If the CIA isn’t funding this covert communications network for North Korea, it should be

Many years ago, when I was a young engineering student at my small college in South Dakota, a grizzled CIA operations officer came to my school to recruit technical experts. To an aspiring man of the world living in a small, isolated island in a vast ocean of grass and sagebrush, before the arrival of the internet, the idea of meeting a real CIA man stoked an irresistible curiosity in me. You might as well have laid a trail of deer jerky from my dorm room to the student center.

I did not end up working for the CIA — readers in Pyongyang and Beijing and assorted tin-foil hatters, take note — but the grizzled operations officer did teach me some important nomenclature that I’ll share with the aspiring spies among you. One is that a CIA agent is an agency non-employee who provides information or assistance to the agency. An agency employee who works in intelligence collection or analysis is known as a CIA officer.

He also taught me the difference between the often confused words “covert” and “clandestine” with a crude-yet-effective example that went something like this: If you break into your professor’s office, open his desk, write down the answers to the test questions, and sneak away without him knowing, that’s a clandestine operation. If you break into your professor’s office and take a dump on his desk, that’s a covert operation. He knows someone did it. He just doesn’t know who. As God is my witness, yes, he really said that. But enough of this. You’re here to read about North Korea:

A group of North Korean defectors are seeking to change the Kim Jong Un regime with “raspberry pies,” but they’re not pastries for consumption. Instead the “pies” the activists are planning to smuggle into North Korea are portable personal computers. [UPI]

I’m no technical expert, but I think the correspondent means “Raspberry Pi.”

The “pies” are about the size of the palm of one’s hand, are cheap, and can be carried easily, according to the report. The computers can pick up wireless signals within a 1-mile radius. The defectors plan to retain a communications command center in an area of China close to the North Korea border. 

When thousands of the devices are smuggled into the country, they can automatically share information across a network that can extend all the way to Pyongyang and other areas more inland, the defector said.

“If in the past a North Korean would sing to himself as he listened to a South Korean pop song, now through the ‘raspberry pies’ he can learn about North Korea’s human rights violations and be moved to action and social change,” the defector said. 

The first step is to send in dozens of the “pies” as soon as funding becomes available, then seek the support of the international community to expand operations, according to Yonhap. [UPI]

Could it work? Yes, I think it could. The idea described here sounds very much like something called Mesh Networking, a concept that allows every wireless-enabled device to become a signal repeater for another device within range, which can be up to 5 or 10 miles, depending on various factors. Mesh networks are simple, cheap, and redundant. They’ve been studied for post-disaster communications, and as a way to frustrate state censorship of the internet. I’m not going to share all of the research I’ve done on them, but I will say that some of the ideas I’ve seen could be adaptable to North Korea’s conditions. They would allow Chinese (or South Korean) cell networks to enable communications across the length and breadth of North Korea. There would be so many nodes that the security forces could never find all of them. 

If the reports are accurate and Congressman Mike Pompeo of Kansas will be the nominee for CIA Director, he should take careful note of a few points.

First, anyone who hasn’t figured out by now that there is no appeasing Kim Jong-un is probably a lost cause. No matter how much we pay him, Kim is nuking up. Now matter how much we pay him, he’s pursuing a graduated, methodical plan to assert hegemony over South Korea, and what’s more, I’m convinced that a majority of South Korean voters may soon elect a man who would surrender their freedom to him in the name of a moment’s security from terror. (If that really is the will of the South Korean people, I would respect that. But I’m convinced that it’s not the will of the North Korean people, who know far better than they do how that would work out in practice.)

Second, much is made of the importance of getting outside information into North Korea to shift popular perceptions of their own government. I agree that this is important. At the moment, it is Jieun Baek who is emerging as the most powerful advocate of this idea. But outside information alone will not be enough to change North Korea. No amount of discontent or envy means anything if the discontented are too isolated and afraid to act on their aspirations.

Which brings us to a point I’ve flogged more than once — that North Koreans will not be able to challenge the state until they have the ability to communicate and organize with other North Koreans, and until information can spread among North Koreans from village to village, valley to valley, province to province, and country to country. I explained here, in detail, how these communications would evolve from the non-political to the political to the subversive to the revolutionary.

I’m convinced that nothing short of an overthrow of Kim Jong-un, or a slow capitulation toward One Slave Korea, can prevent another Korean War. Not only can a covert communications network bring us closer to the first of these objectives, it can also provide for the humanitarian needs of the people who need it most, provide invaluable intelligence and public-interest information about conditions inside North Korea, and pave the way for a less chaotic reunification between North and South.