Search Results for “cyber”

July 27, 2016

What Pyongyang Must Do to Get Sanctions Lifted

If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it. – Dwight D. Eisenhower In yesterday’s post, I confronted two unwelcome facts: first, that Kim Jong-un almost certainly will not give up his nuclear arsenal voluntarily; and second, that we cannot learn to live with a nuclear North Korea (or more accurately, it will not learn to live with us). To these, I’ll add a third: things in Korea will certainly get much scarier over the next few years. Pyongyang is blaming...

Sanctions/U.S. Law

July 21, 2016

The Democrats on North Korea

In 2009, the Democrats came to the White House with high hopes that they could win North Korea’s trust and sign Agreed Framework III. Those hopes didn’t last. In May, North Korea nuked off for the second time. In 2010, it attacked the Cheonan and Yeonpyeong Island. The quick collapse of the Leap Day Agreement in 2012 killed off any hopes of a deal for good. For most of this period, Hillary Clinton didn’t really know what to do but couldn’t...

U.S. Politics

July 20, 2016

The Republicans on North Korea

A few minutes before I sat down to write this, the Republicans officially nominated Donald Trump as their presidential candidate. So on one hand, I’d guess a GOP platform won’t mean much more to Trump than that tax plan you’ve already forgotten about. On the other hand, the GOP platform probably reflects the views of its rank-and-file and down-ballot candidates, and it looks like a thinly veiled call for overthrowing His Corpulency: We are a Pacific nation with economic, military, and...

An Alliance?/U.S. Politics

June 28, 2016

N. Korean counterfeiting surges as Bureau 39’s checks bounce.

When the Secret Service first found high-quality counterfeit dollars circulating in the Middle East over three decades ago, North Korea wasn’t the prime suspect; . The counterfeits were so good that experts could only tell them from the originals by the superior quality of their printing, so the Secret Service named them “supernotes.” The Secret Service’s suspicions shifted to North Korea in 2000, after Cambodian authorities arrested Yoshimi Tanaka, a Japanese Red Army hijacker who had taken refuge in North...

Counterfeiting/Money Laundering/Sanctions

June 17, 2016

House Committee marks up bill calling for N. Korea’s re-listing as a terror sponsor

Last month, when it was introduced, I wrote about H.R. 5208, the House bill that would require the Secretary of State to acknowledge some of the extensive evidence — including final U.S. federal court judgments — of North Korea’s sponsorship of terrorism, and to go on the record as to whether North Korea has repeatedly provided support for acts of international terrorism. Yesterday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee took the next step on H.R. 5208, approving it in a committee markup....

Terrorism (NK)/U.S. Law/U.S. Politics

June 13, 2016

Meet the “Libertarians” who would surrender our liberty & our security to Kim Jong-un’s censors

I doubt that America has fully come to terms with the damage done to its freedom of expression by the Sony cyberterrorist attack of 2014, or by the increasing willingness of Muslim supremacists to extinguish our civil liberties through violence. It is an easy thing to be a civil libertarian when the subject is, say, the limits of a proposed law allowing the FBI or NSA to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists’ communications or monitor their social media posts. Even if we...

Censorship/Cyberwar/Terrorism (NK)

June 6, 2016

Obama Administration, GOP Congress join forces in N. Korea sanctions push in Asia

It’s a rare day in any election year, much less this one, when anyone could write a post title like that about a major public policy issue. Now, for the first time since I began writing this blog, all of the cylinders — the President, the Congress, the U.N., South Korea, and Japan — are all firing in the same sequence to raise the pressure on Pyongyang and Beijing. Over the last week, we’ve seen the Republican Congress’s key foreign...

Anju Links/Money Laundering/Sanctions

June 2, 2016

Congress asked for a real report on North Korean terrorism. The State Department hit CTRL-V and called it good.

As regular readers of this site have heard a few times by now, President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008, and despite overwhelming evidence, 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.” A few years ago, a less inquisitive Congress might actually have bought that, but in recent years, as North Korea’s sponsorship...

Terrorism (NK)

May 31, 2016

How much have sanctions affected PUST? Not enough, apparently.

Chan-Mo Park, the Chancellor of the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, or PUST, and a U.S. citizen, is blaming South Korean bilateral sanctions for his difficulties recruiting new academic talent. He told VOA on Wednesday, “We want to recruit South Korean professors, but the May 24 measure blocks it.” He was referring to trade and exchange sanctions South Korea made against North Korea on May 24, 2010. The sanctions came after South Korea accused the North of sinking one...

