President Park’s unification plan is missing a Phase 2

December 30, 2014 North-South, Sunshine 2 comments

For months now, we’ve heard Park Geun Hye telling us about how reunification would be a “jackpot” for both Koreas, but we’ve never heard her explain just how she intends to achieve this result. This left some rather important questions unanswered.

Having heard so much from President Park about Phase 3 (profit!) and so little about Phases 1 or 2, at least we know that she’s asking us to resume the collection of underpants:

South Korean Unification Minister Ryoo Kihl-jae said Wednesday that Seoul and Washington should make greater efforts to engage North Korea, saying that dialogues would make pressure on the communist regime more effective. [….]

Until now, Seoul and Washington focused on inducing Pyongyang to change by cooperatively putting pressure upon it. [Yonhap]

Oh, no they haven’t. They’ve simultaneously pursued the mutually inconsistent objectives of economic sanctions and economic subsidies, chasing talks without acquiring the leverage for those talks to succeed.

However, to make the pressure more effective, dialogues and cooperation are also necessary,” Ryoo said during the forum at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Wow. I can’t believe no one ever thought of that.

“Our two countries should therefore strengthen our coordination for engagement as well. We will need to show Pyongyang clearly what it can earn by giving up the path of provocation and isolation and choosing the path of dialogue and cooperation,” he said.

WADR, Minister Ryoo, I think the North Koreans know exactly what they’d earn, which explains why they continue to choose the path of isolation.

Well, I’ll say this much—I understand Park’s plan better now; after all, how different is it from the same plan we watched Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun waste a decade and seven billion-plus dollars on? And just look how far that got us. Of course, some of us observed these Sunshine Lite ideas in Park nearly a decade ago, and her North Korea policy has been a triumph of maddening consistency over experience. I’ll predict, with high confidence, that these plans will end just as well as they have before.

I don’t disagree that the efforts of the U.S. and South Korea to engage the North have often been poorly coordinated. I’m not opposed to bilateral or multilateral talks with North Korea, so long as the terms are strictly coordinated among allies, the positions firm, and the expectations realistic. I’m all for engagement — so long as it doesn’t profit the regime we’re ostensibly pressuring — although I think we’ve mostly been engaging the wrong people and wish we’d engage the right ones.

My suspicion (you could even say hope) is that Ryoo’s position isn’t really about those things, and that it’s really about Park’s current political weakness, and her desire to protect her political flanks from the Northern Wind ploy, than it is about having a coherent vision for changing North Korea’s behavior.

Ryoo also said that it is important to help North Korea actually see the benefits of cooperation with the outside world. That will be a way to “pragmatically improve the quality of life and the human rights situation of the North Korean people,” he said.

What do you mean? They have ski resorts! Problem solved!

Ryoo arrived in Washington on Thursday on a trip aimed at broadening U.S. understanding of South Korean President Park Geun-hye’s trademark push for preparations for unification with North Korea. He is the first South Korean unification minister to visit the U.S. since 2011.

But on the other hand, if Park’s true goal was to tell a weary domestic audience what it wants to hear, why would she send Ryoo to deliver these remarks in Washington, while calling on our government to support this wildly unoriginal vision?

On the face of it, the Obama Administration sounds supportive, except for the immovable object that stands in the way of everything:

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Russel expressed staunch support for Park’s unification vision, saying it provides a vivid picture of the benefits the North could reap from reconciliation and denuclearization, as well as the benefits that reunification will bring to South Korea and the region as a whole.

“The U.S. firmly supports this vision. We will never accept a permanent division of the Korean peninsula,” he said. “The ROK (South Korea) and the U.S. will continue to do everything we need to do to keep the peace on the peninsula through a combination of deterrence, and a strong allied defense.”

He also urged the North to give up its nuclear program, stressing that Pyongyang won’t be able to achieve security and prosperity it wants while pursuing nuclear weapons. The North’s “byeongjin” policy of simultaneously seeking economic and nuclear development will never succeed.

“It’s not a policy. It’s a pipe dream. It will not happen. North Korea can’t have its cake and eat it too,” Russel said of the North’s policy. “Our strategy raises the cost of continued defiance and ultimately leaves the DPRK no viable alternative but to honor its commitments and to come into compliance with its international obligations, first and foremost, with its obligations to irreversibly and verifiably denuclearize.”?  [Yonhap]

Is there a single politician in South Korea who remains in firm contact with reality? Unfortunately, U.S. policy toward North Korea has almost always been deferential to Seoul. It’s not hard to guess why that might be.

Christine Hong has been curiously silent about North Korea’s racism

December 29, 2014 Racism, Useful Idiocy 2 comments

By now, most of you have probably read that North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency, referring to President Obama’s failure to censor “The Interview,” said that “Obama Reckless always in words and Deeds Goes like a Monkey in a Tropical Forest.” (KCNA.kp is unlinkable, but I’ve pasted the full article below the fold. The article in question is dated December 27, 2014.)

This is the third racist attack on President Obama KCNA has printed, and the second it has printed under its own name. The language in this latest attack is similar to that in this venomously racist screed, first unearthed by Professor Lee and first printed at this site in May of this year, quoting a (perhaps fictional) North Korean worker. North Korea clearly did not expect the Anglosphere to notice this, or else failed to anticipate the global opprobrium it would draw. Clearly taken aback by the reaction, KCNA attributed the racist language to “individuals of the DPRK,” but also called it “a proper reaction.” Of course, by then, KCNA had itself just called the President “a wicked black monkey.” By now, KCNA has released its grip on both deniability and apology. (For its part, the White House declined to comment on it.)

Of course, racism isn’t new to North Korea’s ideology, but flagrant racism, sexism, and homophobia are recent additions to its external propaganda. Its public embrace of these elements, along with the growing class divide in the North, marks another step in its progression away from any pretense of Marxism, and toward fascism with Korean characteristics.

It also bears repeating that in North Korea, racism isn’t just talk; according to multiple witnesses, it is a justification for infanticide and forced abortion of children of suspect racial purity.

Most of us in America associate “left” with “liberal,” but if the meaning of the word “liberal” still incorporates such notions as equality, freedom, and tolerance, there is nothing liberal about North Korea. Indeed, the arguments of Kim Jong Un’s remaining defenders on the extreme left have converged almost beyond distinction with the swelling ranks of his defenders on the extreme, paleoconservative right.

Which brings me to Christine Hong, an Assistant Professor at U.C. Santa Cruz, Kim Jong Un’s most vocal academic apologist now that even Bruce Cumings has largely abandoned him in disgust, and (as I’ve described her previously) the Florence Foster Jenkins of North Korea scholarship. Hong doesn’t seem nearly as concerned about flagrant, undeniable racism as the contrived kind:

Representations of North Korea as a buffoon, a menace, or both on the American big screen are at least as old and arguably as tired as the George W. Bush-era phrase, “the axis of evil.” Along with the figure of the Muslim “terrorist,” hackneyed Hollywood constructions of the “ronery” or diabolical Dr. Evil-like North Korean leader bent on world domination, the sinister race-bending North Korean spy, the robotic North Korean commando, and other post-Cold War Red/Yellow Peril bogeymen have functioned as go-to enemies for the commercial film industry’s geopolitical and racist fantasies. [Christine Hong, Asia-Pacific Journal, Dec. 29, 2014]

I don’t know if Hong has seen “The Interview,” but there is a small grain of truth in her argument. Whatever the other merits of each film, some of Seth Rogen’s lines in “The Interview” and Kim Jong Il’s dialogue in “Team America” included an offensive pidginization that fair observers could describe as racist. In Rogen’s case, it’s mostly done to parody his own character’s ignorance, but still, creative minds should and can find better vehicles than this to parody the likes of Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un. Hong’s error is to seize on these offenses as polemical conveniences, lenses through which to view and distort the universe of society (but only ours) and foreign policy (but only ours).

