A smartphone smuggled out of North Korea has revealed the astonishing levels of control the secretive dictatorship is exercising over its people.
The phone, which from the outside appears no different from a normal device, issued warnings about using South Korean slang words to users, and auto-corrected “South Korea” to read “puppet state,” an investigation from the BBC found.
It would also covertly take a screenshot every five minutes, storing the images in a secret folder which the user couldn’t access, but which presumably were accessible to North Korean authorities.
When the user tried to type in the word “oppa,” which means older brother in Korean, but has come to be used to refer to a boyfriend in South Korean slang, the phone would auto-correct the word to the more communist-friendly alternative, “comrade.”
A warning would then flash up, warning the phone’s user that the term “oppa” could only be used for older siblings, the BBC investigation found.
The bizarre Orwellian practices with a 21st-century twist were revealed after Daily NK, a Seoul-based media organization, secretly smuggled the North Korean cell phone out of the country late last year.
It is only the latest example of a draconian clampdown