Cyberwar

May 27, 2016

Global wave of bank burglaries should revive calls to kick N. Korea out of SWIFT

In recent weeks, I’ve watched with keen interest, and some schadenfreude, as news reports have implicated Pakistani and North Korean hackers in a series of massive bank burglaries involving as many as 12 banks around the world, starting with the theft of $81 million (or $101 million, depending on which report you believe) from the Bangladesh Bank’s account in the U.S. Federal Reserve. These burglaries did not involve guns or ski masks. They were something more like armored car burglaries,...

Money Laundering/NK Crime/Sanctions

May 15, 2016

New bipartisan bill raises pressure on State Dep’t to list N. Korea as a terror sponsor

As readers of this site know, President Bush removed North Korea from the list of state sponsors of terrorism on October 11, 2008. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, 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.” That position is spurious. The evidence of North Korea’s sponsorship of terrorism is overwhelming. It includes shipments of arms to Hezbollah and Hamas,...

Terrorism (NK)

April 21, 2016

The North Korean Army’s rape epidemic

A few days ago, the Korea Times carried a profile of Lee So-yeon, a native of Hoeryong in North Korea’s far northeast, who defected to the South in 2008, did menial jobs for a few years, later earned her bachelor’s degree in social welfare from Gukje Cyber University based in Suwon, and then founded an NGO called the North Korea Women’s Union. Founded in 2011, the group hosts talks at schools and other groups, and provides job training and psychological...

Activism/Human Rights/Human Trafficking/NK Military

April 12, 2016

If Kim Jong-un can’t trust his own spies and assassins, who can he trust? (updates)

The revelation last weekend that a colonel in North Koreaâ€™s Reconnaissance General Bureau, or RGB, defected to South Korea last year represents a huge potential windfall in uncovering North Korea’s operations in the South. Reuters quotes Yonhap as reporting that the colonel “specialized in anti-South espionage operations before defecting and had divulged the nature of his work to South Korean authorities.” The Korea Herald, also citing Yonhap, reports that he gave â€œdetailed testimonyâ€ on RGB operations in the South. Or...

Defectors/Human Trafficking/Refugees

March 31, 2016

In Pyongyang, the ghost of Goebbels haunts the Associated Press

Why won’t the Associated Press release the Memoranda of Understanding it signed with the North Korean regime in 2011, in exchange for permission to set up a bureau in Pyongyang? What is it hiding? Plenty of possibilities come to mind, including the signature block. Imagine the AP’s embarrassment if it turned out that, to save time, someone had just pulled an old MOU out of a filing cabinet, crossed out “Josef Goebbels,” and written “Kim Jong-un” underneath it. Practically speaking,...

AP Watch

March 17, 2016

Obama blocks N. Korean assets, bans labor exports, sanctions ships and banks.

Just this morning, I was writing about reports that President Obama would sign a new North Korea sanctions executive order. The Executive Order the President signed this afternoon takes several important steps toward implementing the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, and to a lesser extent, U.N. Security Council Resolution 2270. Full implementation will require years of aggressive investigation and designation of targets, but this is a good start. The text of the E.O. itself is strong, exceeding in several...

Anju Links

February 23, 2016

Obama Administration’s “peace treaty” grasp explains its lax enforcement of N. Korea sanctions

For years, friends have asked me why the Obama Administration hasn’t made a serious effort to enforce sanctions against North Korea when we know they’ve worked before. I’ve resisted most temptations to psychoanalyze or speculate, but when pressed, I’ve supposed that the administration might have thought that a deal was still possible, however long the odds against it. With this revelation, however, everything suddenly makes sense. Days before North Korea’s latest nuclear-bomb test, the Obama administration secretly agreed to talks to...

Appeasement/Diplomacy

February 10, 2016

On North Korea policy, the opinion pages suddenly read like posts from this blog

Since January’s nuclear test, I have noted with satisfaction the signs that Washington’s consensus on North Korea policy has taken a decisive turn toward views I’ve advocated at this site for years. This week, OFK readers have been sending me a great deal of better-placed commentary about North Korea, asking me, “Did you write this?” I swear I didn’t write, for example, this Washington Post editorial, published yesterday: What is needed is a return to the only non-military strategy that brought...

U.S. Law/Washington Views

February 7, 2016

Ed Royce’s North Korea sanctions bill is already giving President Obama leverage over China

Kim Jong-un’s Groundhog Day message to the world was the announcement of a long-range missile test, and as you’ve no doubt heard, he has since made good on that threat. Like the movie “Groundhog Day,” this provocation cycle has been a variation on an endless loop. In 2006, 2009, and 2013, the missile test came before the nuke test, but if reports that His Corpulency is preparing yet another nuclear test are true, that will still technically be the case. Otherwise, events have...

China/Diplomacy/Sanctions

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