To cite other examples of this, elsewhere, Hong approvingly cited a description of the Korean War — that is, the invasion of one Korean state with external backing by another — as “racist and imperialist violence” rooted in “the racist logic of American capitalism.” She has even attributed racist motives and white privilege to those advocating human rights for North Koreans. (Hong never quite explains how she extends this attribution to the many such advocates who are ethnic Koreans, or North Korean.)

Most of North Korea’s other apologists have also been silent about its racist slurs against President Obama, but Hong’s frequent, often strained, imputations that racism motivates North Korea’s foes and critics particularly invite the charge of hypocrisy.

If any sin is so mortal as to be grounds for immediate excommunication from the temples of liberalism and socialism — indeed, from nearly every branch of post-enlightenment thought, including mainstream conservatism — it is racism. Christopher Hitchens made the prohibition of it the first of his revised set of commandments. No racism is so dangerous, pernicious, or radioactive as official racism, and no official racism is a greater evil than that which purports to decide that the impure must not be permitted to live.

North Korea owns its racism now. So, I would argue, do those who defend it under the pretense of opposing racism. What other inference should we draw about the calibration of an instrument that detects unsafe levels of racism in every basement, yet which fails to detect it (much less oppose it) in its most highly enriched and lethal forms?

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If S. Korea’s missile defense worries China, just wait till the neighbors start nuking up.

December 29, 2014 China, Proliferation, WMD One comment

The deployment of ballistic missile defense systems around North Korea by the United States and its allies could be an effective way to change China’s strategic thinking about Pyongyang, a U.S. congressional report said.

The Congressional Research Service made the point in a recent report, “North Korea: U.S. Relations, Nuclear Diplomacy, and Internal Situation,” saying Beijing would find it not in its national interest if provocative actions by the North lead to increased military deployments in the region. [Yonhap]

Here’s the full report, which touches on a series of topics of interest to OFK readers, including refugees, human rights, proliferation, and North Korea’s support for terrorists. The money quote is more subtle than Yonhap’s characterization:

As part of the efforts by the United States and its allies to change China’s strategic thinking about North Korea, the BMD deployments may have an impact. Chinese media made the Patriot deployments a major part of their coverage of the April 2012 launch. A subtext to those reports was that North Korea’s actions are feeding military developments in Asia that are not in China’s interests. Many observers, particularly in the United States and Japan, argue that continued North Korean ballistic missile development increases the need to bolster regional BMD capabilities and cooperation.

China’s concern about South Korean missile defenses is also one of the best arguments for a more permissive approach to South Korea’s long-standing desire to close its own nuclear fuel cycle. The countervailing concern is that South Korea will acquire nuclear weapons. Unless an Asia-Pacific Treaty Organization is in our near future—and I don’t think it is—it’s not a concern I share.

A nuked-up South Korea would be a far better deterrent to Pyongyang than the so-called “U.S. nuclear umbrella.” I can see why an impulsive young leader in Pyongyang might calculate that the Pentagon wouldn’t pull the trigger if it called our bluff. I wouldn’t.

China must be concerned about the possibility that South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan would be insecure enough about U.S. power to acquire their own nuclear weapons. They have every reason to be insecure. If the choice is between nuking up and getting rolled by China, we’ll soon see how much they value their freedom and their independence.

Bruce Bechtol on the John Batchelor show

December 29, 2014 Proliferation, WMD One comment

The title: North Korea and Regional Security in the Kim Jong-un Era: A New International Security Dilemma.

When you’re done with that, Bechtol has written a paper arguing that North Korea’s proliferation activity (contrary to some views) is increasing, and discusses ways to disrupt it. One of the many tragic consequences of the Syrian Civil War is that it has increased an old customer’s demand for North Korea’s wares.

Hard times for North Korean mines, and miners

December 27, 2014 Human Trafficking, NK Economics No comments

Please pardon me for taking a few days of rest with my family during the holidays. I’ll have much to say about The Interview, Nate Thayer’s intrepid reporting on the AP, and other exigent matters after we’re all played out on Legos and board games. Meanwhile, I have a few posts that I’d written last weekend and had planned to publish when North Korea hit the front pages. Here is the first of them.

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A series of possibly conflicting reports from North Korea’s outer provinces claims that North Korea’s mining industry is under unusual strain, due to commodity price disputes with China, or due to drought causing a lack of hydroelectric power to pump water and run hoists. Despite promises of ten-fold wage increases for miners, those increases have failed to materialize, and the payment of baseline wages is unsteady:

“These days, because of a dispute over prices with China, iron ore exports have been halted, and in many cases salaries go unpaid,” the source said. “With operations suspended at the mine due to the extreme power shortage in the country, people are worried that they won’t even receive their 30,000 KPW.” [Daily NK]

Yet copper demand has risen … due to a “recent order for copper to produce bronze statues of the son and father Kims all across the country.” Imagine that.

Separately, the Daily NK reported on November 25th that operations at Musan, North Korea’s largest iron ore mine, had halted due to power shortages caused by low rainfall, and that this had caused “major disruptions” to the Kim Chaek and Songjin steel mills. (The report makes no reference to a price dispute with China. It seems improbable that both stories are true.)

Meanwhile, the regime is trying to raise coal production, perhaps to offset its lost iron ore revenue, by drafting slave labor from prisoners sentenced for “minor” offenses like selling smuggled CDs, and “conducting illegal business operations.”

“Upon orders to produce more coal, the state has been forcing male prisoners, who have been sent to labor training camps for misdemeanors, to coal mines,” a source in South Pyongan Province told the Daily NK on Friday.

Labor training camps refer to correctional facilities under the Ministry of People’s Security that hold criminals who have committed less serious crimes. They are held in these camps from anywhere between one to six months, where they carry out intense labor. Usually prisoners of these camps are mobilized to construction sites or farm areas, and coal mine work is considered an extreme exception,  reflecting the serious rate of power deficiency currently facing the North.

The prisoners are worked day and night at coal towns some kilometers away, eating and sleeping on site. [Daily NK]

The article goes on to detail a long list of occupational hazards (collapses, accidents due to lack of lighting) that either kill the miners or drain away their lives (malnutrition, exhaustion, beatings, and respiratory problems due to coal dust and poor ventilation).

She explained once such case, “A few days ago, a prisoner in his 40s fell unconscious from suffocation and then died from the added malnutrition. He then received ‘parole,’” going on to add, “With more residents learning about the conditions at coal mines for those in labor training camps, rumors are spreading that if you land yourself in a training camp, you come out dead.”

“Women who have their husbands in these camps are passing on bribes to security officials and trying everything they can to get them out,” she asserted. “As they get to know of how the inmates are working, not even because of a serious crime, people are saying even during the Japanese colonial period they did exploit people this much.” 

