North Korea: Let the (information) war begin (updated).

It’s still much too early to say that the new campaign to cut off the hard currency that sustains His Corpulency’s misrule will result in either behavior modification or the termination of that misrule, but we continue to see signs that are consistent with Pyongyang feeling the pressure from sanctions. One of these is its exceptional belligerency of late — exceptional even by North Korean standards. Not a week goes by without news of North Korea violating U.N. sanctions by firing more missiles. North Korea has also increased its UAV flights over South Korean territory, in one case, prompting ROK soldiers to fire warning shots. Most recently, it has jammed GPS signals near the DMZ.

The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning said the GPS disruptions that began Thursday have been repeating at intervals ever since, impacting Seoul’s adjacent city of Incheon, and the surrounding Gyeonggi and Gangwon provinces.

The ministry said 746 airplanes and 621 vessels experienced disruptions, but no significant damage has been reported so far. The disruptions can cause mobile phones to malfunction, and affect planes and ships that rely on GPS for navigation.

Seoul’s defense ministry earlier said that the North’s actions are aimed at raising tensions on the divided peninsula amid mounting international pressure on the North to give up its nuclear weapons programs.

The defense ministry added that there has been no reported negative impact on the South Korean military due to the North’s GPS-jamming provocations. It warned that it will make North Korea pay a “due” price if Pyongyang does not cease its actions. [Yonhap]

These things are certainly threatening and disruptive to South Korean commerce — including at Incheon Airport and the vital sea lane nearby — but South Korea could adapt to them if it had to. After all, aircraft and ships operated before GPS was invented. If they had to, aviators and navigators could relearn the lost art of navigation without it.

The unspoken premise of Pyongyang’s strategy is that electronic warfare is inherently more disruptive to the technologically advanced South than the Luddite North. Nonsense. There can be no better illustration of the potentially disruptive power of signals on the North Korean political system than North Korea’s quarantine of outside information. The fact that North Korea expends so much effort to sustain it — jamming foreign broadcasts, conducting house-to-house searches for illegal DVDs, even importing tracking devices to find and seize the illegal cell phones that help fill its markets and feed its people — tells you that the people with the best information, the North Korean security forces themselves, know that outside information is a grave threat to the stability of the system.

In a must-read report, the New York Times explains how, on a people-to-people level, those cell phones have become a vital link between North Koreans and the outside world, including with their relatives who have escaped from the North, and with people inside and outside North Korea who are hungry for information on the other side of the blockade. But the potential of cell phones as an agent of change is so much greater than this that it’s a mystery to me why one cannot call across North Korea’s southern border just as one can (still, barely) call across its northern border.

Since the start of the current financial isolation campaign, the regime has been exceptionally isolationist — again, even by North Korean standards.

North Korea has been intensifying a “sting operation” to arrest people making contact with South Koreans using mobile phones, especially in border areas near China, sources said Tuesday.

Sources familiar with North Korean affairs said that nearly 10 people have been arrested by security forces since the start of the ongoing 70-day campaign to encourage its people to work harder as the ruling Workers’ Party gets ready to host its first congress since 1980. [….]

A source said that the country’s public security authorities have recently carried out a special operation in the border city of Musan in North Hamgyong Province to round up residents having phone conversations with South Koreans or their relatives living south of the border.

The source said that the security authorities’ sting operations are being conducted in the “Rimgang” area near Musan, where phone connections are relatively good.

According to the source, the North Korean authorities turn off their jamming devices intentionally for two to three hours to make it easier for residents to have smooth telephone conversations and then apprehend them for making the phone conversations that are illegal in the North.

“Some 10 residents have been arrested in such operations since the start of the 70-day campaign,” the source said, adding that there are rumors that those detained will be executed before or after the party congress on charges of espionage.

Despite such crackdowns, the number of people contacting the South or making phone calls with citizens are on the rise, as many rely on support from their relatives to survive in the impoverished country. Money sent can be used to buy goods on the open market. [Yonhap]

As it turns out, North Korea’s jamming of South Korean GPS signals may be collateral damage from a redoubled effort by Pyongyang to strengthen the quarantine by jamming foreign broadcasts, and even blocking websites like Twitter, Facebook, and other applications that foreigners in Pyongyang can access, and use to report information to the outside world. North Korea has always jammed foreign broadcasts, although a 2013 study by Intermedia found that the jamming wasn’t all that effective, perhaps due to the North’s endemic power shortages and the difficulty of sustaining the jamming. Today, however, Pyongyang is sparing no expense to maintain the quarantine.

North Korea has been from the beginning of March continually signal jamming radio broadcasts on the shortwave frequency used by the South Korean non-profit broadcaster Unification Media Group (UMG). Given the present situation, in which North Korean residents might be influenced by outside information condemning the regime and explaining the purpose of the sanctions imposed by the United Nations, the regime has showed the will to block sources of outside information that might cause unrest.

The shortwave frequency in question–7515 kHz, in the 41 meter band–has been actively jammed, making it extremely difficult for North Korean listeners to tune in. [….]

“This is the strongest signal jam in the last few years. As the regime is pushed into further isolation by the strongest round of sanctions yet, they have become concerned that the residents will be awakened by exposure to outside information,†Unification Media Group (UMG) President Lee Gwang Baek said.

