Tag: North Korea

#TheInterview is now available in more places than anyone actually needs. http://t.co/wBNFpCnDP7 pic.twitter.com/YEH3RkT0xb

— Boing Boing (@BoingBoing) December 29, 2014

A South Korean man (C) is being repatriated at the truce village of Panmunjeom on Dec. 26, 2014. The 52-year-old, identified only by his surname Ma, illegally entered North Korea in November. (Yonhap)

This is nothing new and par for the course in regards to provocative bluster from the North Koreans, however it still isn’t right:

On Saturday, the North’s powerful National Defense Commission, the country’s top governing body led by Kim, said that Obama was behind the release of “The Interview.” It described the movie as illegal, dishonest and reactionary.

“Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest,” an unidentified spokesman at the commission’s Policy Department said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

It wasn’t the first time North Korea has used crude insults against Obama and other top U.S. and South Korean officials. Earlier this year, the North called U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry a wolf with a “hideous” lantern jaw and South Korean President Park Geun-hye a prostitute. In May, the North’s news agency published a dispatch saying Obama has the “shape of a monkey.”

The defense commission also accused Washington for intermittent outages of North Korea websites this week, which happened after the U.S. had promised to respond to the Sony hack. The U.S. government has declined to say if it was behind the shutdown.  [Associated Press]

You can read more at the link, but President Obama actually got off pretty light compared to the ambassador of Botswana of all places that the North Koreans called a “black bastard”.

Kidnapped directors and American defectors: North Korea's six decades of cinema http://t.co/j6ZVBHHjhl via @mashable #NorthKorea #DPRK

— NorthKoreaRealTime (@BuckTurgidson79) December 22, 2014

The highly controversial movie “The Interview” was released yesterday despite threats from North Korean sponsored hackers and that means more reviews of the movie are in.  Like some of the initial screening reviews I read these reviews are not good either:

The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy calls it “an intensely sophomoric and rampantly uneven comic takedown of an easy but worrisomely unpredictable target, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. In the relatively sparse annals of irreverent major studio comedies that pissed off foreign nations, for big laughs this one doesn’t rate anywhere near Borat or Team America: World Police. … As political satire goes, The Interview has the comic batting average of a mediocre-to-average Saturday Night Live sketch, with a few potent laughs erupting from an overall mash of sex, drugs and TV broadcasting jokes that feel rooted in a sense of humor primarily characterized by a frat-boy/altered state/prolonged adolescence mind-set.”

Additionally, “if you set up as provocative a premise as do the makers of The Interview, you ultimately have to deal with all its implications; let’s just say that what concludes the film is rote action, simplistic wish-fulfillment stuff that feels cheap and naive and more concerned with looking coolly kick-ass than with any real-world consequences. Even if one part of the film is sincere in wanting to highlight North Korea’s negatives (famine, ideological orthodoxy, cult of personality, militarism, nuclear brinkmanship, et al.), the larger part is devoted to very Western-style sexual grossness, deterministic outrageousness, self-satisfied obliviousness and contended immaturity.” Alongside Franco and Rogen, “Park brings great energy and enthusiasm to his tricky job of portraying the world’s least known big-deal ruler — there are even scenes of him getting the famous Kim haircut and selecting a suit from a closet full of identical ones.”  [The Hollywood Reporter]

You can read more reviews at the link, but this movie appears to be pretty horrible.  I think I will pass on watching it even if it is supposed to be my patriotic duty now to do so.  Has any ROK Heads seen this film and can verify how bad it is?

It looks like the North Korean defector Yeonmi Park who has made international headlines about her defection from the country has been exaggerating some of the tales she has been telling:

You’d have to have been inhuman not to be moved. But – and you’re going to hear a lot of “buts” – was the story she told of her life in North Korea accurate? The more speeches and interviews I read, watch and hear Park give, the more I become aware of serious inconsistencies in her story that suggest it wasn’t. Whether this matters is up to the reader to decide, but my concern is if someone with such a high profile twists their story to fit the narrative we have come to expect from North Korean defectors, our perspective of the country could become dangerously skewed. We need to have a full and truthful picture of life in North Korea if we are to help those living under its abysmally cruel regime and those who try to flee.

“Celebrity Defector”

I met Yeonmi Park a few months ago when I spent two weeks filming a story about her and her family for Australia’s SBS Dateline. We called the story, “Celebrity Defector.”

Back in South Korea where she now lives, Park is one of the stars of a television program featuring a cast of North Korean women. It’s called “Now On My Way To Meet You” and it daringly satirizes the Kim Dynasty. The women tell personal anecdotes about their lives in North Korea and their journey to the south. A number of the women were introduced to us as having been homeless and starving – the reason they fled.

