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- cross-posted to:
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A smartphone smuggled out of North Korea is offering a rare – and unsettling – glimpse into the extent of control Kim Jong Un’s regime exerts over its citizens, down to the very words they type. While the device appears outwardly similar to any modern smartphone, its software reveals a far more oppressive reality. The phone was featured in a BBC video, which showed it powering on with an animated North Korean flag waving across the screen. While the report did not specify the brand, the design and user interface closely resembled those of a Huawei or Honor device.
It’s unclear whether these companies officially sell phones in North Korea, but if they do, the devices are likely customized with state-approved software designed to restrict functionality and facilitate government surveillance.
One of the more revealing – and darkly amusing – features was the phone’s automatic censorship of words deemed problematic by the state. For instance, when users typed oppa, a South Korean term used to refer to an older brother or a boyfriend, the phone automatically replaced it with comrade. A warning would then appear, admonishing the user that oppa could only refer to an older sibling.
Typing “South Korea” would trigger another change. The phrase was automatically replaced with “puppet state,” reflecting the language used in official North Korean rhetoric.
Then came the more unsettling features. The phone silently captured a screenshot every five minutes, storing the images in a hidden folder that users couldn’t access. According to the BBC, authorities could later review these images to monitor the user’s activity.
The device was smuggled out of North Korea by Daily NK, a Seoul-based media outlet specializing in North Korean affairs. After examining the phone, the BBC confirmed that the censorship mechanisms were deeply embedded in its software. Experts say this technology is designed not only to control information but also to reinforce state messaging at the most personal level.
Smartphone usage has grown in North Korea in recent years, but access remains tightly controlled. Devices cannot connect to the global internet and are subject to intense government surveillance.
The regime has reportedly intensified efforts to eliminate South Korean cultural influence, which it views as subversive. So-called “youth crackdown squads” have been deployed to enforce these rules, frequently stopping young people on the streets to inspect their phones and review text messages for banned language.
Some North Korean escapees have shared that exposure to South Korean dramas or foreign radio broadcasts played a key role in their decision to flee the country. Despite the risks, outside media continues to be smuggled in – often via USB sticks and memory cards hidden in food shipments. Much of this effort is supported by foreign organizations.
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… How do you people think your stock mobile OS keyboard ‘learns’ how to better autocorrect to your manner of typing?
Do ya’ll think that data is not available, for sale, to any business or agency that will pay for it?
And monitored by AI.
The one I use is FOSS software that largely just stores a dictionary of used words. FUTO Keyboard isn’t perfect, but it is decent.
This is the way.
If I read somewhere correctly, they’re also the first to open source their swipe dataset:
https://huggingface.co/datasets/futo-org/swipe.futo.orgYou can also contribute and help out with their dataset here:
https://swipe.futo.org/
Hence why I only use foss keebs (Futo), or run gboard with network perms disabled.
I’m glad I don’t live in North Korea because I wouldn’t want to traumatize their poor government with pics of my face and body in the morning. There are limits to cruelty.
Same
Think of all the pics they have of people sitting on the toilet.
From… screenshots?
US, it’s every second they are monitoring.
hope the government likes my johnlock obsession
I’m totally shocked that a progressive free society like North Korea would tolerate such authoritarian invasiveness!
That’s the difference between North Korea and the western world:
In North Korea the government forces spyware onto your device.
In the western world, people share their data voluntarily and publicly.
Instagram, Facebook, Dropbox and Co. made it possible.
There is no better regime than the West in this regard. Force things on people? You’re gonna risk a revolt or dissent. ‘Subtly’ make people dependent on your product so they’ll voluntarily use it and share everything with you while you ‘subtly’ control the algorithm in your favour? Now that’s perfect. Social media is the ultimate tool of power and governance.
Although North Korea is a very “successful” oppressive regime, largely able to have full control over information both in and out of the country and to greatly limit desertion. I can’t think of a “better” regime in this regard.
You’re gonna cook up a crazy theory like that and not even mention big daddy capitalism?
edit: I was making a joke, it didn’t land right. I agree with you, I probably wouldn’t be on this website if I didn’t.
