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.
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.
Oh Windows recall beta.
Shhh don’t tell them that American Corporations have been doing that for years.
https://newatlas.com/computers/smartphone-listening-conversations-ads-facebook/
I was going to say “that article mostly just seems to debunk the ‘my phone is always listening to me’ conspiracy theory” but then I got to the part about over 50% of analyzed Android apps having permission to take screenshots :/
Out of over 17,000 Android apps examined, more than 9,000 had potential permissions to take screenshots. And a number of apps were found to actively be doing so, taking screenshots and sending them to third-party sources.
this is a weird paragraph. no permission is needed for an app to take screenshots of itself. all apps can do that.
just an example: the Element matrix client has a bugreport feature that allows you to submit an automatically created screenshot of the previous menu.
it seems there are several ways to accomplish this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2661536/how-to-programmatically-take-a-screenshot-on-android
Do those code snippets on the Stackoverflow post allow you to capture the entire screen regardless of which app is open, or do they only allow you to capture the app the code is running in?
Capturing the app itself makes sense (for things like bug reports) but does Android really let any app capture whatever is on the screen?
no, they only allow the app to capture its own screen content. to make a regular screenshot of the whole display, the app needs a permission that the user has to approve every single time, at least on most phones. that API is actually for continuous screen recording, but of course usable for this purpose too. this also means that after getting approved by the user, the app can keep its recording sessions to keep more screenshots, but that ends when the app gets killed by android. I think the system also shows a notification when an app is recording, but as anything that too could vary with phones.
This is why my TV is on a separate VLAN (with no internet access) and I use an Nvidia Shield for streaming. I haven’t seen any indication that the Shield does anything like this.
Yeah, there is no reason for me to be connecting my TV to the internet. I use a HTPC which is much better for streaming than the TV’s built-in apps.
The one time I do connect the TV to the internet is when there’s a firmware update that fixes an issue I’m encountering. That’s rare though.
I still have it on my network so I can control it using Home Assistant (eg have a backlight come on and dim the main lights when the TV is turned on) but it’s on an isolated VLAN.
The main difference being the consequences that might result from the surveillance.
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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.
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Then i guess i won’t have a phone anymore :/
What do you mean “could”? It does
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The irony of a comment about censorship being censored is really something.
I had a friend paraphrase the plot of fahrenheit 451 for me, because I haven’t read it. Talk about ironic!
On another note, I need to read more
I did this the other day but didnt realize the irony at the time…
I feel like that’s a honeypot, kinda like that time feds made a phone to spy on cartels.
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“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.
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!
Oppa gangnam style -> Comrade Gangnam style
oppan gangnam style - - >dongjin gangnam style ㅋㅋ
All mobile manufacturers could be doing this too. All of the SoCs are proprietary black boxes as are the modems.
laughs in PinePho–
Sorry, my battery died as I was typing that
That secret screenshot folder would eat up your storage quite fast, and it would be known, from whistleblowers, workers having to check the screenshots, “proof coming out from it” etc etc etc
There is certainly validity in the concept that no known instance of exploitation exists. However that is only anecdotal. The potential exists. Naïve trust in others has a terrible track record on these scales of ethics. Every instruction and register should be fully documented for every product sold.
An adequate webp image is only a few tens of kilobytes. Most people now have a bridged connection between their home network and cellular, unless they go out of their way to block it. Periodic screenshots are rather crazy. It would be much easier to target specific keywords and patterns.
I’d be interested in how this documenting could be done. If you’re a manufacturer, you’d probably want to keep everything secret - except what’s needed for a patent for example - otherwise the competition might get an idea of the proprietary things you make in house.
I mean I’m all for it, I just don’t see it happening unless under very strict regulations.
Well are we putting people in prison with the help of them? A secret screenshot folder nobody can exploit isn’t very useful …
Not saying it can’t be done (you are of course right there), we hand it over freely often, but that the implications are not death to your family.
You dont have to bring them to court with it for it to be useful. It could be used to target individuals then they use more conventional methods of evidence gathering to arrest.
I would guess they arent currently doing it enmasse because that doesnt sound useful either. I would say, solely on a vibes based level its been done by US intelligence. Its really not so different than a wiretap.
Developed by Xerox and Canon in the mid-1980s, the existence of these tracking codes became public only in 2004.
Let’s not forget sim cards are tiny computers as well.
I ve heard this a lot, how are modems black boxes?
No hardware documentation whatsoever. We don’t know what registers and instructions exist at the lowest levels.
As far as I am aware, there is no way to totally shut off and verify all cellular connections made, like to pass all traffic through a logged filter.
I love how, for everyone, media literacy seemingly goes straight out the window the moment North Korea is mentioned. I remember a few years back every mainstream media outlet reporting that sarcasm was banned in NK, and that everyone had to get the same haircut as Kim Jong Un. Journalism at its finest.
Then you get these two madlads who go and find out…
The news clip commentary:
The full video:
The best boys
Holy shit actual media criticism and analysis on North Korea. Never thought I’d see this day.
The little clip with the meta-commentary on news stories commenting about them was hilarious yet insightful, so I definitely have to watch the full documentary they’re referencing (EDIT: especially if it’s just the 20 minute video you linked. That’s the full video? I thought I heard the word documentary so thought it would be longer).
It really is a shame, as accurate reporting enables their crimes to be documented better, and gives them less ammo on the world stage.
“How can we be mistreating our citizens? Remember when people said sarcasm was banned? Haircuts had to be approved and the same? How can you believe anything.”
Documenting people/governments/coprorations for the things they’ve actually done is the most we can ask for. Making shit up on the fly for a quick buck is the death of truth. It just enables them to deflect everything and anything.
There’s dozens of reasons to dislike/distrust North Korea. We don’t need to make ones up.
People who say things like “dozens of reasons” often list not a single reason. Trust me bro!
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
I call that a normal day at Google or Meta
At least you can choose not to use their services. Not much choosing going on in North Korea
At least you can choose not to use their services.
I guess a smart phone would be a luxury item in NK. So one could chose not to use one instead of being tracked?
In Germany the government and police use the word Quellentelekommunikationsüberwachung (telecommunication source surveillance) when they express their desire to have a Trojan on someone’s phone - to protect the children of course.
So the phenomenon is not unknown outside of NK.
Edit: fixed translation, thanks Muehe
use the word Quellentelekommunikationsüberwachung
Yeah, right, as if that can be used by humans, or if it’s even a word.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telekommunikationsüberwachung#Quellen-Telekommunikationsüberwachung
It means “telecommunication source surveillance”.
Wow, German is weird.
Meh, essentially it’s just writing “Telecommunicationsourcesurveillance” as a single word without the spaces to indicate it’s a singular thing being referred to (in this case the concept of directly listening on the source device before encryption happens). Might seem weird I guess, but you get used to it pretty quickly.
North korean are forced to use a smartphone?
The ones who have the ability to own such luxury might be. Sorta like how some jobs require it in other parts of the world.
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!
… How do you people think your stock mobile OS keyboard ‘learns’ how to better autocorrect to your manner of typing?
Do ya’ll think that data is not available, for sale, to any business or agency that will pay for it?
The one I use is FOSS software that largely just stores a dictionary of used words. FUTO Keyboard isn’t perfect, but it is decent.
If I read somewhere correctly, they’re also the first to open source their swipe dataset:
https://huggingface.co/datasets/futo-org/swipe.futo.orgYou can also contribute and help out with their dataset here:
https://swipe.futo.org/This is the way.
And monitored by AI.
Hence why I only use foss keebs (Futo), or run gboard with network perms disabled.
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.
