All they need are data-phones and sims. Soon they will have the ability to communicate with less risk and in "town square" web venues like twitter and forums. I think it's a hard counter to the situation there. Collapse in under 5 years.
One of the things that occurred to me was that flooding the market with cheap Android tablets/smartphones would be pretty interesting.
Even more interesting would be if they came w/ Chinese/South Korean sim cards w/ data plans - I assume that if you're close enough to the border you'd be able to get reception and you wouldn't have to worry so much about your data being intercepted on the NK network (I doubt they'd provide a data gateway anyway).
You could preload Kakaotalk/Webo accounts and like some sort of secure chat to communicate securely w/ the defector network. You could have some sort of anonymous/pseudonymous Twitter like app as well, although the most important thing is to recognize/warn people that it'd be completely infiltrated and not to post any identifying information. A mesh 4chan-like message board might be perfect.
You'd want to provide preloaded media (and like a dump of Korean Wikipedia?) and also have USB OTG adapter for those devices as well so they could easily load new pirated media... Heck, as long as those devices had MicroSD cards that'd make all that smuggling a heckuva lot easier.
Google says North Korea's population is only 25M people. That's tiny. At say $100/pop you could produce devices for say 20% of the population for $500M. You'd have to strike a balance of trickling in devices so it doesn't get immediately cracked down vs getting to that critical mass where so many people have them that it can't be.
Anyway, that sounds like a relatively cheap way to topple a pretty terrible regime/uplift a society, to me, but well, it's never been tried before.
Maybe double that price and include smuggling in some guns and ammo w/ the devices just in case it does come to a violent revolution though...
Exactly what I was thinking, in terms of population size, price-point per data-device, at least in that I see it as inevitable that they will saturate a critical amount of the population soon, if just through luxury smuggling. It's only a matter of time as the devices are getting cheaper and they are already entering at an exponential rate. Cellular service is extremely powerful on its own, data service is... "liberating".
I think it needs little prompting at this point it is bound to happen organically.
i think you underestimate the degree of control the state has (data-phones? what data? what network?), as well as the extent of brainwashing of the population
It mentions offering (NK-only) web browsing and most people have dumbphones, but there is a network there. I think it'd be pretty suicidal to conspire using that though as I'm sure it's monitored.
I think there's probably a lot more dissent than you're assuming, but agin, it'd be suicidal to express it if one of your neighbors would just rat you out.
I posted earlier about this, but it seems that these phones would be pretty valuable as media playing devices - preload kiwix w/ KR wikipedia etc - it'd allow you to much more easily/discretely distribute/exchange microSD cards.
Some sort of mesh protocol could be incredibly effective in allow communication while maintaining anonymity. But any sort of message passing/communication would have to be designed under the assumption that it's being monitored.
I don't underestimate it at all. The state does not have control of the airwaves, with SK and CN and the rest of Asia right there.
What's being discussed is cellular/wireless data networks from outside NK penetrating in. It is currently happening. Linking up to smuggled data devices which have prices on a race to 0.