How is that a “crazy theory”? Information control is not directly tied to capitalism but to any form of regime. The Western model and social media is, of course, strongly tied to capitalism and the desire for economic growth. How does that add to it?
What’s crazy about that?
Haven’t heard of, e.g., Cambridge Analytica?
It’s a matter of rhetoric a lot of the times with the states. We don’t invade countries, we defend democracy. Our government doesn’t spy on us, they protect homeland security. Etc etc
Reminds me of that great joke -
A KGB agent and CIA agent meet up in a bar.
“I have to admit, I’m always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up,” the CIA agent says.
“Thank you,” the KGB says. “We do our best but truly, it’s nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them.”
The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. “Thank you friend, but you must be confused… There’s no propaganda in America.”
Over analysis caveat of the joke
Of course it’s not state media directly in the states, but the same billionaires who own the state own the media, so it turns out all to be the same thing in the end.
Don’t worry, the western governments also do it
And I definitely believe a NED sponsored SK site and the BBC. /s
Don’t get any ideas, GOP!
The GOP is just The Soviet’s 2.0, so too late
Except we don’t get free healthcare or government housing or guaranteed employment or-
Too late!
When did Snowden whistleblow? This isn‘t exactly new tech.
2013.
Thats so dystopian, that it can only screenshot every five minutes. Thank god i use windows, and get over 60x the frames-on my double 4k monitor setup. So much better than those filthy north korean peasants. I hope someday they have this freedom.
Shhh don’t tell them that American Corporations have been doing that for years.
https://newatlas.com/computers/smartphone-listening-conversations-ads-facebook/
I was going to say “that article mostly just seems to debunk the ‘my phone is always listening to me’ conspiracy theory” but then I got to the part about over 50% of analyzed Android apps having permission to take screenshots :/
Out of over 17,000 Android apps examined, more than 9,000 had potential permissions to take screenshots. And a number of apps were found to actively be doing so, taking screenshots and sending them to third-party sources.
this is a weird paragraph. no permission is needed for an app to take screenshots of itself. all apps can do that.
just an example: the Element matrix client has a bugreport feature that allows you to submit an automatically created screenshot of the previous menu.
it seems there are several ways to accomplish this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2661536/how-to-programmatically-take-a-screenshot-on-android
Do those code snippets on the Stackoverflow post allow you to capture the entire screen regardless of which app is open, or do they only allow you to capture the app the code is running in?
Capturing the app itself makes sense (for things like bug reports) but does Android really let any app capture whatever is on the screen?
no, they only allow the app to capture its own screen content. to make a regular screenshot of the whole display, the app needs a permission that the user has to approve every single time, at least on most phones. that API is actually for continuous screen recording, but of course usable for this purpose too. this also means that after getting approved by the user, the app can keep its recording sessions to keep more screenshots, but that ends when the app gets killed by android. I think the system also shows a notification when an app is recording, but as anything that too could vary with phones.
This is why my TV is on a separate VLAN (with no internet access) and I use an Nvidia Shield for streaming. I haven’t seen any indication that the Shield does anything like this.
Yeah, there is no reason for me to be connecting my TV to the internet. I use a HTPC which is much better for streaming than the TV’s built-in apps.
The one time I do connect the TV to the internet is when there’s a firmware update that fixes an issue I’m encountering. That’s rare though.
I still have it on my network so I can control it using Home Assistant (eg have a backlight come on and dim the main lights when the TV is turned on) but it’s on an isolated VLAN.
One of the more revealing – and darkly amusing – features was the phone’s automatic censorship of words deemed problematic by the state.
…
When you type South Korea it autocorrects to Puppet State and that’s actually hilarious.
I switched off my iphone autocorrect years ago for tge same reasons
for tge same
We noticed.
Yes. North Korea.
WINK
Did they read 1984 and think, “This is a fantastic idea!”?
The North Korean government’s totalitarianism predates Ninteen Eighty-Four. North Korea might have been an input for Nineteen Eighty-Four, mind…
The book does predate the North Korean utter totalitarianism. Nineteen Eighty-Four was published in 1949, the year after the Democratic People’s Republic was founded. It was based on the Stalinist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.
