North Korean smartphone that was smuggled out shows the insane things Kim Jong Un is doing to control his people
A smartphone smuggled out of North Korea has revealed the astonishing levels of control the secretive dictatorship is exercising over its people.The phone, which from the outside appears no different from a normal device, issued warnings about using South Korean slang words to users, and auto-corrected “South Korea” to read “puppet state,” an investigation from the BBC found.It would also covertly take a screenshot every five minutes, storing the images in a secret folder which the user couldn’t access, but which presumably were accessible to North Korean authorities.When the user tried to type in the word “oppa,” which means older brother in Korean, but has come to be used to refer to a boyfriend in South Korean slang, the phone would auto-correct the word to the more communist-friendly alternative, “comrade.”A warning would then flash up, warning the phone’s user that the term “oppa” could only be used for older siblings, the BBC investigation found.The bizarre Orwellian practices with a 21st-century twist were revealed after Daily NK, a Seoul-based media organization, secretly smuggled the North Korean cell phone out of the country late last year.It is only the latest example of a draconian clampdown on modern technology by Kim Jong Un’s authoritarian regime, revealing that the dictatorship may be winning the battle of the tech world.“Smartphones are now part and parcel of the way North Korea tries to indoctrinate people,” Martyn Williams, a senior fellow at the Washington DC-based Stimson Center, and an expert in North Korean technology and information, told the BBC.North Korea is now “starting to gain the upper hand” in the information war, he warned.In other signs of a hardening of the rules, using South Korean phrases or speaking in a South Korean accent were officially made a state crime by Kim in 2023.Members of “youth crackdown squads” are seen patrolling the streets, monitoring the behavior of young North Korean...