“North Korean authorities can not signal jam at high strength across multiple channels, so right now, the most effective thing to do would be to expand our frequencies and signal strength. We need direct [South Korean] government assistance to do that.â€

If the government were to grant permission for civil society organizations broadcasting to North Korea to use the former’s powerful and far-reaching medium wavelengths, the broadcasts would be able to reach far more people despite the jamming attempts.

About this, National Intelligence Service First Deputy Director Yeom Don Jae said, “The regime’s efforts to block radio signals from South Korean civic groups is actually confirmation of the potency of these broadcasts. This will cause considerable agitation for the listeners who have become accustomed to tuning in to foreign radio.â€

He added, “Therefore, we need to let the North Korean residents know about this situation and use the strength of the regime as a weapon against them. We need to use multi-dimensional methods to pump the North full of information.†[Daily NK]

Exactly right. Regardless of the North’s electronic warfare against the South, the South should be waging an aggressive information war against the North. The campaign should leverage various types of media — broadcasting over short wave, medium wave, and television; and the smuggling of USBs, DVDs, and the devices to read them.

It should focus as much attention on getting information and images out of North Korea as getting them in. Above all else, it should focus on two-way communication, ideally through cell phones, because the information that is most persuasive to North Koreans is what they hear from people they trust. Its message must not only inform North Koreans about the corruption and inequality in their own society, it should also spread a message of peace to counteract the state’s anti-American and anti-South Korean war propaganda. The message should be a variation of the one that worked so well for Marxist revolutionaries a century ago — rice, peace, and freedom.

Even as the information campaign pursues diverse tactics, it must also have a single, cohesive strategy. Calls to establish a pro-democracy movement inside North Korea sound wonderful in the abstract, but how many North Koreans will understand what democracy is, much less the complex ways in which democratic institutions would protect them from fear and hunger? How many North Koreans would risk their lives for abstract ideas? Lately, I’ve become convinced that we should learn from Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, which built the foundations of political movements on social service organizations that filled the voids left by uncaring, incompetent, and corrupt governments, while rejecting the terrorist methods they also pursued. In the same sense, clandestine institutions that provide for North Korean’s material needs can establish the organization, resiliency, and credibility to take their messages in more spiritual and political directions later. Again, as the Marxists taught us:

Note that this is not a call to support unconventional warfare, as retired Special Forces Colonel David Maxwell has advocated, or a call for a campaign of nonviolent resistance as the Albert Einstein Institute advocates generally. My view is that both strategies are premature and implausible today, because today, no resistance movement can organize or establish the clandestine political infrastructure that is the prerequisite to all resistance — including nonviolent resistance — to totalitarian regimes.

Seoul is now calling the jamming a violation of the armistice and warning Pyongyang that it will pay a price for it. Certainly information operations can be an effective deterrent, but they can be so much more. They can be the path to Korea achieving its destiny — to be a nation once again.

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Updates: After I published my post, a new Yonhap story tells us that Pyongyang has “strengthened its surveillance of its people in areas bordering China to crack down on those contacting defectors in South Korea ahead of its key party congress.”

“The North is trying to strengthen its control over people in the border areas on the grounds that internal information in North Korea has leaked to the South Korean media,” a source said.

The ministry is carrying out special operations to arrest North Koreans who contact their family members in South Korea via mobile phones, the sources added.

Defectors living in South Korea send money to their kin in the North through brokers in China or the North. They talk over the phone along the border regions where Chinese mobile phones work.

“The authorities have increased the number of agents to monitor North Koreans at public places, such as markets,” the source said. “North Korea has been beefing up its crackdown over its people. Those who are at risk the most are North Koreans who have family members who have defected to the South.” [Yonhap]

My post also drew this response from Colonel Maxwell:

With all due respect to my good friend Joshua Stanton he makes the fatal mistake regarding both unconventional warfare and non-violent resistance (e.g., Gene Sharp) that most non-practitioners, and uninformed policymakers and strategists make regarding unconventional warfare. The resistance in north Korea must be supported and while the conditions may not be ready for the resistance to act (which is why continuous assessment of resistance potential must be made), preparation must occur over time. You cannot just decide to conduct unconventional warfare sometime in the future without any prior preparation. If you want to have that option you have to prepare the environment now and one of the ways to do that is to provide support to the nascent resistance which is what I advocate here. To follow Joshua’s line of reasoning at the end of his article would mean that we never have the option should the Alliance determine that it is one of the ways/means to support Alliance strategy.

But to support Joshua’s call for the (information) war to begin with one recommendation for how to use information to help prepare the Korean people living in the north for unification.

As a non-practitioner, I had not thought that I was proposing anything that would be categorized as “unconventional warfare” by a practitioner, but Colonel Maxwell and I are both saying that the U.S. and South Korea should — immediately — seek to create the technological, social, and political conditions in which resistance (regardless of the form it takes) becomes possible.

Colonel Maxwell also contemplates supporting an armed resistance movement. For today’s purposes, I’ll leave that part of the discussion to the practitioners, although as early as the 1990s, even Wendy Sherman was assuming that this would just happen spontaneously and save us from the nuclear crisis. As the examples of Iran, Syria, and Libya show us, simply letting such things play out on their own seldom ends well.

On the other hand, if widespread popular resistance to the Pyongyang regime becomes a real possibility, it would surely concentrate minds in Beijing and Pyongyang on diplomatic alternatives. Beijing fears chaos in North Korea far more than it fears THAAD — probably even more than secondary sanctions — and the generals in Pyongyang must know that they’re neither equipped, trained, nor financed to wage a nationwide war against their own population.