BANGKOK - The state of North Korea's
information-technology (IT) industry has been a
matter of conjecture ever since "Dear Leader" Kim
Jong-il famously asked then-US secretary of state
Madeleine Albright for her e-mail address during
her visit to the country in October 2000.
The answer is that it is surprisingly
sophisticated. North Korea may be one of the
world's least globalized countries, but it has
long produced ballistic missiles and now even a
nuclear arsenal, so it is actually hardly
surprising that it also has developed
advanced computer technology,
and its own software.
Naturally, it lags
far behind South Korea, the world's most wired
country, but a mini-IT revolution is taking place
in North Korea. Some observers, such as Alexandre
Mansourov, a specialist on North Korean security
issues at the Honolulu-based Asia-Pacific Center
for Security Studies (APCSS), believes that in the
long run it may "play a major role in reshaping
macroeconomic policymaking and the microeconomic
behavior of the North Korean officials and
economic actors respectively".
Sanctions
imposed against North Korea after its nuclear test
last October may have made it a bit more difficult
for the country to obtain high-tech goods from
abroad, but not impossible. Its string of front
companies in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and
Taiwan are still able to acquire what the country
needs. It's not all for military use, but as with
everything else in North Korea, products from its
IT industry have both civilian and non-civilian
applications.
The main agency commanding
North Korea's IT strategy is the Korea Computer
Center (KCC), which was set up in 1990 by Kim
Jong-il himself at an estimated cost of US$530
million. Its first chief was the Dear Leader's
eldest son, Kim Jong-nam, who at that time also
headed the State Security Agency, North Korea's
supreme security apparatus, which is now called
the State Safety and Security Agency.
Functioning as a secret-police force, the
agency is responsible for counterintelligence at
home and abroad and, according to the American
Federation of Scientists, "carries out duties to
ensure the safety and maintenance of the system,
such as search for and management of anti-system
criminals, immigration control, activities for
searching out spies and impure and antisocial
elements, the collection of overseas information,
and supervision over ideological tendencies of
residents. It is charged with searching out
anti-state criminals - a general category that
includes those accused of anti-government and
dissident activities, economic crimes, and slander
of the political leadership. Camps for political
prisoners are under its jurisdiction."
In
the 1980s, Kim Jong-nam studied at an
international private school in Switzerland, where
he learned computer science as well as several
foreign languages, including English and French.
Shortly after the formation of the KCC, South
Korean intelligence sources assert, he moved the
agency's clandestine overseas
information-gathering outfit to the center's new
building in Pyongyang's Mangyongdae district. It
was gutted by fire in 1997, but rebuilt with a
budget of $1 billion, a considerable sum in North
Korea. It included the latest facilities and
equipment that could be obtained from abroad.
According to its
website, the KCC has 11 provincial
centers and "branch offices, joint ventures and
marketing offices in Germany, China, Syria, [the
United] Arab Emirates and elsewhere".
The
KCC's branch in
Germany was established in 2003 by a
German businessman, Jan Holtermann, and is in
Berlin. At the same time, Holtermann set up an
intranet service in Pyongyang and, according to
Reporters Without Borders, "reportedly spent
700,000 euros [more than US$950,000] on it. To get
around laws banning the transfer of sensitive
technology to the Pyongyang regime, all data will
be kept on servers based in Germany and sent by
satellite to North Korean Internet users."
Nevertheless, it ended the need to dial Internet
service providers in China to get out on the Web.
Holtermann also arranged for some of the
KCC's products to be shown for the first time in
the West at the international IT exhibition CeBIT
(Center of Office and Information Technology) last
year in Hanover, Germany. The KCC's branches in
China are also active and maintain offices in the
capital Beijing and Dalian in the northeast.
Another North Korean computer company,
Silibank in Shenyang, in 2001 actually became
North Korea's first Internet service provider,
offering an experimental e-mail relay service
through gateways in China. In March 2004, the
North Koreans established a software company, also
in Shenyang, called the Korea 615 Editing Corp,
which according to press releases at the time
would "provide excellent software that satisfies
the demand from Chinese consumers with competitive
prices".
Inside North Korea, however,
access to e-mail and the Internet remains
extremely limited. The main "intranet" service is
provided by the Kwangmyong computer network, which
includes a browser, an internal e-mail program,
newsgroups and a search engine. Most of its users
are government agencies, research institutes,
educational organizations - while only people like
Kim Jong-il, a known computer buff, have full
Internet access.
But the country beams out
its own propaganda over Internet sites such as
Uriminzokkiri.com, which in Korean, Chinese,
Russian and Japanese carries the writings of Kim
Jong-il and his father, "the Great Leader" Kim
Il-sung, along with pictures of scenic Mount
Paekdu near the Chinese border, the "cradle of the
Korean revolution", from where Kim Il-sung
ostensibly led the resistance against the Japanese
colonial power during World War II, and where Kim
Jong-il was born, according to the official
version of history. Most other sources would
assert that the older Kim spent the war years in
exile in a camp near the small village of
Vyatskoye 70 kilometers north of Khabarovsk in the
Russian Far East, where the younger Kim was
actually born in 1942.
