It looks like the FBI has shutdown the IT worker scheme being run by North Korea:
The US Justice Department said Tuesday it has clamped down on North Korean remote IT worker schemes that affected more than 70 American companies and generated millions of dollars in revenue allegedly linked to the North Korean regime.
The department announced a series of recent coordinated law enforcement actions in Ohio and Texas, including an indictment, two arrests and the seizure of 187 computers used by North Korean IT workers to obtain fraudulent employment at US companies.
You can read more at the link, but the scheme the North Koreans were running is fooling legitimate U.S. businesses into thinking they were contracting legal remote workers. However, due to sanctions the North Koreans cannot provide remote IT services to American businesses. So the North Koreans were doing actual work, but most of the money was probably being funneled into illicit programs. Supposedly this scheme was generating up to $600 million a year for the regime. Maybe legaling IT workers from North Korea is something that President Trump can offer to Kim Jong-un as a carrot if they do restart any negotiations again.
If the Lee administration has its way, they will take over OPCON whether they are ready or not because the issue is not about enhancing national defense, but instead politics and nationalism:
On the envisioned transfer of wartime operational control (OPCON) from Washington to Seoul, Brunson reiterated his support for a conditions-based transition, stressing the importance of meeting agreed military requirements before proceeding with the handover.
“I am in full support of OPCON transfer that is conditions based, full stop,” he said.
“At the end of the day, if my president, if my secretary of war tell me, ‘Execute right now,’ I go, ‘Yes, but here are the risks inherent in doing this without having fully met the conditions, securing the critical capabilities that are necessary.'”
You can read more at the link.
It will be interesting to see if General Brunson can pull this off. There is so much inertia to do things the way they have always been done in Korea to overcome:
The general suggested that the allies consider conducting exercises across a much broader geographical area rather than in fixed locations.
“What would it look like if we train from Jeju all the way up to Gyeonggi Province in the north?” he said. “So just imagine if we trained across the entirety of the peninsula.”
Brunson said the allies should take into consideration lessons from the war in Ukraine, where the widespread use of drones and other modern battlefield technologies has left forces operating from fixed positions vulnerable.
He stressed the importance of distributing forces across different locations to reduce their vulnerability to potential attacks. “We won’t be moored in place.”
Brunson also raised the possibility of conducting more training between the two major annual exercises, rather than focusing preparations primarily on those events.
You can read more at the link.
It looks like another Trump-Kim summit may happen next month:
U.S. President Donald Trump said Monday that he may meet North Korean leader Kim Jong-un during his upcoming trip to Asia, raising the possibility of renewed summit diplomacy between Washington and Pyongyang.
Asked by a reporter at the White House on whether he plans to meet Kim during the trip, Trump replied, “I may,” adding, “That’ll be exciting, won’t it? But I get along with him.”
Trump plans to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in China, scheduled for November 18-19 in Shenzhen.
You can read more at the link.
It is a bit ironic that October 10th is the World Day Against the Death Penalty and the Pentagon recently announced it will be livestreaming the execution of mass murderer Nidal Hasan. It will be interesting to see if that actually happens. Anyway for its part South Korea hasn’t executed anyone since 1997 and this researcher is pushing for the ROK government to end the death penalty all together because the killers are old and regret what they did:
Every weekday before 1997, death row inmates in Korea braced themselves between 6 and 9 a.m. — the hours when executions could happen. If 9 a.m. passed uneventfully, they felt relief. Then they went to sleep wondering if the next morning would be their last.
No one has been executed since Dec. 30, 1997, but 56 people remain on death row — 52 in Ministry of Justice correctional facilities and four in military prisons. Kim Dae-keun, a research fellow at the Korean Institute of Criminology and Justice, interviewed 42 of them.
“Most of them were ashamed, distressed or regretful about what they did,” Kim said in an interview with The Korea Times. “I imagine they were brutal and frightening when they committed their crimes. But many I met in prison now were older, frail men.”
Oct. 10 marks World Day Against the Death Penalty, an annual international observance calling for the abolition of executions as judicial punishment. In Korea, the day arrives with the death penalty still on the books but widely regarded as unenforceable. Most inmates now believe executions will not resume — a belief that has fundamentally reshaped how they live.
You can read more at the link, but this is just another example of suicidal empathy. In this article, this researcher shows a lot of sympathy for the criminals on death row, but does not mention one word about the impact these criminals have had on the lives of the families of the victims they killed.
