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That's just reality in North Korea. It's not any of the ordinary citizens' faults, but they all essentially have to be assumed to be coerced puppets of the stat

That's just reality in North Korea. It's not any of the ordinary citizens' faults, but they all essentially have to be assumed to be coerced puppets of the state if they're perpetrating such application fraud. (Though, really, a company shouldn't be accepting fraudulent applicants even if they aren't spies.) I'm sure there are plenty of North Koreans who are qualified (whether they are or aren't working for state intelligence), just as plenty of people working for Chinese intelligence are smart and qualified and decent people, like you mention, but we don't live in an era of utopian world peace where such things can just be overlooked when giving people access to sensitive systems, and we may not even in ten thousand years from now. We shouldn't expect Chinese tech companies to accept applicants working for CIA or NSA, either.

Spivak 2y ago
All this is right and most people get it by the whole country-wide sanctions thing but god I wish we would treat the folks living there with a little more humanity. It's painting with a huge brush to associate a group of remote work scammers, which is what they found, with the whole country. We don't do this with Iran despite similar sanctions— people talk about how awful and regrettable it is to have to cut off so many regular folks just trying to live. It's clearly not even the whole communism/socialism thing because we don't do it with Cuba either. But when it comes to NK (and China) the crazy amount of propaganda has flipped a switch in people's brains that it's not a country of regular people with a shitty government but an impossibly powerful state who has a nuralink into every citizen and company.