I hate to continue to beat the horse but this is another indicator that illustrates how much the regime fears outside information and that the operations by the north Korean defector organizations and other NGOs are having an impact. This is all the more reason why a comprehensive ROK-US influence operations strategy (PSYOP/MISO) should be sustained. As an aside when looking at Bob Collins' patterns of collapse or 7 phases of collapse this is an indication of how the regime remains in the suppression phase has it has been for more than two decades. But reports such as this show that the suppression mechanisms may be strained. If suppression fails then we can potentially see a rapid progression though the remaining phases of collapse and if that is the case the potential for conflict increases. The bottom line is that reports such as these should be watched closely and of course we should not only be planning for what comes next but actively preparing to deal with the "fall out" when regime collapse occurs. But call me chicken little.
V/R
Dave
North Korea Cracks Down on Knowledge Smugglers
By By TIM SULLIVAN Associated Press
HUNCHUN, China December 31, 2012 (AP)
The warning came from Kim Jong Un, the North Korean ruler who sees his isolated nation, just across the border from this busy Chinese trading town, as under siege. The attack, he said, must be stopped.
"We must extend the fight against the enemy's ideological and cultural infiltration," Kim said in an October speech at the headquarters of his immensely powerful internal security service. Kim, who became North Korea's supreme leader after the death of his father a year ago, called upon his vast security network to "ruthlessly crush those hostile elements."
Over the past year, Kim has intensified a border crackdown that has attempted to seal the once-porous 1,420-kilometer (880-mile) frontier with China, smugglers and analysts say, trying to hold back the onslaught.
The assault that he fears? It's being waged with cheap televisions rigged to receive foreign broadcasts, and with smuggled mobile phones that — if you can get a Chinese signal along the border — can call the outside world. Very often, it arrives in the form of wildly popular South Korean soap operas smuggled in on DVDs or computer thumb drives.
In North Korea, a country where international phone calls and Internet connections exist only for a tiny fraction of a tiny elite, and televisions and radios must be permanently preset to receive only state broadcasts, it's Korean-language TV heartache they crave.
(Continued at the ink below)
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