A smartphone smuggled out of North Korea is offering a rare – and unsettling – glimpse into the extent of control Kim Jong Un’s regime exerts over its citizens, down to the very words they type. While the device appears outwardly similar to any modern smartphone, its software reveals a far more oppressive reality. The phone was featured in a BBC video, which showed it powering on with an animated North Korean flag waving across the screen. While the report did not specify the brand, the design and user interface closely resembled those of a Huawei or Honor device.
It’s unclear whether these companies officially sell phones in North Korea, but if they do, the devices are likely customized with state-approved software designed to restrict functionality and facilitate government surveillance.
One of the more revealing – and darkly amusing – features was the phone’s automatic censorship of words deemed problematic by the state. For instance, when users typed oppa, a South Korean term used to refer to an older brother or a boyfriend, the phone automatically replaced it with comrade. A warning would then appear, admonishing the user that oppa could only refer to an older sibling.
Typing “South Korea” would trigger another change. The phrase was automatically replaced with “puppet state,” reflecting the language used in official North Korean rhetoric.
Then came the more unsettling features. The phone silently captured a screenshot every five minutes, storing the images in a hidden folder that users couldn’t access. According to the BBC, authorities could later review these images to monitor the user’s activity.
The device was smuggled out of North Korea by Daily NK, a Seoul-based media outlet specializing in North Korean affairs. After examining the phone, the BBC confirmed that the censorship mechanisms were deeply embedded in its software. Experts say this technology is designed not only to control information but also to reinforce state messaging at the most personal level.
Smartphone usage has grown in North Korea in recent years, but access remains tightly controlled. Devices cannot connect to the global internet and are subject to intense government surveillance.
The regime has reportedly intensified efforts to eliminate South Korean cultural influence, which it views as subversive. So-called “youth crackdown squads” have been deployed to enforce these rules, frequently stopping young people on the streets to inspect their phones and review text messages for banned language.
Some North Korean escapees have shared that exposure to South Korean dramas or foreign radio broadcasts played a key role in their decision to flee the country. Despite the risks, outside media continues to be smuggled in – often via USB sticks and memory cards hidden in food shipments. Much of this effort is supported by foreign organizations.
does anyone really think our freedom phones are far from this?
Maybe the western world can be given some credit on being a tad more subtle, but overall the difference here are in tecnique, not goals
Its funny, a screenshot every 5 minutes that might be reviewed later on if needed sounds less intrusive than western efforts like google, amazon, etc.
Tracking someone’s history through screenshots sounds like a fucking nightmare for the person doing the searching.
It’s evil, but also a PITA for the analyst.
What kind of tankie bullshit argument is that lmao
Eh, they didn’t exactly paint it in a good light. It’s more like not laughing too much at the ordinary NK citizen’s big brother plight while the rest of us are being monitored constantly and much more real time.
The two situations are not the same, but the parallels show his we all deal with this crap in our own ways.
A factually accurate one lol
That’s why laws like the GDPR exist to prevent this bullshit.
GDPR
Does not exist in Murica
But it does in the EU and similar laws exist in other countries. I can do nothing about the corruption in the states
Ps. it does exist in Amerika
Not completely, but the Brussels effect still applies to some degree.
Did not know about that… thanks for the link
GDPR does not prevent foreign intelligence agencies from profiling you
Do you have a link to what foreign intelligence agencies you mean cause than I am going to use my right to be forgotten. Cause yea that will work.
Any SIGINT agency that deals with foreign intelligence is likely to have most of your deepest darkest secrets. The ones with most media coverage are NSA and GCHQ. Looking it up isn’t likely to yield very insightful results, other than perhaps some queer documents leaked by Snowden
Probably not considering I live in a generally low risk country (NL) and they can’t have something that doesn’t exist. International intelligence in GDPR countries generally goes through the own countries government unless there are signs that they cannot be trusted.
And they will be really wary of using illegally obtained data on somebody in NL since that will cause for a lot of attention on them and probably issues. So even if they have relevant data they should be hesitant of using it.
Yes, because here in the capitalist USA I am free to choose what phone and carrier I use, and what OS and software my phone have on them. The free market decided that I should have access to bootloader unlockable phones with open source OS and zero shitty Facebook apps spying on me.
Tell me you are blind to privilege without telling me you are blind to privilege…
I get what you are saying but claiming that Capitalism and the Free Market got you there is laughable.
A shit ton of people in the USA do not actually have a choice in carrier and choice of phone seriously depends on how rich you are, the spread is wide!
More importantly, how many people do you think have the tech knowledge (or access to pay) to get an open source OS in their phones?