Although the drafting of prisoners as unskilled labor suggests a labor shortage, some (other?) part of the North Korean government is exporting (skilled?) mine laborers to Malaysia, where the conditions sound hardly better than inside North Korea itself.

Malaysia has defended the use of North Korean labourers in its mining industry, saying they are particularly good workers because of their dedication, strength and bravery.

After a North Korean was among those killed in a mine explosion at the weekend, Malaysia’s deputy home minister, Datuk Seri Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar, told reporters that the men had been working legally under a special agreement between Pyongyang and authorities in the Malaysian state of Sarawak.

“When it comes to industries such as coal mines, the jobs are very dangerous and tough,” Wan Junaidi said. “No local or Sarawakian will dare to take up such jobs — that is why [we] need foreign workers. In the coal-mining sector, only Britain, China and North Korea have highly-skilled workers.” [….]

The minister’s comments come just two days after three men — Tun Tun Win, 36, from Burma; Kardianto, 38, from Indonesia; and Pang Chung-hyok, 29, from North Korea — were killed after a blast ripped through the mine on Saturday morning. Another 29 men were injured, seven of them from North Korea. Forty-nine of the 119 foreign workers at the Sarawak mine were North Koreans. [The Guardian]

The report quotes “defectors’ groups” as saying there may be as many as 65,000 North Koreans working abroad now. The usual suspicions arise that the workers in Malaysia are receiving anywhere from zero to 15% of their salaries, as at the Kaesong Industrial Park, the Siberian logging camps, and Qatar’s new World Cup construction sites.

Collectively, mineral products constitute North Korea’s largest legal exports. The trend bears watching, not only because of its potential effects on North Korea’s economy and society, but also because the regime may feel tempted to substitute falling mineral exports with illicit exports, or by exporting more food.

China to Obama: Drop dead

December 23, 2014 Anju Links, Censorship, China, Cyberwar, Terrorism (NK) 6 comments

The best news I’ve heard today is that Sony Pictures has either grown a pair or decided that it would rather wilt under domestic political pressure than wilt under foreign terrorist pressure. That means that some theaters will be showing The Interview on Christmas after all. I won’t stand in line to see it, but when it comes to my neighborhood, I’m taking my son (my daughter might not be old enough).

Fortunately, this sounds like exactly the kind of crappy movie that might just be fun to watch with a twelve year-old. At Epcot Center, we almost punctured our lungs laughing at Captain EO, clearly the worst film I’ve ever seen. How much worse could this possibly be? I expect The Interview to be stupid and distasteful, for the reasons we explained here, but I’m willing to compartmentalize that. There is an even more important principle involved now, and my son is old enough to understand that.

That also suggests one reason why China would harbor those responsible for these attacks, from Chinese soil, routed “through servers in Singapore, Thailand and Bolivia.” China also favors the remote-control censorship of American speech. The editors of The Global Times, for example, believe they have standing to define the acceptable limits of free speech here:

“No matter how U.S. society looks at North Korea and Kim Jong-un, Kim is still the leader of the country. The vicious mocking of Kim is only a result of senseless cultural arrogance,” the Chinese state-run paper said in an editorial.

“The biggest motive for Sony Pictures may be the box office, by putting out a sensational story. However, if the movie really was shown on a large scale, it would further upset the already troubled U.S.-North Korea ties,” it said. [Yonhap]

The editors of The Global Times can go fuck themselves. They’re the first ones to whine about “interference” in China’s “internal affairs” when civilized nations protest that China’s tyrants gun down students, jail dissidents, persecute Tibetans, or send North Korean kids to death camps. It takes some chutzpah for a gang of toadies for stultifying, culture-strangling despots to lecture a free society with a legitimate government about what kinds of speech it should allow.

Good thing whoever hacked North Korea’s internet didn’t also take down The Global Times. Why, that might cause problems for U.S.-China relations! Perish the thought that China should conclude that the U.S. was allowing people to attack its interests from U.S. soil.

China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, also strongly denied media reports that China was involved in the Internet outage in North Korea, slamming such reports as “not trustworthy” and “irresponsible.” [Yonhap]

Yesterday, there was some speculation that the outage of North Korea’s internet service might be the result of China shutting down North Korea’s access at the White House’s request.

“We have discussed this issue with the Chinese to share information, express our concerns about this attack, and to ask for their cooperation,” the official said. “In our cybersecurity discussions, both China and the United States have expressed the view that conducting destructive attacks in cyberspace is outside the norms of appropriate cyber behavior.”

North Korea’s Internet traffic goes through China. President Barack Obama said Friday, “We’ve got no indication that North Korea was acting in conjunction with another country.” [CNN]

But if there was any such “cooperation,” it didn’t last long. The evidence to the contrary is stronger. Not only is Xi Jinping knowingly harboring North Korean hackers who attack U.S. interests, he’s also telling President Obama to leave him out of it and work it out with Kim Jong Un himself:

“We have noted the relevant remarks made by the U.S. and the DPRK (North Korea) over recent days,” Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying replied during a regular press briefing, when asked whether China has responded to calls by the U.S. over the Sony hacking.

“We believe that the DPRK and the U.S. can have communication on that,” Hua said, without elaborating further. [Yonhap]

Again, the newspapers are filled with speculation that at last, China is done with North Korea and ready to cooperate with us to pressure Kim Jong Un — the same kind of speculation we see after every North Korean nuke test, missile test, purge, or attack. It makes for interesting reading. I can even believe that some people in China really are annoyed with Kim Jong Un. But I’ll believe that China is ready to cut Kim Jong Un off when I see it. I’d say it’s at least 60% likely that this is disinformation, designed to restrain gullible Americans from taking legal action against North Korea’s Chinese enablers. Which is the only way to change China’s behavior, and North Korea’s.

After 9/11, we didn’t ask the Taliban to “investigate” Osama Bin Laden. We’re obviously not going to invade China, but we should do to those who sponsored North Korea’s hackers and terrorists what we did to Kim Dotcom. In the Kim Dotcom case, the Chinese government saw that its interests favored cooperation, so it cooperated. If China continues to sponsor attacks against American interests in our own country, then it’s time to restrict China’s access to U.S. markets. If push comes to shove, China isn’t going to choose its relationship with North Korea over its relationship with the United States. Its business interests won’t allow that. We must force China to make that choice.

White House considers sanctions, psyops, and cyber responses to N. Korea

December 23, 2014 Cyberwar, Propaganda, Sanctions, Subversion One comment

Because I’ve begun to develop a certain sense of when interesting events are about to get much more interesting, yesterday morning, I decided to check the web site of KCNA, North Korea’s official “news” service. The site did not load, but it has always been slow to load. Then, news sites began to report that North Korea’s internet access had gone down, and that the White House wasn’t denying that it had a hand in this.

This morning, kcna.kp loaded with its usual masikryeong speed. Let’s all hope that our government has the will and the means to respond more potently than this. Kicking North Korea out of the Internet is like kicking Alabama out of the World Cup, and North Korea without internet is like North Dakota without surfing, Ireland without sunshine, or a Kardashian without a job. Meanwhile, the Japanese mirror site of KCNA kept right on squawking its threats to attack the White House:

Our target is all the citadels of the U.S. imperialists who earned the bitterest grudge of all Koreans. The army and people of the DPRK are fully ready to stand in confrontation with the U.S. in all war spaces including cyber warfare space to blow up those citadels.

