4 ms·
One thing bothers me about the article. This guy Kevin is able to get elderly relatives to practice good opsec. They walk to distant locations to make and recei
by cantrevealname 11y ago
One thing bothers me about the article. This guy Kevin is able to get elderly relatives to practice good opsec. They walk to distant locations to make and receive calls, presumably at predetermined times; they avoid mentioning real names and other personally identifiable information; they speak for a strict 100 seconds or less. Carefully trained people could do all this certainly, but how would you train an elderly relative you left in your backward homeland with all this trade-craft, especially since you can't train them face to face, but you're limited to brief phone calls?
Perhaps the opsec has been exaggerated to make the article more thrilling, or the opsec is true but it's a professional smuggling ring not involving elderly relatives.
- pkkim 11y agoI'm not an expert, but I would suspect that life in North Korea is good training for being very careful with things like this.
- S4M 11y agoYep, I remember reading on another article posted on HN that North Korea's economy depends a lot on the black market, which means that North Koreans must be cunning in their every day lives to get the basic things they need.
- Agathos 11y agoYet another gratuitous cruelty: the killer [famine] targets the most innocent, the people who would never steal food, lie, cheat, break the law, or betray a friend. It was a phenomenon that the Italian writer Primo Levi identified after emerging from Auschwitz, when he wrote that he and his fellow survivors never wanted to see one another again after the war because they had all done something of which they were ashamed. As Mrs. Song would observe a decade later, when she thought back on all the people she knew who died during those years in Chongjin, it was the “simple and kindhearted people who did what they were told—they were the first to die.” -- Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick
- j_lev 11y agoYou're not the only one that is bothered by the article. The thing that triggered my radar was that the entire thing read like fiction. If it looks like a duck,... The dictionary sounds like bullshit. North Korean and South Korean are completely different dialects, with different orthography and spelling. Bigger differences than different spellings in English. I can't see a dictionary like that being of any use to his family. There is no way sources can ever be checked, and that means anywhere from 0 to 100% of the article could be fabricated. (edit: an analogy to better describe the dubious usefulness of the dictionary, it would be like a native Greek using a French-English dictionary to learn English)
- brenschluss 11y ago> The dictionary sounds like bullshit. North Korean and South Korean are completely different dialects, with different orthography and spelling. Bigger differences than different spellings in English. I can't see a dictionary like that being of any use to his family. Uh, totally wrong there. Might want to read up some more. There are some minor spelling differences, pronunciation/accent differences. North Korean doesn't use any loan words, so there's a great deal of different terms for ice cream or radio, for example. But they're not totally different dialects. Any South Korean can understand a North Korean TV broadcast, for example.
- jakobegger 11y agoThe article doesn't say "English/South Korean" dictionary, it just says "English" dictionary.
- kokey 11y agoI think the incentives are high enough for them to make it work, and those who can't make it work are not participating. The parents of the person in the article is probably also not that old and they have a network of relatives back home to train each other.
- rmc 11y ago> how would you train an elderly relative you left in your backward homeland with all this trade-craft An elderly relative probably knows/knows of various people who've been caught and punished for this sort of thing. Tends to motivate people to learn. Old people aren't stupid.
- msandford 11y agoRight, our "dumb elders" here are people who feel that they've made it and that they don't (or shouldn't!) need to learn anymore. Plus being able to make you child or grandchild fix your computer might not be a bug, but rather a feature!
- omegaham 11y agoA society like North Korea is Darwinian in this regard. If you're a good little citizen, you starve to death. If you're bad at breaking the rules, you go to the reeducation camps or to the firing squad. I'm sure that the example of former friends and family gives them ample motivation to learn good OPSEC.
- LordKano 11y agoElderly people who have lived virtually their entire lives under such an oppressive regime would have opsec ingrained into their way of thinking. My grandfather is in his 70s and I have heard from him about how some of his friends sneak around on their wives. These are men in their 60s and 70s who employ opsec to keep affairs concealed from their wives and the husbands of their mistresses. Old people can be sneaky if the stakes are high enough and I guarantee that any elderly North Korean knows precisely what's at stake if they make any mistakes. Maybe you're right, maybe there was some exaggeration for dramatic purposes but it's also plausible that the details are accurate.
- rm_-rf_slash 11y agoAny North Korean that can reach old age probably knows more about security than the majority of us "hackers."