North Korea’s elite uses Gmail, Facebook and iTunes
Western researchers recently began sifting through troves of North Korean internet data, looking for activity related to missile launches or malicious cyber activity within the famously isolated country. What they found instead surprised them. North Korea’s tiny circle of elite families — among the few people in the country with unfettered access to the internet — turned out to be strikingly like the rest of the world in their digital habits. They use their smartphones to check Gmail, call up their Facebook accounts and browse for goods at Amazon and Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce company, according to a new report.
“These leaders are doing many of the same things that we do when we wake up in the morning,” said Priscilla Moriuchi of Recorded Future, a threat intelligence firm that wrote the report. “They’re not isolated.”
These observations apply to only a tiny sliver of North Koreans because the vast majority of the nation’s 25 million people are poor and have no access to the internet. Even the few who have mobile devices — a number estimated as high as 4 million people — are confined to a heavily censored, government-run na- tional network called Kwangmyong.
But some North Koreans do have direct access to the internet through universities, select businesses and perhaps the homes of top government or military officials. Whoever they are, 65 per cent of their overall internet traffic was devoted to gaming and streaming online content. Among the most popular streaming services are China’s Youku video-hosting service and iTunes.
North Koreans with internet access have a particular fondness for Baidu, a Chinese search engine and internet services firm, as well for a multiplayer online game called World of Tanks, the researchers found.
The researchers also found that few of the elites on the internet in North Korea used virtual private networks or other tools for cloaking the origin of digital activity, although one iPad used a virtual private network “to check a Gmail account, access Google Cloud, check Facebook and MSN accounts, and view adult content,” the report found.
“If it’s real, it’s very interesting because it shows more access from North Koreans to the internet and more access to information,” said technology journalist Martyn Williams, who runs the North Korea Tech website from his home in Northern California.
The findings track loosely with other research showing that North Koreans are more plugged in to global information flows than commonly assumed, said Victor D. Cha, a former White House North Korea expert and now a senior adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.
He said interviews conducted with people living in the country have revealed alternative sources of information for North Koreans beyond government propaganda, and that people working in professional settings often speak privately of their frustrations with the regime of Kim Jong Un.
“There’s a surprising level of awareness of the inadequacies of the government,” Cha said.