The official Korean
Central New Agency also has its own website,
KCNA.co.jp, which is maintained by pro-Pyongyang
ethnic Koreans in Japan, and carries daily news
bulletins in Korean, English, Russian and Spanish,
but with rather uninspiring headlines such as "Kim
Jong-il sends message of greetings to Syrian
president", "Kim Jong-il's work published in
Mexico" and "Floral basket to DPRK [North Korea]
Embassy [in Phnom Penh] from Cambodian Great King
and Great Queen".
On the more innocent
side, the KCC produces software for writing with
Korean characters a Korean version of Linux, games
for personal computers and PlayStation - and an
advanced computer adaptation of go, a kind
of Asian chess game, which, according to the Dutch
IT firm GPI Consultancy, "has won the world
championship for go games for several
years. The games department has a display showing
all the trophies which were won during
international competitions."
Somewhat
surprisingly, the North Koreans also produce some
of the software for mobile phones made by the
South Korean company Samsung, which began
collaboration with the KCC in March 2000. North
Korean computer experts have received training in
China, Russia and India, and are considered, even
by the South Koreans, as some of the best in the
world.
More ominously, in October 2004,
South Korea's Defense Ministry reported to the
country's National Assembly that the North had
trained "more than 500 computer hackers capable of
launching cyber-warfare" against its enemies.
"North Korea's intelligence-warfare capability is
estimated to have reached the level of advanced
countries," the report said, adding that the
military hackers had been put through a five-year
university course training them to penetrate the
computer systems of South Korea, the United States
and Japan.
According to US North Korea
specialist Joseph Bermudez, "The Ministry of the
People's Armed Forces understands electronic
warfare to consist of operations using
electromagnetic spectrum to attack the enemy by
jamming or spoofing. During the 1990s, the
ministry identified electronic intelligence
warfare as a new type of warfare, the essence of
which is the disruption or destruction of the
opponent's computer networks - thereby paralyzing
their military command and control system."
Skeptical observers have noted that US
firewalls should be able to prevent that from
happening, and that North Korea still has a long
way to go before it can seriously threaten the
sophisticated computer networks of South Korea,
Japan and the US.
It is also uncertain
whether Kim Jong-nam still heads the KCC and the
State Safety and Security Agency. In May 2001, he
was detained at Tokyo's airport at Narita for
using what appeared to be a false passport from
the Dominican Republic. He had arrived in the
Japanese capital from Singapore with some North
Korean children to visit Tokyo Disneyland - but
instead found himself being deported to China.
Since then, he has spent most of his time in the
former Portuguese enclave of Macau, where he has
been seen in the city's casinos and massage
parlors. This February, the Japanese and Hong Kong
media published pictures of him in Macau, and
details of his lavish lifestyle there - which
prompted him to leave for mainland China, where he
is now believed to be living.
Whatever Kim
Jong-nam's present status may be in the North
Korean hierarchy, the KCC is more active than
ever, and so is another software developer, the
Pyongyang Informatics Center, which, at least
until recently, had a branch in Singapore. Other
links in the region include Taiwan's Jiage Limited
Corporation, which has entered a joint-venture
operation with the KCC under the rather curious
name Chosun Daedong River Electronic Calculator
Joint Operation Companies, which, according to
South Korea's trade agency, KOTRA, produces
computers and circuit boards.
The US
Trading with the Enemy Act and restrictions under
the international Wassenaar Arrangement, which
controls the trade in dual-use goods and
technologies (military and civilian), may prohibit
the transfer of advanced technology to North
Korea, but with easy ways around these
restrictions, sanctions seem to have had little or
no effect.
North Korea's IT development
seems unstoppable, and the APCSS's Mansourov
argues that it can "both strengthen and undermine
political propaganda and ideological education, as
well as totalitarian surveillance and control
systems imposed by the absolutist and monarchic
security-paranoid state on its people, especially
at the time of growing conflict between an
emerging entrepreneurial politico-corporate elites
and the old military-industrial elite".
So
will the IT revolution, as he puts it, "liquefy or
solidify the ground underneath Kim Jong-il's
regime? Will the IT revolution be the beginning of
the end of North Korea, at least as we know it
today?" Most probably, it will eventually break
North Korea's isolation, even if the country's
powerful military also benefits from improved
technologies. And there may be a day when the KCNA
will have something more exciting to report about
than "A furnace-firing ceremony held at the Taean
Friendship Glass Factory".
Bertil
Lintner is a former correspondent with the Far
Eastern Economic Review and is currently a writer
with Asia-Pacific Media Services.
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