Press
North Korea's dictator Kim Jong-un has his people constantly spied on. The regime relies on high-tech from China – including in schools and kindergartens.
The children are perhaps five years old, they play with building blocks or make patterns with colorful plastic stones. A kindergarten like any other, you might think. But something is different: a camera watches the children as they play, and their teacher is also in the surveillance camera's sights. everyday life in North Korea.
“Digital surveillance is slowly but surely creeping into the lives of North Koreans,” says Martyn Williams, North Korea expert at the US think tank Stimson Center. Together with his co-author Natalia Slavney he has created a comprehensive study submitted for digital surveillance in the isolated country. Reports from North Korean state television were evaluated, including the pictures from the kindergarten with the surveillance camera on the wall. Refugees were also interviewed, as were people in North Korea itself.
Surveillance in North Korea: “What does the teacher write on the blackboard, what does he tell the children?”
The regime is concerned with complete control of citizens, says Williams when presenting the study. To do this, the country uses surveillance cameras to identify license plates on the streets and thus track people's movements. There is also increasing surveillance via cameras indoors, for example in factories or near statues – and in kindergartens and schools.
“The number of surveillance cameras appears to have increased significantly over the past five years,” says Williams. “They are also used on a large scale in classrooms.” The cameras are not intended to ensure more security in schools, but rather to monitor the students and, above all, the teachers: “What does the teacher write on the blackboard, what does he tell the children ?”
North Korea is one of the poorest countries in the world and unable to adequately feed its population. Nevertheless, the East Asian dictatorship has a huge army of hackers to extort large sums of foreign currency through Bitcoin fraud and other cyber crimes. The regime uses this to finance its missile program, but also luxury goods to keep the upper class in the capital Pyongyang happy. And there is also increasing technology to monitor our own population.
To monitor people in North Korea, Kim Jong-un relies on “made in China”
According to the Stimson report, North Korea has been working on biometric devices, such as fingerprint scanners, since the 1980s. Especially in the mid-2010s, after the dictator came to power Kim Jong Un, North Korea has increased its research efforts in this area. The regime has now also introduced digital identity cards that contain data such as blood type and fingerprints. Perhaps, Williams said, the country is working on building a nationwide biometric database.
While the software for the surveillance technologies is primarily programmed in North Korea itself, the majority of the hardware comes from China. However, surveillance in North Korea is not yet as comprehensive as in the People's Republic. The regime lacks the necessary foreign currency for this, says Stimson expert Slavney. The country also suffers from regular power outages, there is not enough computing capacity and only poor internet connections.
That is why the regime continues to rely on “classic” methods of surveillance: citizens are forced to spy on each other. “A vast surveillance apparatus helps the government maintain control over every aspect of people’s daily lives,” one said report the human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) in March. “It consists of a large network of secret informants.” These would control who people talk to on the phone, where they travel, whether they watch banned films or series from South Korea.
North Korea further isolated after the corona pandemic
Escape from this repressive system is hardly possible. The border with South Korea has always been insurmountable, and the borders with China and Russia were closed during the corona pandemic. Since then, border fences have been built along almost the entire length, as satellite images evaluated by HRW show.
During the pandemic, the Stimson report said, North Korea tested how extensively it could control its citizens. Even after the country has slowly opened up, dictator Kim Jong-un doesn't seem to want to give his people more freedom – on the contrary: the regime will continue to expand its surveillance system, says North Korea expert Slavney: “If you were Kim Jong-un, you would do everything “Then you don’t want this technology?”
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