Yes, you captured yourself perfectly… I couldn’t have done it better
Can you provide more information on how western governments are spying?
Thats so dystopian, that it can only screenshot every five minutes. Thank god i use windows, and get over 60x the frames-on my double 4k monitor setup. So much better than those filthy north korean peasants. I hope someday they have this freedom.
In the westwe call it Microsoft Recall
No that’s totally different… it will be used the same way but it takes much less manual work to perform
That’s still 60 times fewer screenshots than Microsoft Recall. SIXTY.
Yeah, but at least it’s our corporate overlords and not the government!!
/s
Unless the government wants to buy the data in which case it’s just good capitalism
They won’t even buy it, they’ll just find a zero day and steal the data while everyone is none the wiser.
No, I believe they come to the company and say “Give us a live feed or we shut you down. Also if you tell anyone we shoot your wife” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
Lil o’ column A, lil o’ column B https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EternalBlue
Nicole Perlroth
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
is a must read for people. All agencies, from USAF through FBI to NSA, were buying zero days separately. En mass. As much as they could. Just in case.
Google bug hunting program stems from USA getting into their networks and stealing data.
Snowden may disagree with that.
The true source of Microsoft innovations in Windows.
Seriously. This is exactly what people object to about Windows Recall. In its re-released version at least it’s opt-in for now, but it’s still eerily close to this.
after the linux nerds opt out. there’s still 98% of the flock begging for ai surveillance from recall and whatever apple’s scam is lately.
Oh cool they got microsoft recall first
Sounds like windows recall…
Better than recall. No need for special hardware like an NPU, nor does it keep asking you to sign in.
/s
An NPU isn’t required for something like recall, it just makes running local models more efficient.
frequently stopping young people on the streets to inspect their phones and review text messages for banned language
I’m really tired of people saying “both sides are the same” when it comes to western capitalist exploitation vs eastern totalitarian authoritarianism.
It’s ironically so privileged to even make the comparison because if it were the same, you wouldn’t have been allowed to make this comment.
I didn’t say both sides are the same. I made a stupid joke about a garbage operating system and the garbage company that runs it.
And your example of stopping people on the streets to inspect their phones doesn’t really do a great job at making the argument you’re trying to make. We have ICE running around and throwing people into contracted prisons even when they have proof of citizenship. We are trafficking people to foreign concentration camps. We are rocketing at light speed to a techno fascist authoritarian state and the level of surveillance we are under is increasing at a mind boggling pace.
So we aren’t the same, and the people currently in charge are striving to make the differences smaller every day.
I made a stupid joke
Nah, the joke was fine. They overreacted.
In addition to your point, literally just two days ago I saw an article about a Texas sheriff running a search through a nation-wide network of license plate readers to track down a woman suspected of having an abortion.
Oh OK they didn’t stop her on the street, they just queried the panopticon system that tracked her movement as much as possible. Want to protest a genocide your state and university are sponsoring? Sorry, MIT will muzzle you and now you are now forbidden from giving the commencement address. Wouldn’t want to offend the dear leader in the white house.
if it were the same, you wouldn’t have been allowed to make this comment.
It works both ways. Is OP allowed to make the comment because he is more priviliged or because he has less power and is less of a threat?
Remember the McCarthy era. There can be more restrictions if needed.
I totally agree. Stuff like Microsoft recall is not great and America under Trump neither, but it is nothing compared to North Korea. That is a hellhole nobody who grew up in a free western society really can even imagine.
Frequently the point of comparing the two is to caution before they actually become comparable, though. I think it’s intentional hyperbole to make a stark point, not an insensitive reduction.
I’d rather live in NK then in Gaza: the West loves to create hellholes, and the US has the most prisoners of any country on earth so calling it a ‘free society’ is pretty rich.
More to the point, if any Western country had done to it what NK had done to it by the West during the Korean war, it would turn into a brutal basket case far worse then anything NK could imagine. Things like 9/11 and October 7 turn Westerners into frothing omnicidal maniacs, and those are completely negligible in scope compared to what the west has done to other countries, including Korea.
I agree, western capitalist exploitation is far worse, but privileged liberals in the imperial core aren’t the main victim, and they only care if their billionaire owned media tells them to.
Although I dislike recall as much as anyone else, this is quite a bit worse.
From the article:
Then came the more unsettling features. The phone silently captured a screenshot every five minutes, storing the images in a hidden folder that users couldn’t access. According to the BBC, authorities could later review these images to monitor the user’s activity.
Recall stores an image every few seconds. 5 minutes is indeed much worse. Think of all the content they’re missing!
