2 min read
A mobile phone smuggled out of North Korea revealed chilling details about the surveillance and censorship employed by the Kim Jong Un regime. Among the most striking revelations is that North Korean smartphones secretly take screenshots every five minutes for government surveillance.
The smartphones are programmed to automatically capture screenshots of the screen approximately every five minutes without the user’s consent. These screenshots are then saved in a hidden folder on the phone. Users cannot access or view these files, but North Korean authorities can retrieve them.
This allows continuous monitoring of a user’s activities, including the apps they use, messages they type, and the content they consume. This covert logging system enables the government to build a detailed digital profile of each individual, tracking their behavior.
The primary purpose of this pervasive surveillance is to combat cultural influence from South Korea and the outside world. The regime views foreign culture, particularly K-pop and South Korean dramas, as subversive and a threat to its authoritarian rule.
If you think this is extreme, North Korean smartphones do not even have access to the global internet. Instead, users are restricted to a closed intranet system called “Kwangmyong,” which only hosts state-approved content. These phones also employ sophisticated censorship mechanisms, including automatic rewriting of text.
For instance, typing “South Korea” is automatically changed to “puppet state,” and the South Korean term “oppa” (often used for boyfriends) is replaced with “comrade,” accompanied by a warning that the word should only be used for siblings.
In essence, the North Korean smartphone is a sophisticated instrument of control, designed to indoctrinate citizens and ensure their ideological alignment with the regime.
