
Being able to comunicate without the government snooping... in a free country...

Well, just dreaming.

This is not going to work well.

[SuricouRaven]

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.