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Looks around modern day
You uh…you think N Korea is the only ones?
They’re definitely among the worst.
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oppan gangnam style - - >dongjin gangnam style ㅋㅋ
Sounds like windows recall…
frequently stopping young people on the streets to inspect their phones and review text messages for banned language
I’m really tired of people saying “both sides are the same” when it comes to western capitalist exploitation vs eastern totalitarian authoritarianism.
It’s ironically so privileged to even make the comparison because if it were the same, you wouldn’t have been allowed to make this comment.
I agree, western capitalist exploitation is far worse, but privileged liberals in the imperial core aren’t the main victim, and they only care if their billionaire owned media tells them to.
if it were the same, you wouldn’t have been allowed to make this comment.
It works both ways. Is OP allowed to make the comment because he is more priviliged or because he has less power and is less of a threat?
Remember the McCarthy era. There can be more restrictions if needed.
I didn’t say both sides are the same. I made a stupid joke about a garbage operating system and the garbage company that runs it.
And your example of stopping people on the streets to inspect their phones doesn’t really do a great job at making the argument you’re trying to make. We have ICE running around and throwing people into contracted prisons even when they have proof of citizenship. We are trafficking people to foreign concentration camps. We are rocketing at light speed to a techno fascist authoritarian state and the level of surveillance we are under is increasing at a mind boggling pace.
So we aren’t the same, and the people currently in charge are striving to make the differences smaller every day.
I made a stupid joke
Nah, the joke was fine. They overreacted.
In addition to your point, literally just two days ago I saw an article about a Texas sheriff running a search through a nation-wide network of license plate readers to track down a woman suspected of having an abortion.
Oh OK they didn’t stop her on the street, they just queried the panopticon system that tracked her movement as much as possible. Want to protest a genocide your state and university are sponsoring? Sorry, MIT will muzzle you and now you are now forbidden from giving the commencement address. Wouldn’t want to offend the dear leader in the white house.
I totally agree. Stuff like Microsoft recall is not great and America under Trump neither, but it is nothing compared to North Korea. That is a hellhole nobody who grew up in a free western society really can even imagine.
Frequently the point of comparing the two is to caution before they actually become comparable, though. I think it’s intentional hyperbole to make a stark point, not an insensitive reduction.
I’d rather live in NK then in Gaza: the West loves to create hellholes, and the US has the most prisoners of any country on earth so calling it a ‘free society’ is pretty rich.
More to the point, if any Western country had done to it what NK had done to it by the West during the Korean war, it would turn into a brutal basket case far worse then anything NK could imagine. Things like 9/11 and October 7 turn Westerners into frothing omnicidal maniacs, and those are completely negligible in scope compared to what the west has done to other countries, including Korea.
Although I dislike recall as much as anyone else, this is quite a bit worse.
From the article:
Then came the more unsettling features. The phone silently captured a screenshot every five minutes, storing the images in a hidden folder that users couldn’t access. According to the BBC, authorities could later review these images to monitor the user’s activity.
How? If authorities seize your computer, don’t you think the recall screenshots is the first they will look at?
For sure. But at least those images aren’t kept in a secret location where users can’t see or delete them. Even if Recall makes this harder, there’s a meaningful difference here.
That said, neither one is doing you any privacy favors…
Has everyone forgotten about the NSA and their absurdly massive data centers? At least a portion of the US population likely has substantial data from their tech in a database we can’t access.
Sure, but at least from a technical POV those screenshots are accessible to the users, can be deleted/manipulated and the user is not forced to have the feature enabled
Recall stores an image every few seconds. 5 minutes is indeed much worse. Think of all the content they’re missing!
I don’t see how this is worse.
Better than recall. No need for special hardware like an NPU, nor does it keep asking you to sign in.
/s
An NPU isn’t required for something like recall, it just makes running local models more efficient.
Well maybe if they stopped taking all those screenshots with their fancy rice avocado phones they could afford a house!
