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Serious question, if the United States decided to unilaterally cut North Korea off from the Internet, how hard would that be to do? Could we just knock out a fe
by mattmaroon 2y ago
Serious question, if the United States decided to unilaterally cut North Korea off from the Internet, how hard would that be to do? Could we just knock out a few cables?
North Korea pretty much only uses the Internet for scams Or to make money in violation of sanctions. They certainly don’t allow their citizens to use it for anything else, and they don’t allow their citizens to leave the country because they would never come back.
Even if it were only temporary, suddenly cutting off the Internet to the country would expose all of those remote workers to the people who employ them and don’t realize they are employing North Koreans when they all disappear at once.
Is this just not logistically feasible? or are we just too afraid it would be unpalatable to our allies? I can’t be the first person who has thought of this.
- rwmj 2y agoThis wouldn't work against the bad actors as they could just proxy through a friendly (to NK) country. And would set a bad precedent of using Internet access as a tool for sanctioning.
- w-ll 2y agoYou think they are doing this from NK ip blocks/asn? Their physical links are more or less enemy of enemy with US, so they have no incentive to block. Its impossible to keep them off the internet.
- mattmaroon 2y agoOh I’m not imagine anyone helping us. Im wondering why we aren’t cutting undersea cables or drone bombing land based ones. All the “international sovereignty” responses are humorous to anyone whose paid attention to the last twenty years of the American military.
- brap 2y agoBecause China really wouldn’t like it, and that’s all there is to it. Is it technically feasible? Yes.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago> drone bombing land based ones How do you imagine that a drone will be able to find and damage an underground cable? This is not Afghanistan, a drone will not live long past China’s/Russia’s air defences.
- mattmaroon 2y agoI imagine pretty easily. They likely don’t have to find it, nothing gets dug in North Korea without US watching it via satellite. Chinas air defenses likely don’t exist in North Korea. I have no doubt the US has plans to cut them (and probably anyone else you can imagine) off in the event of war.
- justinclift 2y agoApparently China's navy is stronger than the US navy these days. So it might not be a great idea to start doing stuff like that in their back yard? ;)
- gosub100 2y agoIt's probably of higher intelligence value to let them connect and intercept everything than it is to cut them off and not know what's going on. If you look at their border with China, it's only tens of meters from fairly populated areas, so setting up high bandwidth microwave links wouldn't be hard. Also bombing a sovereign nation is an act of war and comes with consequences.
- throwup238 2y agoMost of North Korea’s traffic is routed through China so it’d require cutting the latter off from the internet. With the amount of submarine cables connecting China to other countries, it wouldn’t be very feasible.
- godelski 2y agoNot to mention that lots of data is sent wirelessly.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Dalewyn 2y agoFirst consider that the internet was designed to withstand and endure attacks upon it. So long as at least one connection remains, the nodes thereof remain accessible. Next, consider that the authority of US sovereignty ends at US borders. The US legally cannot unilaterally do anything to anything outside of its own borders. Next, consider that both North Korea and more importantly China have no damns to give about what the US wants. Next, consider the first point again. Any actions made domestically can and likely will be circumvented by people who do not agree with them. An obvious example is people running their own DNS servers configured in defiance of US government orders. So to answer your question: Is it legally feasible? No. Is it politically feasible? No. Is it logistically feasible? No. Is it physically feasible? No. Is it good that this isn't feasible? Yes.
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago> First consider that the internet was designed to withstand and endure attacks upon it. So long as at least one connection remains, the nodes thereof remain accessible. Tell me you haven't worked in network infrastructure without telling me you haven't worked in network infrastructure. > Next, consider that the authority of US sovereignty ends at US borders. The US legally cannot unilaterally do anything to anything outside of its own borders. I mean, sure, officially, when all laws are followed and in a friction-less plane this is correct. However the United States does all kinds of shit unilaterally outside it's own borders, literally all the time, not the least of which every war we've been in post WWII, and incalculable numbers of other tom-fuckery carried out on all levels of secrecy and non-secrecy by all manner of organizations identified by three letters, most commonly the CIA.
- Dalewyn 2y ago>Tell me you haven't worked in network infrastructure without telling me you haven't worked in network infrastructure. Am I wrong, though? >I mean, sure, officially, when all laws are followed and in a friction-less plane this is correct. However the United States does all kinds of shit unilaterally outside it's own borders, literally all the time, You can just say we went and blew up Nordstream, you know.