How? If authorities seize your computer, don’t you think the recall screenshots is the first they will look at?
For sure. But at least those images aren’t kept in a secret location where users can’t see or delete them. Even if Recall makes this harder, there’s a meaningful difference here.
That said, neither one is doing you any privacy favors…
Has everyone forgotten about the NSA and their absurdly massive data centers? At least a portion of the US population likely has substantial data from their tech in a database we can’t access.
Sure, but at least from a technical POV those screenshots are accessible to the users, can be deleted/manipulated and the user is not forced to have the feature enabled
I don’t see how this is worse.
After examining the phone, the BBC confirmed that the censorship mechanisms were deeply embedded in its software.
Remember, this could happen in your country.
Its always “It Can’t Happen Here” until it does.
I’m glad these exists, but remember that these only work as long as device manufacturers don’t lock the bootloaders.
Your country’s government could pass a law that requires bootloaders to be locked for “national security” reasons, and there’d probably not be much resistance since most people don’t even use custom roms. (Looking at you, USA and the autocratization)
Then i guess i won’t have a phone anymore :/
“It Can’t Happen Here”
Unironically a good book about fascism happening in the US, and was written before 1984 and other dystopian novels that were largely reactionary to the USSR.
What do you mean “could”? It does
I feel like that’s a honeypot, kinda like that time feds made a phone to spy on cartels.
In the c/Privacy community, people say e/OS isn’t as secure as Graphene OS. Although e/OS has better privacy compared to googled android, but apparantly worse security (late security patches).
Whaaaat? Are they using Windows smartphones with Copilot in Korea? 😮
Windows Recall is approved by the supreme leader.
That’s Best KoreaTM to you!
lemmygrad and hexbear users now scavenging for windows phones
Bill Gates is actually a based ally!
It’s funny, because it’s their government’s version of knockoff spyware, and decades out of date. Western governments get a live feed out of their backdoors.
Oh yeah, have there been reports on this ?
(Not trying to shut you down, I’m genuinely curious)
Yeah, there have been various leaks over the years that trickle out. Supposedly they’ve banned companies from operating in the US for refusal to comply with backdoor demands (Hawei, Kaspersky), some reports of backdoors built right into both Intel & AMD processors, some vague stuff that’s come out about backdoors in Windows, etc. Even when the companies refuse to comply, there’s been reports of US intelligence going into factories or intercepting deliveries to install spy chips into hardware. I recall there was a local ISP provider somewhere in the mid-west that got shut down for refusing to install spy devices in their facilities.
Really a lot of this was confirmed as far back as Snowden. And plenty of whistleblowers and leaks since.
There’s an extremely powerful backdoor in every processor/chipset. Intel named it “Management Engine” and AMD “Secure Technology”.
From the Wikipedia page on Management Engine:
The ME has its own MAC and IP address for the out-of-band management interface, with direct access to the Ethernet controller; one portion of the Ethernet traffic is diverted to the ME even before reaching the host’s operating system.
ME has Serial over LAN, so it’s possible that attackers can have a more intimate access to your hardware than your Operating System.
I imagine other manufacturers have similar frameworks.
Sure, those could theoretically be used for backdoor access to your computer.
However, they are trivial to spot on most routers. If you see another device on the ethernet port that your computer connects to, then something weird is going on.
Another important consideration is the fact that those technologies are meant for ethernet, while most people use laptops with wifi.
Microsoft Recall: Amateurs!
Probly happens in the US too but we won’t know until a whistleblower comes forward and gets a lifetime of solitary confinement for telling us
Yep. Just like with reverse-engineering software and making unintented use of proprietary services, whistleblowing depends at nobody being able to threaten you with jail or worse.
Your country should have made it law when Watergate and such were still fresh in memory. To make such mechanisms not just “de facto”, but “de jure” reality. Because any “de facto” either becomes “de jure” or vanishes without a trace.
EDIT: similar with “adversarial interop” CD was talking about
EDIT2: or Gutenberg and the printing press and the conflicts to ensue…
didn’t google just announce android was gonna do the same thing?
edit: it was microshaft.
In August 2024, security experts revealed code similar to NSO Pegasus were reused by Russia-linked agencies. They pointed out the uncontrolled proliferation of surveillance tools to authoritarian actors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(spyware)#Reuses
Could the north Koreans have a copy of Pegasus (like) software/spyware through russia? Pegasus is a proven solution to spy on Saudi Arabia (and others) on ios™️ and android™️ devices.
I’m totally shocked that a progressive free society like North Korea would tolerate such authoritarian invasiveness!
