Blacklist warnings spread on websites

TOKYO: North Korea, already one of the least-wired places in the world, appears to be cracking down on the use of the internet by even the small number of foreigners who can access it with relative freedom by blacklisting and blocking social media accounts or websites deemed to carry harmful content.

The move won’t be noticed by most in the North because hardly anyone has access to the internet. But it could signal increasing concern in Pyongyang over the flow of real-time photos, tweets and status updates getting out to the world and an attempt to further limit what the few North Koreans able to view the internet can see.

Warnings, in Korean and English, are now appearing on a wide array of sites, including social media such as Instagram, Tumblr and Flickr and websites such as the South Korean news agency Yonhap, along with specific articles about the country. The warnings say the sites have been blacklisted for harmful content and cannot be accessed.

There has been no announcement of a policy change by the North Korean government or the North’s mobile service carrier, Koryolink, a joint venture with Egypt’s Orascom Telecom and Media Technology. With no official confirmation, it was impossible to rule out the possibility the warnings resulted from a hack of some sort. Many sites, including Facebook and Twitter, continue to function normally.

But signs of concern that local eyes may be trying to peek into the crack opened for foreigners to use the internet have been growing.

From late last year, Koryolink began blocking t he f unction t hat allows smartphones to be turned into WiFi hotspots that can share their internet connection with other nearby devices. Officials last year also tightened restrictions on WiFi use at embassies, probably to keep local residents from illegally “piggybacking” off WiFi signals near their compounds.

If not the result of a hack, the scattershot nature of the blacklist warnings and the relative ease with which they can be circumvented would suggest a more tentative and possibly experimental effort at controlling internet use than the sophisticated Great Firewall that makes it difficult for most mainland Chinese to access Facebook or even the widespread government censorship of internet sites in South Korea.

“This effort seems a bit random,” said James Lewis, an expert in computer security who is a director and senior fellow at the Washington DC-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

“Why send a warning about some sites, block some, but not block others? Either the DPRK is developing a more comprehensive policy but changed their mind, or they’ve been hacked.”

For most North Koreans, official interference with online activity is anything but subtle.

Instead of the worldwide web, North Korea has its own “intranet”, which looks a lot like the internet but is sealed off from the global web and allows users to access only a tiny number of government-sanctioned websites. The few North Koreans who are granted internet access — including some government and military officials, IT technicians and computer science students — get it only in public settings under close supervision.