How to smuggle $1K into North Korea

[cantrevealname]

One thing bothers me about the article. This guy Kevin is able to get elderly relatives to practice good opsec. They walk to distant locations to make and receive calls, presumably at predetermined times; they avoid mentioning real names and other personally identifiable information; they speak for a strict 100 seconds or less. Carefully trained people could do all this certainly, but how would you train an elderly relative you left in your backward homeland with all this trade-craft, especially since you can't train them face to face, but you're limited to brief phone calls?

Perhaps the opsec has been exaggerated to make the article more thrilling, or the opsec is true but it's a professional smuggling ring not involving elderly relatives.

[LordKano]

Elderly people who have lived virtually their entire lives under such an oppressive regime would have opsec ingrained into their way of thinking.

My grandfather is in his 70s and I have heard from him about how some of his friends sneak around on their wives. These are men in their 60s and 70s who employ opsec to keep affairs concealed from their wives and the husbands of their mistresses.

Old people can be sneaky if the stakes are high enough and I guarantee that any elderly North Korean knows precisely what's at stake if they make any mistakes.

Maybe you're right, maybe there was some exaggeration for dramatic purposes but it's also plausible that the details are accurate.

[rmc]

> how would you train an elderly relative you left in your backward homeland with all this trade-craft

An elderly relative probably knows/knows of various people who've been caught and punished for this sort of thing. Tends to motivate people to learn. Old people aren't stupid.

[pkkim]

I'm not an expert, but I would suspect that life in North Korea is good training for being very careful with things like this.

[omegaham]

A society like North Korea is Darwinian in this regard.

If you're a good little citizen, you starve to death. If you're bad at breaking the rules, you go to the reeducation camps or to the firing squad. I'm sure that the example of former friends and family gives them ample motivation to learn good OPSEC.

[kokey]

I think the incentives are high enough for them to make it work, and those who can't make it work are not participating. The parents of the person in the article is probably also not that old and they have a network of relatives back home to train each other.

[j_lev]

You're not the only one that is bothered by the article. The thing that triggered my radar was that the entire thing read like fiction. If it looks like a duck,...

The dictionary sounds like bullshit. North Korean and South Korean are completely different dialects, with different orthography and spelling. Bigger differences than different spellings in English. I can't see a dictionary like that being of any use to his family.

There is no way sources can ever be checked, and that means anywhere from 0 to 100% of the article could be fabricated.

(edit: an analogy to better describe the dubious usefulness of the dictionary, it would be like a native Greek using a French-English dictionary to learn English)

[BuildTheRobots]

> Detection tools and systems to track down international phone calls made inside North Korea are becoming increasingly accurate and more widespread, so calls must be kept under two minutes.

Could someone elaborate on this... keeping calls <2min to stop them being traced seems painfully Hollywood

[fnordfnordfnord]

These are operating off of Chinese cell towers near the border, so the Nork authorities have no access to cellular system records. They have to use plain old RF direction finding techniques to pinpoint the location of a signal, and then catch a person with an illegal cell phone in their possession.

[grecy]

Speaking from a telco perspective, all of our switches make a CDR (call data record) for ALL calls in and out. Origin number, destination number, number of seconds, date stamp, etc. etc.

There are millions of CDRs per day.

It would be trivial to filter them for calls to/from certain ranges of numbers.

EDIT: To be clear, it makes no difference if your call is one second or one hour, I can easily find the CDR for it and prove you made/received a call from/to X

[Vexs]

No idea if this is right, but I imagine that's how long it takes to get the word out to start tracking this number, after which the actual tracking happens quickly.

[toomuchtodo]

Radio triangulation can take time.

[jkot]

In my experience from communist Czechoslovakia, western stuff is not actually prohibited. It is illegal for peasants, but communist elite can enjoy all luxuries they can effort.

[NietTim]

Indeed, Kim Jong Un has an iMac: http://news.images.itv.com/image/file/183576/image_update_aa...

[enedil]

Chechoslovakia was never actualy communist. Like in Poland, Eastern Germany and several other countries, it was socialist.

[merraksh]

The stranger on the other line is usually a girl, a Joseonjok girl. The woman gives Kevin a South Korean bank account number, to which Joseph wires $1,000.

Joseph was not mentioned before in the article. Is that another fake name for Kevin, that the author forgot to replace? I don't understand otherwise.

[yitchelle]

From what I can comprehend of the article, Joseph is the name of the person that "wired" the money into the Sth Korean bank. I guess that this is another obfuscation layer for identity hiding.

[huac]

Honestly sounds like a 'real name' for Kevin (it mentions his Christian faith, and Joseph is a 'better' Christian name than Kevin).