Our toughest counteraction will be boldly taken against the White House, the Pentagon and the whole U.S. mainland, the cesspool of terrorism, by far surpassing the “symmetric counteraction” declared by Obama. This is the invariable toughest stand of the army and people of the DPRK.

Fighters for justice including “guardians of peace” who turned out in the sacred drive for cooperation in the fight against the U.S. to defend human justice and conscience and to dismember the U.S. imperialists, the root cause of all sorts of evils and kingpin of injustice, are sharpening bayonets not only in the U.S. mainland but in all other parts of the world. [KCNA.co.jp]

President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. The Obama Administration’s official view is that North Korea is “not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.” Discuss among yourselves.

I can only guess, but if this was an attack, I’d guess that the U.S. government wasn’t behind it, and that independent hackers were. That’s also what I’m hoping, because if this is the worst that the world’s most powerful nation can do to a blighted hell-hole like North Korea, it would be wholly inadequate to deter any other despots who would censor and control our discourse through cyberwarfare and cyberterrorism. A nine-hour DDOS attack wouldn’t do much to deter Kim Jong Un, or contribute to solving the greater problem — the fact that he rules a country to begin with. That level of response, together with the President’s description of North Korea’s attacks as “cybervandalism,” would imply a junior-varsity insouciance about the gravity of this threat:

Sen. John McCain rejected Obama’s characterization of the North Korean hack as “an act of cybervandelism,” instead calling it “a new form of warfare” on CNN’s State of the Union.

“The President does not understand that this is a manifestation of a new form of warfare when you destroy economies, when you are able to impose censorship,” McCain, a Republican from Arizona, said. “It’s more than vandalism. It’s a new form of warfare that we’re involved in and we need to react and we need to react vigorously.” [CNN]

McCain, the incoming Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, promised to call hearings on the issue when the new Congress convenes.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called it “an act of terrorism” and favored reimposing sanctions and adding North Korea to the terrorism list. The United States needs to “make is so hard on the North Koreans that they don’t want to do this in the future,” Graham said. [Joongang Ilbo]

Fortunately, a report from The New York Times claims the White House is considering better alternatives, starting with asking the Pentagon’s Cyber Command for a list of options:

“What we are looking for is a blocking action, something that would cripple their efforts to carry out attacks,” one official said. [….]

For now, the White House appears to have declined to consider what one Defense Department official termed “a demonstration strike” in cyberspace, which could have included targets such as North Korean military facilities, computer network servers and communications networks.

United States officials said that American efforts to block North Korea’s access to the Internet, which is available only to the military and the elite, would necessarily impinge on Chinese sovereignty.  N.Y. Times]

Sort of like China and North Korea just impinged on ours, then.

Tom Kellermann, a former member of the presidential commission on cybersecurity, said one option was what security experts refer to as a “hack back,” in which they use the attackers’ own computer footprints and back doors to deploy an attack that destroys North Korea’s attack infrastructure, or compromises the integrity of the machines that did the hacking. For example, the United States could deploy a malicious payload that encrypts the data on North Korea’s machines, or renders them unable to reboot — clearly “proportional,” in the president’s words, because that was what happened to Sony’s computers.

The White House is also considering financial sanctions, “mirroring those recently placed on Russian oligarchs and officials close to President Vladimir V. Putin,” to “cut off their access to cash … that allows the elite surrounding Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, to live lifestyles their starving countrymen can barely imagine.” The Times even invokes the example of Banco Delta Asia, calling it “the one sanction in the past decade that caused the most pain to the North Korean leadership.”

They’re starting to sound like Ed Royce, who is starting to sound like a man ahead of his time.

Finally, they’re considering an offensive of information operations — or if you prefer, psyops, “in which the United States plays on North Korea’s worst fears by using its access to the North Korean domestic computer and radio systems to deploy propaganda inside North Korea’s closed media bubble.”

A combination of those three options could be a serious response, although I’ll reserve judgment until I see the administration actually enforce it.

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Update: Reuters suggest some other alternatives:

U.S. cyber teams could also go after the hackers aligned with Pyongyang and make their lives miserable. It’s an effective tactic. Bullies are notoriously susceptible to bullying.

Since the FBI has declared that the attack came from North Korea, there’s a good chance the bureau’s experts know which computers and even which hackers it came from. Hackers generally have robust online lives. They use social networks, maintain a presence in online forums and chatrooms and transfer money using Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Washington could make their lives uncomfortably complicated.

It could break into the hackers’ email accounts and publish them – just as the hackers did to Sony Pictures executives. It could ban their Internet protocol addresses or infect their computers with destructive viruses and malware that could store every keystroke the hackers type. Every password, email, website visited would be recorded and stored in a U.S. database. It might only sideline the hackers, by making them spend time and energy fixing the problem or even force them to buy entirely new hardware — a hacker’s worst case scenario.

U.S. cyber teams could also pose online as commentators and ruin the hackers’ reputations among any communities they belong to. For example, they could upload faulty software to the black markets as the Guardians of Peace.

In the long run, those tactics might damage the North Korean hackers’ capabilities, but wouldn’t do much to deter North Korea or other copycat cyberterrorists.

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This post was edited after publication.

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Update 2: These hackers claim responsibility for taking down North Korea’s internet. HT: Steve Herman.

N. Korea perestroika watch: corruption defeats information crackdown

December 23, 2014 Capitalism, Censorship No comments

I’ve previously reported on Kim Jong Un’s efforts to crack down on illegal cell phones, memory sticks, DVDs, and other subversive information flows, even as some wishful observers clung to sketchy evidence to argue that Kim Jong Un was a reformer. The good news is that after an initial period in which smuggled DVDs became hard to find, they are making their way back into circulation.

“People caught for watching South Korean dramas aren’t being punished that harshly anymore,” a source based in Pyongyang told the Daily NK on Wednesday. “Authorities in charge have been turning a blind eye in exchange for bribes, so all we hear about is people being caught and not punished for what they did.”

However, she was quick to note that this situation is not indicative of any lax in regulation. “This doesn’t mean the crackdowns from the 109 group, the SSD, the Ministry of People’s Security, and inminban [people’s unit] have gotten any looser,” she explained. “They frequently search people’s homes and demand bribes if any CDs or flash drives containing South Korean dramas are discovered.”

She went on to explain that the 109 Group, a specialist team comprising people from the Ministry of People’s Security [MPS], the Party, and the administration, looks for, in particular, discs of South Korean films, dramas, and music. Some residents have reportedly paid up to 500 USD in bribes in response to the demands by this group and others conducting clampdowns.

“Some of the personnel carrying out these crackdowns tell people that if they don’t give them bribes, they might be sent to prison camps, never to leave for the rest of their lives,” the source said. “They often tell you that if you don’t have enough, that you should at least make an effort; many times they eventually say they’ll look the other way for 100 USD.” [Daily NK]

According to the article, lower-ranking officials are telling their seniors that the crackdown is working to a greater extent than it really is. Similarly, officials at all levels pay lip service to Kim Jong Un’s threat to punish corruption, which continues as it always has.

Not all of the news is good. Illegal cell phones are still nearly impossible to use, thanks to cell phone trackers the regime recently imported from Germany. That’s important, because those phones provide a critical cross-border link for the escape of refugees, and for cross-border trade in all kinds of smuggled goods.