Buried in the shows archives are some snapshots of Park’s childhood in North Korea that explain why she’s known on the show as the Paris Hilton of North Korea. They’re in sharp contrast to the story she’s now telling her international audience.  [The Diplomat]

You can read the rest at the link, but it is a very convincing case that Park has exaggerated circumstances of her defection to possibly help raise awareness and funding for the North Korean human rights organizations she has been working with.

Here is Yeonmi Park’s response to this article:

I want to thank Mary Ann Jolley for caring so much about the terrible situation in North Korea that she would point out any inconsistencies in my quotes and how my story has been reported. Much of the time, there was miscommunication because of a language barrier. I have only learned English in the last year or so, and I’m trying hard to improve every day to be a better advocate for my people. I apologize for any misunderstandings. For example, I never said that I saw executions in Hyesan. My friends’ mother was executed in a small city in central North Korea where my mother still has relatives (which is why I don’t want to name it). And there are mountains you can even see on Google Earth – maybe you call them big hills in English – outside of Hyesan that we crossed to escape. There are many more examples like this.

But one very important thing to correct:  I do not have a foundation.  The website was a dummy site built by a friend, and it was not supposed to be live. There was no way it could accept money, and I haven’t taken any.  I am so sorry for the confusion. The site has been taken down.

Also, I apologize that there have been times when my childhood memories were not perfect, like how long my father was sentenced to prison. Now I am checking with my mom and others to correct everything. I am also writing a book about my life in North Korea, my escape through China and and my work to promote human rights.  It is where I will be able to tell my full story.

In the meantime, I thank you all for your patience and kindness to me.

I think most of the inconsistencies are pretty minor that could be explained by poor memory and English language skills other than the story of her mother being raped.  If that is not true then that is a flat out lie.  The organizations that promote defector testimony like this need to be very careful to not have defectors exaggerate or lie because this just plays into the hands of the Kim regime and its apologists.  The truth about North Korea is bad enough, there is no need to lie about it.

The answer is, not much:

There technically is an Internet that only a very small fraction of the population, including government employees or select university students, can access.

When they do, they likely only go to about the 10 to 15 “government-blessed” sites that computers in the country would be able to access, which would inevitably be monitored, said Martyn Williams, who runs a North Korean tech blog.

“They’re quite good at self-censoring,” Williams told ABC News. “They know what sites they should and shouldn’t go.”

New government-approved sites are added “every few months” but some examples that have been accessible outside of North Korea recently include a cooking website with different recipes for rice.

The Korea National Insurance Corporation has a rotating slideshow of pictures, including one that shows snow-covered artillery guns.

“Not many people have used it but it’s a lot of smoke propaganda,” Williams said.

The websites with servers that are based in North Korea and are visible outside its borders end in the .kp domain, though there is an entirely separate intranet system that residents are able to access through some library and university computers, Williams noted.

“That for most people is the closest they’ve come to a computer,” he said.

Williams estimated that the number of people who regularly use the Internet in North Korea was probably somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 people, and since Monday’s attack took place in the evening hours local time, the number of people who noticed would be far less.  [ABC News]

You can read more at the link.

First Havana, next Pyongyang? http://t.co/UPs0oLEmgu

— NK NEWS (@nknewsorg) December 22, 2014

This supposed cyberattack on North Korea’s Internet is probably more for US domestic political consumption to show that the US is “doing something” than punishing North Korea for the Sony hack:

 

Key North Korean websites were back online Tuesday after a nearly 10-hour shutdown that followed a U.S. vow to respond to a crippling cyberattack on Sony Pictures that Washington blames on Pyongyang.

It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the Internet stoppage in one of the least-wired and poorest countries in the world, but outside experts said it could be anything from a cyberattack to a simple power failure. The White House and the State Department declined to say whether the U.S. government was responsible.  [AP]

Even if a cyberattack had caused the shutdown, analysts said, it would largely be symbolic since only a tiny number of North Koreans are allowed on the Internet — a fraction of Pyongyang’s staunchly loyal elite, as well as foreigners.

You can read the rest at the link, but the few websites they have like the Korean Central News Agency was shut down for just 9.5 hours, big deal. Hopefully some different response actions will be explored as well.

The Kim regime must be feeling pretty of themselves right now after there successful Sony hack because they continue to gloat and make threats:

While steadfastly denying involvement in the hack, North Korea accused U.S. President Barack Obama of calling for “symmetric counteraction.”

“The DPRK has already launched the toughest counteraction. Nothing is more serious miscalculation than guessing that just a single movie production company is the target of this counteraction. Our target is all the citadels of the U.S. imperialists who earned the bitterest grudge of all Koreans,” a report on state-run KCNA read.

“Our toughest counteraction will be boldly taken against the White House, the Pentagon and the whole U.S. mainland, the cesspool of terrorism,” the report said, adding that “fighters for justice” including the “Guardians of Peace” — a group that claimed responsibility for the Sony attack — “are sharpening bayonets not only in the U.S. mainland but in all other parts of the world.” (CNN)

You can read more at the link.