[jonah]

Here's a piece from 2014 about sending propaganda to NK via balloon.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/01/we-...

[NicoJuicy]

Since i once read that North Korea has a team of PR-people for online communities ( like Russia does), could HN check for the ip range of North Korea for possible propaganda here and indicate it? ( kinda interesting)

If someone of HN read this, the ip range is : 175.45.176.0 – 175.45.179.255 & 210.52.109.0 – 210.52.109.255

[jmnicolas]

You know what should interest you, is that YOUR country is astroturfing (and probably much more than NK). There's probably 99% chances that you will detect NK astroturfing (they're not natives), but how well can you detect astroturfing from your country ?

[shocks]

Russia do this too.

I imagine they're smart enough to use VPNs or something.

[msane]

There is a growing amount of cheap contraband smartphones and electronics in DPRK. When it reaches a critical mass, the only thing stopping a revolution will be ISP access. Well-timed satellite or balloon based WiFi could foment a revolution?

[emilsedgh]

Excuse me for my ignorance but why do you think internet access has anything to do with a revolution?

Isnt a revolution a complex sociological phenomenon?

Im pretty much sure whatever holds DPKR together isnt lack of internet access.

Source: Iranian who lived through Iran's Green movement

[redcalx]

"Well-timed satellite or balloon based WiFi could foment a revolution?"

Assuming the key players want a revolution, i.e. China, US, South Korea. We've seen how those sorts of revolutions can play out and they're not always better than what came before, at least in the short term (I'm mainly thinking about Syria and Yemen).

[Lancey]

> Smuggling goods is highly punishable, and letting people pass through the North Korean border, rather than shooting them, could get the border guards killed instantly.

This made me think the border guards have Running Man-esque bomb collars around their necks. I'm sure there's consequences, but compared to shooting smugglers I don't think their punishment would be that instant.

[omegaham]

Summary execution is pretty expedient, especially if you don't care about the facts.

[needhelpplz]

I sometimes fantasize about setting up a website or a kickstarter that lets people send balloons with the $9 chip, GPS, and tiny fans that will guide it any point in the map. The problem with weather balloons that are being sent from South Korea is that 1) Korean government are too much of a pussy to aggravate North (given their lack of response after naval ship attack and island shelling) so they attack activists 2) The weather balloons mostly end up in unreachable places, no way of knowing if it was successful.

It would be like a website or a kickstarter where people could pay to send packages that include communication equipment, non perishable food items, medkits, insurgency, guerilla warfare, etc.

Imagine the impact this would have on North Korea when suddenly the citizens are communicating anonymously with each other and outside world.

This can only be done if the balloons could self guide themselves using GPS with a high degree of accuracy, and they be launched outside of South Korea. Maybe it can be done from America but the pacific ocean is turbulent and it will be tough to make it all the way in to North Korea. Japan is the best bet but South Korea will probably pressure them. So this leaves out launching it directly from the States, the challenge and costs go up dramatically since the journey must be made across pacific ocean.

[josefresco]

"too much of a pussy"

Poor choice of language aside - South Korea has much more to lose in a direct or indirect conflict, and even if victorious (very likely despite the "size" of the NK force) would still sustain casualties that make them countering any NK aggression ... complicated.

[sosborn]

> Korean government are too much of a pussy to aggravate North

Perhaps they are more concerned with the well being of their citizens in Seoul than with being the big tough guy.

[ballerindustry]

"How to smuggle 1K..." Technically it was $700

[sgustard]

It's a good point. Kevin's mother asked for $1000, but she ended up with less. Feels like sloppy reporting.

[ck2]

So this article just detailed for north korea government how people are smuggling. Which means people are going to be found and killed.

How is this a good idea? This is people's very lives.

If even one person is executed over this, do the journalists just shrug and go browse amazon some more or wander around the mall?

If you want to expose North Korea, expose the government, not the people desperately trying to survive.

I love how we are freaking out about Iran, meanwhile North Korea makes Iran look like disneyland and actually HAS nuclear weapons AND missiles they can be attached to. The deep hypocrisy with only caring about Israel is thick and deadly.

[cantrevealname]

> So this article just detailed for north korea government how people are smuggling. Which means people are going to be found and killed.

The article is generalities. Don't you think the government would already know all that? If the government had caught and interrogated even a single smuggler or a single person who'd received foreign goods, they'd know far more specific information than this article gave.

[venomsnake]

The NK not only knows about that smuggling, but also probably takes cut of the profits from it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_39

[wiradikusuma]

I think it (should) work both ways. By having it exposed (which I believe the NK govt know already), probably some sympathetic people smarter than me could come up with a better solution.

[kuyfiuyg]

They already know. When they catch people, they have ways to make people tell them anything.