The obvious caution is that most of these reports invariably depend on a small number of sources. They may reflect local conditions, or individual biases.

One can imagine the existence of a degree of passive official tolerance of this corruption, and even the possession of the offending materials, as a function of those officials’ political apathy or disillusionment. It’s likely that corruption has now embedded itself into the official culture to the point where it will be difficult to extirpate, even after reunification.

Dr. Evil, on Kim Jong Un

December 23, 2014 Humor/Satire No comments

For better or for worse, the whole country is talking about it.

N. Korea: Stop accusing us of terrorism, or else!

December 22, 2014 Censorship, Terrorism (NK) 3 comments

There is something strangely unconvincing about North Korea’s denial that it hacked Sony Pictures or threatened “9/11 style” attacks on theaters:

North Korea rejected the notion that it would attack “innocent moviegoers.”

“We will not tolerate the people who are willing to insult our supreme leader, but even when we retaliate, we will not conduct terror against innocent moviegoers,” KCNA said.

“The retaliation will target the ones who are responsible and the originators of the insults. Our army has the intention and ability to do (so).” [CNN]

And this:

“As the United States is spreading groundless allegations and slandering us, we propose a joint investigation with it into this incident,” the spokesman was quoted as saying by the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

The spokesman also threatened “grave consequences” if the US continued to discuss retaliation against North Korea on this matter. [….]

Despite denying the attack, the North’s top military body the National Defence Commission has slammed Sony for “abetting a terrorist act while hurting the dignity of the supreme leadership”, according to KCNA. [AFP]

In contrast to this hyperbolic characterization, President Obama offers an oddly hypobolic one, calling North Korea’s actions “cyber vandalism.” I suppose we should be thankful that he didn’t attribute it to the “junior varsity” of North Korea’s hack squad, Unit 121. But if North Korea is also responsible for the threat to attack American movie theaters that Nakoulad two of the world’s largest movie studios into submission — and that’s how I read the FBI’s statement — we’re talking about something far worse than “vandalism.”

North Korea is also threatening a nuke test, in response to the full General Assembly’s passage of a resolution condemning it for crimes against humanity, and recommending a prosecution of responsible North Korean officials by the international criminal court.

“We will step up our efforts to strengthen self-defensive capability, including nuclear capability,” the North’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement, arguing that the resolution was a U.S-led political scheme to find an excuse for a military invasion against it. [Yonhap]

You can read the full text of that General Assembly resolution here, which you should, because we are all North Koreans now.

President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. The Obama Administration’s official view is that North Korea is “not known to have sponsored any terrorist acts since the bombing of a Korean Airlines flight in 1987.” Discuss among yourselves.

This organization does not tolerate failure.

December 22, 2014 "United" Nations, Diplomacy No comments

For weeks, I’d heard rumors that the North Korean government told its diplomats that they’d be held accountable — personally — unless they stopped the U.N. from moving human rights resolutions. There may have been some truth to those rumors.

North Korea has recently replaced the deputy chief of its mission to the United Nations in New York, diplomatic sources said Wednesday, a personnel change that followed the recent U.N. passage of a unusually strong human rights resolution against the communist country.

“Around two weeks ago, North Korean deputy ambassador to the U.N., Ri Tong-il, was replaced and he returned to the North,” one of the sources, well-versed in U.N. matters, told Yonhap News Agency. “As far as I know, his successor, Deputy Ambassador An Myong-hun, has entered New York.”

The decision to replace Ri, a well-known U.N. expert, comes as a surprise at a time when the North is undergoing a critical phase at the international body over its human rights situation. [Yonhap]

OFK has exclusive video.

What re-listing N. Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism would mean

December 22, 2014 Sanctions, Terrorism (NK) 2 comments

The New York Times is reporting that President Obama is considering re-listing North Korea as a state sponsor of terrorism:

As the United States moves closer to taking Cuba off the list of state sponsors of terrorism, President Obama said he would “review” whether to return North Korea to the list, part of a broader government response to a damaging cyberattack on Sony’s Hollywood studio.

“We have got very clear criteria as to what it means for a state to sponsor terrorism, and we don’t make those judgments just based on the news of the day,” Mr. Obama told CNN in an interview broadcast Sunday. “We look systematically at what’s been done.” [N.Y. Times]

In fact, the standard isn’t clear, and neither is the Foreign Assistance Act’s definition of terrorism, but it wasn’t until I reviewed a post I wrote several years ago that I realized the full significance of a re-listing. I was reminded that Section 2332d of the Criminal Code prohibits financial transactions by U.S. persons with the governments of states designated as sponsors of terrorism, except in accordance with Treasury Department regulations published at 31 C.F.R. Part 596, which require that those transactions be licensed. Because almost everything in North Korea is controlled by the government, this would effectively force most U.S. corporations and their subsidiaries to divest from North Korea, closing one important loophole in our current sanctions. Compare Part 596 to our leaky existing sanctions at Part 510, and you can see the difference clearly.

(What Part 596 would not do, of course, is hit North Korea’s third-party enablers, or its very access to the financial system, as the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act would.)

Companies such as the Associated Press and DHL that do business in North Korea would have to scramble to obtain licenses or withdraw. Any U.S. subsidiaries operating in the Kaesong Industrial Park would also be affected. Although Treasury could grant licenses to those choosing to deal with this regime, a re-listing would nonetheless send a powerful signal to lenders and investors everywhere that providing Kim Jong Un with regime-sustaining cash is politically and financially risky.

A re-listing would also require U.S. diplomats to oppose foreign assistance grants and loans by international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Export-Import Bank. A state sponsor of terrorism also loses its sovereign immunity from civil lawsuits for personal injury caused by the acts of terror it sponsors. North Korea recently lost several such suits in U.S. federal district courts, relating to actions that took place prior to North Korea’s 2008 de-listing. The plaintiffs are now trying to collect nearly $500 million. As recently as July of this year, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth found North Korea liable for sponsoring rocket attacks by Hezbollah.

Other effects would be less significant, such as restricting the availability of non-immigrant visas to North Koreans. Theoretically, restrictions on the export of munitions and sensitive technology to North Korea would be further restricted, although the Commerce and Treasury Departments presumably aren’t granting licenses for those exports now.

The re-listing of North Korea is long overdue. President Bush’s decision to take North Korea off the list in October 2008 was an inducement for a disarmament deal on which North Korea had already begun to renege. It was a decision President Obama (while still a candidate) promised to reverse if North Korea didn’t keep its word, but it was President Obama who didn’t keep his when North Korea conducted two additional nuclear tests. North Korea’s de-listing did not follow any North Korean acknowledgement of its past support for terrorism. It actually marked the beginning of a period in which North Korea increased its terrorist threats against the U.S. and South Korea, its assassinations of (and assassination attempts against) exiles and human rights activists, and its shipment of weapons to Hamas and Hezbollah.

A re-listing, if President Obama actually goes through with it, would effectively foreclose the possibility of another nuclear deal with North Korea during the remainder of President Obama’s term, particularly if Kim Jong Un’s reaction is as impulsive as I suspect it would be. It would belatedly challenge Pyongyang’s sense of impunity.

