This Smartphone Smuggled Out of North Korea Is Absolutely Wild

"Smartphones are now part and parcel of the way North Korea tries to indoctrinate people."

Autocomrade

North Korea's supreme leader, Kim Jong Un, is tightening the leash to stop the influence of South Korean media from crossing the border, where it's often smuggled on USB sticks and SD cards.

As the BBC reports, consuming foreign media is punishable by imprisonment and even death in the dictatorship. In 2023, Kim even made it a crime for people to use South Korean phrases or speak in a South Korean accent.

It's an Orwellian degree of absolutist control over the freedom of speech. And it extends to deep features of localized smartphones in the reclusive nation; a North Korean phone that was smuggled out of the country and obtained by the BBC was programmed to automatically replace forbidden words as they were typed, demonstrating the extraordinary extent of the Kim regime's efforts to control the way people express themselves — in an incredibly literal way.

Big Brother

For instance, the South Korean word "oppa," which directly translates to older brother but has become a popular term to address older male friends or romantic partners, gets autocorrected to the word "comrade."

"This word can only be used to describe your siblings," reads a warning that automatically pops up on the smuggled phone when a user types the word "oppa."

And the word for South Korea automatically changes to "puppet state," North Korea's preferred term for referring to its southern neighbor, which has a vastly more mainstream government and relationship to the outside world.

Worst of all, the device is taking a screenshot every five minutes and sending it to the authorities — files that the user isn't even able to access.

The software highlights the oftentimes surprising extent to which the North Korean regime goes out of its way to fight foreign influences and squash dissent.

"Smartphones are now part and parcel of the way North Korea tries to indoctrinate people," North Korean tech expert Martyn Williams told the BBC.

And it's working, Williams argued, with North Korea "starting to gain the upper hand" in its ongoing information war with the South.

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