- appendix-rock 2y agoOnly an American would ever entertain this idea without being at least a bit tongue in cheek about it. The US doesn’t own the Internet.
- immibis 2y ago[flagged]
- bboygravity 2y agoYeah, except not really. You might want to have a look at the political history of Iran. lol
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gorgoiler 2y agoOut of interest I looked up who controls the DNS root servers: Europe (2): RIPE and Netnod AB. RIPE is Europe’s RIR, run as a conference by European ISPs. Netnod is a Swedish ISP. Asia (1): Project WIDE, part of the Tokyo Institute of Technology. US (9): Verisign, Cogent, NASA, US Department of Defense, US Army, the University of Maryland, ISC (as in the Bind9 people), ICANN itself, and the University of Southern California. The last two seem to have some overlap and there is probably a lot of overlap between all of these organisations. Verisign runs two root servers which is why the list has twelve entries but the root servers run from A to M.
- averageRoyalty 2y agoThe land of democracy, ladies and gentlemen. Rights for us, nobody else.
- churchill 2y agoFunny thing about American meddling is that it always comes back to bite the US in the ass. The War of Terror has cost $8 trillion and there's nothing tangible and lasting the US has to show for it. Groups like Al Qaeda, ISIS (esp. their networks across Libya, Iraq, etc.) are offshoots of American meddling in the region, growing healthily despite everything. Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iran (now a rabid enemy), Iraq, Syria, and Libya, are all failures of that World Police ethos that the US refuses to disengage from.
- tazu 2y agoThe American way is creating problems and selling solutions.
- churchill 2y agoThey're not really selling solutions if it still costs them at the end. For the most part, US foreign policy is a net negative for America's pockets and many of their "allies."
- csomar 2y agoThey are a sophisticated money siphoning program. Socialize the cost of war (taxes), but privatize the gains (corporate profit).
- tazu 2y agoThere is no cost, overall it all raises US GDP. Military lives are not considered.
- churchill 2y agoDigging a hole and covering it at a cost of $22 trillion will double America's GDP overnight. But it doesn't create value for anyone. All it does is transfer money to the contractor doing the digging (in America's case, the military-industrial complex) while everyone else becomes poorer. $8 trillion has been spent on the War on Terror so far. Like I said in another comment, that's enough money to build 80 million $100k homes, or reduce America's debt by 25%, or pay off all student loans, or build 400,000 KM of high-speed rail at $20M/km, or give every American taxpayer a one-time check of $48k, etc. Every bomb dropped on Afghanistan or Iraq was money diverted from something else useful the US could have done.
- asynchronous 2y agoIt’s a dumb question simply because we know most North Korean cyber agents are working abroad- they literally live in China or somewhere else and setup infrastructure elsewhere to remote into.
- phoenixreader 2y agoThe Chinese government had built the infrastructure for the Great Firewall, allowing them to block whoever they want. The US does not have this capability.
- willcipriano 2y agoYou certain all those devices in black rooms[0] like Room 641A[1] are entirely passive? I'm not. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_room https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_room [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
- Terr_ 2y agoWhat makes you think the same equipment would have the necessary mechanics and capacity for realtime mass-filtering? Even in America, I imagine there are many other budget priorities competing for a limited spook-fund, that would displace a "national censor-wall but indefinitely inactive and secret just in case we need it someday."
- willcipriano 2y agoYou know how the internet and things like Tor are products of the Department of Defense? The State Department has been using the internet (and anonymization tools like Tor) to organize dissidents in foreign countries for various purposes, often coups. One example is the Arab Spring[1]. I'd wager they are very afraid of someone doing it back to them, and might have some capability in place. Even if it's just to shut the internet off for a time (like Pakistan and other nations have done during elections[0], maybe in response to US interference) or perhaps prevent connections to other nations/the rest of the world more generally. [0]https://www.accessnow.org/campaign/2024-elections-and-internet-shutdowns-watch/ https://www.accessnow.org/campaign/2024-elections-and-intern... [1]https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/arabstudquar.35.3.0255?seq=2 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/arabstudquar.35.3.0255...
- Terr_ 2y ago
- jbkkd 2y agoSomeone did it a while ago: https://www.wired.com/story/north-korea-hacker-internet-outage/ https://www.wired.com/story/north-korea-hacker-internet-outa...