We are all North Koreans now

December 20, 2014 Censorship, Human Rights, Sanctions, Terrorism (NK), U.S. Law 5 comments

As far as I know, I didn’t liberate a single North Korean during my four-year tour with the Army in South Korea, although I’ve argued their distant and forgotten cause ever since I came home. The crimes of Kim Jong Un were still distant just five weeks ago, when Professor Lee and I, writing in The New York Times, sounded a lonely warning about Kim’s efforts to censor his critics in the South with terror and violence, writing that “[c]aving into blackmailers merely begets more blackmail.” To some, that probably seemed absolutist, even hyperbolic. It should seem more prophetic now.

One morning this week, I awoke to the realization that the rights I’m arguing for are my own—in my own home, and in my own neighborhood. Here, in America. In the suburbs of Washington, D.C.  Today, in a very small way, we are all North Koreans. Most of us have spent the last several decades ignoring the men who oppress North Koreans. Now, in a small but incalculably important way, the same men have oppressed us. Here is the FBI’s statement about the Sony hack, and the terrorist threats that followed it:

As a result of our investigation, and in close collaboration with other U.S. government departments and agencies, the FBI now has enough information to conclude that the North Korean government is responsible for these actions. While the need to protect sensitive sources and methods precludes us from sharing all of this information, our conclusion is based, in part, on the following:

- Technical analysis of the data deletion malware used in this attack revealed links to other malware that the FBI knows North Korean actors previously developed. For example, there were similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks.

- The FBI also observed significant overlap between the infrastructure used in this attack and other malicious cyber activity the U.S. government has previously linked directly to North Korea. For example, the FBI discovered that several Internet protocol (IP) addresses associated with known North Korean infrastructure communicated with IP addresses that were hardcoded into the data deletion malware used in this attack.

- Separately, the tools used in the SPE attack have similarities to a cyber attack in March of last year against South Korean banks and media outlets, which was carried out by North Korea.

We are deeply concerned about the destructive nature of this attack on a private sector entity and the ordinary citizens who worked there. Further, North Korea’s attack on SPE reaffirms that cyber threats pose one of the gravest national security dangers to the United States. Though the FBI has seen a wide variety and increasing number of cyber intrusions, the destructive nature of this attack, coupled with its coercive nature, sets it apart. North Korea’s actions were intended to inflict significant harm on a U.S. business and suppress the right of American citizens to express themselves. Such acts of intimidation fall outside the bounds of acceptable state behavior. The FBI takes seriously any attempt—whether through cyber-enabled means, threats of violence, or otherwise—to undermine the economic and social prosperity of our citizens. [FBI Press Release]

The feds sound very confident about their conclusions:

Intelligence officials “know very specifically who the attackers are,” said one individual familiar with the investigation, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing. [Washington Post]

As with the Cheonan incident, it’s almost as if North Korea wants everyone to know it did it, while leaving just enough doubt to let its apologists do their work. That strategy worked well for them in South Korea, which never responded to the two deadly attacks on its territory in 2010. Why should Kim Jong Un believe that attacking us would lead to different results? That’s one reason why I’m so glad the President said something about the importance of protecting free speech:

“We cannot have a society in which some dictator someplace can start imposing censorship here in the United States,” Obama said. “Because if somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what they start doing when they see a documentary that they don’t like or news reports that they don’t like.

Obama said he wished Sony had “spoken to me first,” adding: “I would have told them, ‘Do not get into a pattern where you get intimidated by these criminal attacks.’ ” [Washington Post]

Well, depending on who you believe, maybe they did. Still, that’s a welcome change, coming from the President who asked YouTube to take down “The Innocence of Muslims,” and whose Justice Department hustled Nakoula Nakoula off to jail to appease the whooping loonies who dominate the Middle East’s political culture today. But not to worry—the CEO of Sony Pictures says he’s “considering some sort of release on the Internet.”

I’ve never been much of a George Clooney fan, but he’s one of the few people in Hollywood with the spine to stand against North Korea’s terrorism:

“We’re talking about an actual country deciding what content we’re going to have,” he told Deadline. “This affects not just movies, this affects every part of business that we have.”

“What happens if a newsroom decides to go with a story, and a country or an individual or corporation decides they don’t like it? Forget the hacking part of it. You have someone threaten to blow up buildings, and all of a sudden everybody has to bow down. [CNN]

Our attention now turns toward what President Obama will do. Let’s hope it exceeds my low expectations, and Pyongyang’s:

Even in my myopic world view, these attacks raise far weightier questions than what our North Korea policy should be. The President’s response must be enough to restore U.S. deterrence of North Korea, and the confidence of our artists, media, journalists, and lowly bloggers that our government will protect them from the world’s petty despots:

“We will respond proportionally,” Obama said, “and we will respond at a place and time that we choose.”

U.S. officials have made clear for several years that they have a range of diplomatic, economic, legal and military options at their disposal in response to cyberattacks. Those steps might include indicting individuals believed to be behind the attack, asking like-minded states to join in condemning the intrusion, and if North Korea persists, undertaking a covert action to dismantle the computer systems used in the operation. [Washington Post]

I’ve already written here about what that response should include. One of those possible responses seems almost inevitable, now that Senator Bob Menendez has asked Secretary of State John Kerry to put North Korea back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. It’s difficult to see how he could avoid doing that, given the destructive power of the attack, its chilling effect on free speech, and the extensive evidence that North Korea was already sponsoring terrorism even before this incident.

“The United States condemns North Korea for the cyber-attack targeting Sony Pictures Entertainment and the unacceptable threats against movie theaters and moviegoers,” he said in written statement.

“We encourage our allies and partners to stand with us as we defend the values of all of our people in the face of state-sponsored intimidation,” Kerry added.

Separately, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said U.S. and Chinese officials had met in Washington and Beijing to discuss the issue, adding that: “Both China and the United States agree that conducting destructive attacks in cyberspace is outside the norms of appropriate cyber behavior.” [Yonhap]

As is customary among journalists, The New York Times and Reuters printed the standard-issue, off-the-record-senior-State-Department-official talking point that North Korea sanctions are maxed out, without bothering to read the sanctions. This talking point sometimes comes without any citation of authority whatsoever, and sometimes cites “experts” who appear not to have ever read a sanctions regulation. When I pointed out to these Bloomberg reporters that they’d cited a cybersecurity expert‘s analysis of a legal question–and that the analysis was wrong–I received a polite and interested reply, suggesting that the reporters genuinely intend to research the question. In the case of Reuters, in particular, the propagation of this false narrative is disappointing, because most of the Reuters reporters I follow check their facts painstakingly before publishing them.

The Wall Street Journal’s Jonathan Cheng and Jeyup Kwaak did a better job:

On the financial front, the U.S. has wide latitude to target the North’s financial capabilities and its links to the global banking system, says Joshua Stanton, a Washington, D.C. lawyer and blogger who has advised the U.S. House of Representatives’ Foreign Affairs Committee on North Korea sanctions legislation.

Mr. Stanton says the U.S. can designate the North’s banking system as a money-laundering concern, add the country back to a list of state sponsors of terrorism, and move toward blocking U.S. tourism to the North.

“Our North Korea sanctions are weaker than our Zimbabwe sanctions,” Mr. Stanton said in an interview. “All of the top officials in the government of Zimbabwe have their assets blocked, and none of the top officials in the government of North Korea do.” [….]

“The single biggest thing that we can do is to designate the country as a primary money-laundering concern,” Mr. Stanton says, which he says would block the regime from conducting dollar-denominated transactions through the U.S. financial system, as its institutions can now do.

