Using radio and “internet freedom tools,” Washington intends to tell North Korean citizens the truth about Kim Jong Un’s repressive regime and encourage them to “ask more questions.”
The United States is investing $50 million (46 million euros) over the next five years to surreptitiously bring information about the outside world to North Korea, hoping to improve the image of the United States and South Korea to the public. North Koreans.
As part of a larger annual defense spending package, US President Joe Biden signed into law the North Korean Otto Warmbier Surveillance and Censorship Act in late December.
The law is designed to counter widespread censorship and surveillance of the citizens of Pyongyang. It is named after the American student who was arrested in Pyongyang in 2016 on a subversion charge and sentenced to 15 years in prison for stealing a sign. Released in June 2017 in a vegetative state, Warmbier, 22, died at an Ohio hospital six days later.
Under the law, the funds will be channeled to the US Global Media Agency, which effectively serves as an advocacy organization for the US government, broadcasting and disseminating information around the world.
“It’s interesting to me, as the US now seems more willing to operate in the ‘grey zone’ that other countries have been exploiting for some time, with information warfare now only one of the coercive measures that they apply while it still remains below the thresholds that would trigger a conventional conflict,” Dan Pinkston, a professor of international relations at the Seoul campus of Troy University, told DW.
US expects North Koreans to ‘ask more questions’
Washington is trying to catch up with Russia, which has been particularly effective in planting propaganda promoting its own geopolitical goals, Pinkston said.
The US program will focus on additional radio programming in the North, as well as the development of “Internet Freedom Tools,” which are designed to help users get around the limitations placed on free access to the Internet. digital world by the North Korean government.
Prepared for North Korea’s nukes
“Radio should be relatively easy, but Internet access will be a bigger challenge,” Pinkston said, adding that “more sophisticated approaches” may not be noticed by Pyongyang at first, but “could quickly have an insidious effect on its own propaganda. .”
“Ideally, a successful ‘attack’ using information will go unnoticed for some time and therefore be more subtle and have the long-term goal of destabilizing and causing the people of North Korea to ask more questions,” Pinkston said.
North Korea cracks down on foreign media
Eujin Kim, who fled with his mother and sister from North Hamgyong province in the 1900s due to food shortages in their homeland, said getting more information in the North would encourage criticism of the regime, but He warned that it would be dangerous.
Pyongyang has intensified its crackdown on anyone caught listening to foreign radio broadcasts or watching movies or TV shows smuggled into the country in recent months, analysts and defectors have warned. There have been reports that teenagers who were seen practicing dance moves to K-pop music were sent to penal colonies.
“Twenty years ago, very little information about the outside world reached North Korea, but now many people there have seen foreign news, TV shows or movies,” said Kim, a member of Freedom Speakers International, an organization that helps the north koreans. refugees learn english.
“But in the last year or so, it’s clear that the government is trying really hard to control the information coming into the country,” he said. “The regime is very concerned about that because it threatens them and just a few days ago, I heard that a teenager had been executed for watching a South Korean movie.”
‘Each time is harder’
The Seoul-based news outlet Daily NK reported in late December that North Korean citizens have been ordered to attend screenings of government films depicting public humiliation and punishment of people who have been caught. with foreign films. The regime has described foreign content as “dangerous toxins that instill delusions in enemy countries and paralyze revolutionary and class consciousness.”
The footage shows groups of people being reprimanded by crowds at a sports stadium, their heads bowed as they appear to await their public sentencing.
In January, the North Korean government will pass Pyongyang’s Cultural Language Protection Law, which prohibits citizens from using foreign terms when speaking or writing. It will also ban foreign fashion and hairstyles and increase penalties for accessing foreign media.
“It’s getting harder and harder,” Kim said. “People have their faces public and their thoughts private, but it is increasingly dangerous to share those thoughts.”
