North Koreans Use Cellphones to Bare Secrets

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea, one of the world’s most impenetrable nations, is facing a new threat: networks of its own citizens feeding information about life there to South Korea and its Western allies.
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The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea’s near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers’ phoned and texted reports on Web sites.

The work is risky. Recruiters spend months identifying and coaxing potential informants, all the while evading agents from the North and the Chinese police bent on stopping their work. The North Koreans face even greater danger; exposure could lead to imprisonment — or death.

The result has been a news free-for-all, a jumble of sometimes confirmed but often contradictory reports. Some have been important; the Web sites were the first to report the outrage among North Koreans over a drastic currency revaluation late last year. Other articles have been more prosaic, covering topics like whether North Koreans keep pets and their complaints about the price of rice.

But the fact that such news is leaking out at all is something of a revolution for a brutally efficient gulag state that has forcibly cloistered its people for decades even as other closed societies have reluctantly accepted at least some of the intrusions of a more wired world. “In an information vacuum like North Korea, any additional tidbits — even in the swamp of rumors — is helpful,” said Nicholas Eberstadt, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has chronicled the country’s economic and population woes for decades.

“You didn’t used to be able to get that kind of information,” he said of the reports on the currency crisis. “It was fascinating to see the pushback from the lower levels” of North Korean society.

To see the whole article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/world/asia/29news.html?pagewanted=1&ref=global-home

Commentary:
North Corea is a hard dictatorship and also one of the world's most closed society. For example, the north Corean cannot have access to the Internet. Therefore, we have very few news about the country, except those of the official government. However, even in "the world's most impenetrable nation", they cannot fully to cut out from the globalized world. Indeed, some North Corean dissidents found a solution to face the censorship. They can communicate with the world and reveal what happens in their country by using a chinese cellphone that works near the border with China.In conclusion, this article reminds us that because of globalization and new technologies it is almost impossible for a country to cut out from the world. We all know new technologies can be usefool tools for military spying, but can new technologies be usefool tools for protestation ? Indeed, they have a potential to both defy the censorship and quickly amass a virtual crowd of supporters.