“That would have a very big impact on North Korea—banks around the world are very reputation-conscious,” he says, and would shy away from conducting any transactions with institutions tied to Pyongyang.

Some defectors from North Korea say Pyongyang has learned from the Banco Delta Asia sanctions, and now keeps much of its money outside the traditional banking system, which could limit the impact of such a move.

Mr. Stanton also notes that U.S. sanctions list just 63 North Korean ships, companies and individuals, far fewer than those for Myanmar or Cuba. He also says that U.S. Congress could start moving legislation that would impose similar restrictions blocking U.S. citizens from traveling to North Korea and spending money. [Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Cheng and Jeyup S. Kwaak]

Bruce Klingner of the Heritage foundation was also battling against this myth:

Oh, and for the record:

A North Korean U.N. diplomat said Pyongyang had nothing to do with the cyber attack. “DPRK (North Korea) is not part of this,” the diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity. [Reuters]

I think I speak for all of humanity when I sincerely hope this isn’t all Barack Obama’s pretext to advance Joe Biden’s cryptic plot to dominate North Korea’s vast riches of coal, meth, and refugees.

One thing that seems far more likely today is that the House and Senate will make North Korea sanctions legislation a higher priority. Even before the FBI fingered North Korea for this attack, and before President Obama announced his outreach to Cuba, Senator Menendez introduced a sotto voce version of the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, S. 3012. That bill is too weak to be worth passing in its current form, but it’s structurally similar enough to what the House passed last year that it should be viewed as a serious opening bid and a welcome step toward a good compromise.

A friend on the Hill told me yesterday that in terms of seizing Congress’s attention, the events of this week are the equivalent of “two or three nuke tests.” A Chinese Security Council veto of U.N. human rights sanctions–sanctions that were just recommended by the full General Assembly–should be the equivalent of another. At an exceptionally formative moment, Congress’s attention has been focused on North Korea. The administration is distinguishing North Korea from Cuba, is almost certainly considering new sanctions, and has probably just scrapped its plans for Agreed Framework 3.0. If a bipartisan, centrist consensus concludes that the agony of North Koreans is no longer a problem we can treat as remote and irrelevant, and that it’s time to discard the failed solution of appeasement, we will have reached an inflection point in our North Korea policy.

One avenue of response I hope the President won’t overlook is that information warfare works both ways. Certainly, carefully targeted sanctions can play an important part in defunding and disrupting the regime’s capacity to censor and oppress its people. Symbolically and practically, however, no response–not even sanctions–would do more to alter North Korea than to wage a quiet, non-violent war against its information blockade. It is difficult to imagine that despite all of America’s innovative potential, it still lacks the means to bring free speech to the people of North Korea, and to help them find their own way to rid themselves of the accursed men who tread them–and us–down.

If N. Korea hacked Sony and threatened us, here’s how we should respond

December 18, 2014 Books & Films, Censorship, Terrorism (NK), U.S. Law 25 comments

The New York Times, quoting “[s]enior administration officials,” is reporting that “American officials have concluded that North Korea ordered the attacks on Sony Pictures’s computers.”

Senior administration officials, who would not speak on the record about the intelligence findings, said the White House was debating whether to publicly accuse North Korea of what amounts to a cyberterrorism attack. Sony capitulated after the hackers threatened additional attacks, perhaps on theaters themselves, if the movie, “The Interview,” was released. [N.Y. Times]

The Times report doesn’t say whether the feds also think North Korea was behind the threats that caused Sony to pull The Interview from theaters, but North Korea certainly is profiting from the perception that it was responsible for them. Today, another studio made the cowardly decision to kill a Steve Carell film that would have been set in North Korea.

Nor would this be the first time North Korea has used terrorism to censor The Interview. It has already used its kidnappings of Japanese citizens to censor the film’s closing scene:

Japan, where Sony is an iconic corporate name, has argued that a public accusation could interfere with delicate diplomatic negotiations for the return of Japanese citizens kidnapped years ago.

The administration’s sudden urgency came after a new threat delivered this week to desktop computers at Sony’s offices warned that if “The Interview” was released on Dec. 25, “the world will be full of fear.”

“Remember the 11th of September 2001,” it said. “We recommend you to keep yourself distant from the places at that time.” [N.Y. Times]

That’s one example of how negotiations with North Korea can be worse than no negotiations with North Korea. Separately, the Times reports on Sony’s internal debates about censoring The Interview, in a simpering kowtow to North Korea’s threats.

Disturbed by North Korean threats at a time when his company was already struggling, Sony’s Japanese chief executive, Kazuo Hirai, broke with what Sony executives say was a 25-year tradition. He intervened in the decision making of his company’s usually autonomous Hollywood studio, Sony Pictures Entertainment.

According to hacked emails published by other media and interviews with people briefed on the matter, he insisted over the summer that a scene in which Mr. Kim’s head explodes when hit by a tank shell be toned down to remove images of flaming hair and chunks of skull. [….]

At one point in the tug of war over the script, Mr. Rogen weighed in with an angry email to Ms. Pascal. “This is now a story of Americans changing their movie to make North Koreans happy,” he wrote. “That is a very damning story.” [N.Y. Times]

I’m not sure what would leave me more speechless–a direct, brazen attack on our freedom of expression in our own country; the cowardice of Hollywood, Sony, Japan, and the theater chains; or the idea that the U.S. State Department agreed to review scenes from The Interview, thus putting a stamp of government censorship (or endorsement) on the film.

Or, maybe it’s the argument of an irredeemable imbecile named Justin Moyer, who defends North Korea’s reaction in a blog post at The Washington Post, without condemning its hacking, threats, violence, or use of its Japanese hostages. Moyer even writes, “If a future North Korean missile test, naval exercise, trip across the DMZ or future act of terror is blamed on ‘The Interview,’ Rogen can’t say he didn’t have fair warning.” Say what? I look forward to Moyer’s explanation of why Hitler had every right to be upset about “The Great Dictator,” or why Charlie Chaplin had “fair warning” about the Sudeten Crisis and Kristallnacht.

Whether the evidence ultimately proves North Korea responsible for this or not, petty despots everywhere have learned how to censor what the rest of us are allowed to read and see, and not only in America. I can’t help wondering whether Pyongyang, in turn, learned it from the Innocence of Muslims affair. These events have vast implications for our freedom of expression. Arguments about the film’s artistic merit have no place in this discussion. Parody, including tasteless parody, is at the core of how we express our views on matters of global public interest.

The breach is expected to cost Sony Pictures tens of millions of dollars as the company rebuilds its computer network, conducts a forensic investigation of the attack and deals with the legal fallout, including potential lawsuits from employees. It could also have an effect on the film industry’s creative choices.

“I’ve got to believe that this will spook anybody from considering making the North Koreans bad guys in a film,” movie producer Bill Gerber said. “Unless you were dealing with something that was fact-based and very compelling, it might not be worth it.” [L.A. Times]

This time, will our President stand up for our freedom of expression unambiguously? That would require him to act swiftly and firmly against those found to be responsible. Unfortunately, the Times‘s reporters end an otherwise excellent report with the tired, cliche falsehood that the President has no options because “[t]he North is already under some of the heaviest economic sanctions ever applied.” Pish-posh. I don’t know how many times I have to say it–people who write about sanctions should read them first. People who’ve read the sanctions know they’re weak.