- EgoIsMyFriend 2y agodon't bother with the above link if you're not subscribed to wired, use this instead: https://archive.is/rWpjI https://archive.is/rWpjI
- woodruffw 2y agoTaking you seriously: I’m pretty sure NK has non-oceanic interconnects with both China and Russia. So unless your plan involves attacking within the internationally recognized borders of either and living with the consequences, the answer is “not easy.”
- mattmaroon 2y agoI assume the US is willing to do this because we do it frequently, though not with China or Russia. I’m not sure about the DPRK, and was asking more of a technical question than a political one. Like, how many cables would we need to cut and how exposed are they? I’m aware they’re a nuclear power (ish) and the politics aren’t trivial.
- woodruffw 2y agoI don’t think we go around frequently cutting international interconnects? Do you have a source for this?
- konart 2y ago>Serious question, if the United States decided to unilaterally cut North Korea off from the Internet, how hard would that be to do? Could we just knock out a few cables? You will have to cut cables going to Russia (and\or out of Russia) and China at least. Not to mention wireless comms.
- mattmaroon 2y agoHow many? Near as I can tell a few drone bombs could accomplish this. We love drone bombing other countries.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoNot ones with nuclear weapons. Or one that manufactures all the toys that keep Americans happy.
- mattmaroon 2y agoThat’s true, but are they really going to lob their two nukes at Maui just because we drone bomb a few wires? The Kims like being alive.
- socksy 2y agoThe Kims are likely the only reliable bet for people who would actually survive a nuclear war and the following nuclear winters, if the book Nuclear War by Anne Jacobsen is to be believed. They're the only ones that have built their bunkers deep enough (under mountains) that modern thermo nuclear weapons wouldn't destroy them, and they have years of supplies down there.
- csomar 2y agoNo. At least not because of that. But if they drone bomb Seoul, would you continue the escalation? Because the escalation can lead to that. Also DPRK is threatening Seoul and Japan, not the USA.
- 2y ago
- segmondy 2y agoUSA doesn't care about North Korea. We love to have Boogeymen. What would the military industrial complex do and be without our Boogeymen?
- xadhominemx 2y agoWe care very much about North Korea as they have nuclear weapons and share a land border with our ally
- lucasRW 2y agoThey already partially operate from China. They would just do that more. They could even have their own connection to China and connect to the Internet from there. It's going to be a wack-a-mole thing that they easily win.
- mattmaroon 2y agoI wasn’t assuming it to be a strategy that was permanently feasible.
- icameron 2y agoI think their main connection comes through china, but if that was cut off they could still use star links.
- mattmaroon 2y agoIf you mean SpaceX’s Starlink they obviously can’t. Elon clearly controls who uses it where. If you are just using the term generically and mean other satellite connections, maybe, but limiting them to satellite internet only where we couldn’t take out a dish would certainly be crippling to the crimes I’m referencing!
- arresin 2y ago> They certainly don’t allow their citizens to use it for anything else, and they don’t allow their citizens to leave the country because they would never come back. I never thought about it like this but it’s the largest open air prison on earth.
- Fokamul 2y agoTell me you're American without telling me you're American :D
- citizenpaul 2y agoN.Korea is a Chinese weapon, unfortunately. To do something like cut off their internet would be considered an attack on China. China is their border where do you think they get connected to the internet.
- petre 2y agoSure. As if they couldn't reroute through any other country. They're already cut off by their leadership, except for the state sponsored cybercriminal groups which don't need a NK IP.
- godelski 2y ago> cut North Korea off from the Internet, how hard would that be to do? Could we just knock out a few cables? > Is this just not logistically feasible? NK shares a physical border with China and Russia. Not to mention that we can send data by means other than a physical wire. Even if you were willing to block Russia and China from "the internet" (lol) it would be nearly logistically impossible. Even if you were willing to destroy all sense of privacy and track every single packet sent (what a terrible dystopian idea), there's still going to be ways to fake this. It would only make it harder, not impossible.
- fastasucan 2y ago>North Korea pretty much only uses the Internet for scams Or to make money in violation of sanctions. They certainly don’t allow their citizens to use it for anything else, and they don’t allow their citizens to leave the country because they would never come back. Do you think that the only place north korean hackers operate from is inside north Korea?