The number of people in North Korea with actual internet access is estimated at a few thousand - the tiny core of the country's sprawling government - most of them top government officials. Then there is a group of privileged elites in North Korea who can access the real internet, which is forbidden to everyone else. Kim Jong Un with other senior North Korean officials. The small core of elites who can see the real internet Outside computers are illegal (except for the very highest elite, for whom many official rules do not apply) the only acceptable computers are produced by Morning Panda, a government-run company that makes only a few thousand computers every year. (Internal travel is forbidden without permission in North Korea, so most citizens never see Pyongyang or can visit its cyber cafes.) But you need a computer to access it, and that's only possible with official permission. This network is accessible by the handful of computer labs at major North Korean government offices, universities, and a small number of cyber cafes in major cities. Rather, it runs rudimentary email and browser tools that are restricted to a hand-picked collection of "sites" that have been copied over and censored from the real internet.
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It is a closed network that runs on pirated Japanese versions of Microsoft software and looks sort of like the real internet but isn't. It looks sort of like the internet circa 1994 many users even access it with old-school dial-up or computer labs. Kwangmyong, which is Korean for "bright star," is North Korea's officially sanctioned intranet.
But in Pyongyang, the privileged capital city, and perhaps in one or two other cities, North Koreans with good office jobs or coveted university slots might assume that you were talking about Kwangmyong. Most of the country is still mired in poverty, much of it rural. If you went to North Korea and asked people about the internet, most of them would probably have no idea what you were talking about. Could one of the world's poorest countries, which puts its citizens under near-total control, really have the internet? How does it work? Who can access it? And why would North Korea allow any internet access at all? What the few North Koreans who are allowed online think the internet meansĪ North Korean student in Pyongyang checks information on a computer. Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, offered what may have been the first hint of US responsibility for the attack.įor many Americans, though, the entire idea of a North Korean internet seems surprising, and for good reason.
While the US never claimed responsibility for the attack, President Obama had warned just days earlier of a "proportional response" to North Korea's hack against Sony. That small web of internet connections between North Korea and the outside world collapsed entirely on December, under an apparent mass cyber attack. Still, North Korea does have the internet.
So you can imagine how tightly restricted internet access would be in the Hermit Kingdom.
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Meanwhile, pirated DVDs of South Korean TV dramas are so illegal that North Koreans caught with them in regular police sweeps can be sentenced to years in labor camps. Private ownership of fax machines is banned outright, and sending a single fax requires high-level authorization. North Korea is so paranoid about its citizens accessing the internet that merely owning a computer requires permission from local government authorities, and all personal computers are registered with the police as if they were shotguns.