Here, then, is a brief list of things the President could do in response, assuming the evidence shows that North Korea was responsible.

1. Put North Korea back on the list of state sponsors of terrorism. One of George W. Bush’s great, unsung foreign policy failures was his failed nuclear deal with Kim Jong Il, under which he relaxed sanctions and removed North Korea from the list. North Korea’s de-listing marked the beginning of a period during which North Korea escalated its sponsorship of terrorism, including threats, assassinations, and arms shipments to terrorists.

2. Ask the Senate to follow the House’s example and pass the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, to remedy the weaknesses in our North Korea sanctions.

3. Sign an executive order blocking the assets of North Korean state entities responsible for censorship inside North Korea itself. That executive order could be modeled on one that already applies to Iran.

4. Sign a new executive order blocking the assets of entities found to have knowingly perpetrated, attempted, or supported hacking, cyber-attacks, or cyber-espionage against U.S. targets. That order could be modeled on existing executive orders that target the perpetrators and sponsors of terrorism and WMD proliferation.

5. Ask the Director of National Intelligence to compile a report on China’s support for North Korean hackers, release the unclassified portions to the public, and consider either a criminal prosecution or a civil forfeiture action to attach and seize the assets of any Chinese entities hosting, harboring, or supporting North Korea’s hackers.

Sony, of course, should release and promote The Interview in its original, uncut form. Theaters should show it. Newspapers should stop printing Sony’s hacked e-mails, except as they pertain to North Korea’s attempts to suppress the film. Artists should expose and criticize the cowardly decisions of studios to censor criticism of North Korea, and any other government. Courts should exclude Sony’s hacked e-mails as evidence in litigation. And individual citizens who love freedom of speech should give to Thor Halvorssen’s Human Rights Foundation, which plans to send copies of The Interview into North Korea by balloon.

~   ~   ~

Update:

Congratulations to Kwon Eun Kyoung of Open Radio …

December 17, 2014 Activism, Subversion No comments

for winning the National Human Rights Commission’s Korea’s Human Rights Award.

Max Fisher’s criticism of the Sunshine Policy is spot-on

December 17, 2014 Appeasement, Kaesong, Sunshine One comment

Washington Post alumnus Max Fisher, now writing at Vox, presents a graph and data showing how, despite all of its abhorrent behavior, North Korea’s trade (most of it with China and South Korea) has grown, and how that leads to more abhorrent behavior.

The way it’s supposed to work is that North Korea’s belligerence, aggression, and horrific human rights abuses lead the world to isolate it economically, imposing a punishing cost and deterring future misdeeds. What’s actually happening is that North Korea is being rewarded with more trade, which is still extremely small, but growing nonetheless, enriching and entrenching the ruling Kim Jong Un government, even as it expands its hostile nuclear and missile programs. [….]

But it turned out that North Korea was just exploiting the Sunshine Policy as a con. The greatest symbol of this was the Kaesong Industrial Complex, a big production center just on the North Korean side of the border, where South Korean companies and managers contract with North Korean workers. The idea was that this daily contact would ease cultural tension and that the shared commercial interests would give the countries a reason to cooperate. In practice, though, the North Korean government stole most of the workers’ wages, big South Korean corporations exploited the ultra-cheap labor to increase profits, and North Korea didn’t ease its hostility one iota.

The Sunshine Policy ended in 2007, correctly rejected as a failure by South Korean voters. But the trade continued, as did the work at Kaesong. South Korean corporations, which have even more political power there than do American corporations in the US, have come to enjoy this trade as a source of revenue and cheap labor, and push to maintain it. That drop you see in 2013 is actually because North Korea shut down Kaesong for a time as a political provocation — it was the South Koreans, paradoxically, who wanted to reopen the facility that directly funds the North Korean weapons occasionally used to kill South Koreans. [Vox, Max Fisher]

Those South Korean corporate profiteers have since allied themselves with “progressive activists,” who vary from the anti-anti-North Korean to the pro-North Korean, to call on President Park to lift sanctions on the North. It must be the most unlikely alliance since 1939.

I’m not sure how Fisher’s analysis of the problem could have been better, unless he’d driven home the point that the Sunshiners justified their policy by predicting that this preferential trade would catalyze economic reform and liberalize North Korean society. Clearly, that hasn’t happened; in fact, I could make a strong case that the opposite is closer to the truth. In their desperation to catalyze reform, Sunshiners have perpetuated the status quo instead.

And then again, some rumors are true

December 16, 2014 Kremlinology One comment

In October, I posted about rumors that several senior North Korean officials had lost their jobs, including Ma Won-Chun, who showed up shortly thereafter. But another subject of the rumors, Gen. Ri Pyong-Chol, the Commanding Officer of North Korean People’s Air Force, has lost his job.

~   ~   ~

Update: A reader wonders whether Ri has necessarily lost his job, or might have been promoted. Technically, I suppose it’s possible that both of those things could be true. The story of Choe Ryong-Hae, who also lost one of his job titles, shortly before being sent to South Korea in a position of obvious rank and influence, counsels us not to assume too much about where Ri landed.

Suki Kim responds to critics of her decision to go undercover

December 16, 2014 Books & Films, Foreigners in N. Korea 2 comments

It’s ironic to read how the people at PUST–who’ve suppressed their religious, political, and moral beliefs to accommodate and assist the world’s most oppressive regime, and also, to suppress the truth about it–have challenged Suki Kim’s ethical decisions. But some of those criticisms might be more valid coming from other sources, so Kim addresses them on her web site. I can’t disagree with Kim’s justification that overt journalism has failed us.

There is a long tradition of “undercover” journalism—pretending to be something one is not in order to be accepted by a community and uncover truths that would otherwise remain hidden. In some cases, this is the only way to gain access to a place. North Korea, described only recently by the BBC as “one of the world’s most secretive societies,” is such a place. [….]

I did not break any promises. I applied to work at PUST under my real name. I was not asked to sign and did not sign any kind of confidentiality agreement, nor did I ever promise not to write about PUST.

Meanwhile, in the six decades since Korea was divided, millions have died from persecution and hunger.  Today’s North Korea is a gulag posing as a nation, keeping its people hostage under the Great Leader’s maniacal and barbaric control, depriving them of the very last bit of humanity. So what are our alternatives? How much longer are we going to sit back and watch? To me, it is silence that is indefensible.  [Suki Kim]

All valid points, but it also occurs to me that had Ms. Kim been caught, I’d probably be railing against her now, which doesn’t seem completely fair somehow. While I think Ms. Kim has told us important things about North Korea—and especially important things about the ethical compromises that some foreigners have made with its regime—I still wouldn’t advise anyone to try anything like this again.

I’d greatly prefer it if the journalists who are there now (and yes, I mean the AP) made more of an effort to report the news from North Korea objectively, rejecting the regime’s financial entanglements and editorial constraints. Failing that, they would do better to fund, equip, train, and tap into existing guerrilla journalism.

I doubt, of course, that we really know the whole story about PUST, either–who its faculty are, what they’re really doing there, who they’re teaching what to, how much money the regime makes from them, and what skills those young elites are really learning. That’s why I’ll keep my mind open just a sliver until one day, when James Kim reveals just what they were really doing there all along.

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