At Phone Arena, Alan Friedman tells us,

A smartphone was smuggled out of North Korea late last year by a Seoul-based media organization known as NK. It might look like an ordinary connected handset to most, but the BBC investigated the device and discovered that it had certain features that contained the fingerprints of the country’s dictatorship all over it. For example, typing in the South Korean variant of a word would lead the phone to make that word disappear only to be replaced by the North Korean version of the word.

Features of the phone that are typically found on smartphones worldwide were hijacked and used to disseminate propaganda. For example, auto-correct is something that just about everyone with a smartphone has had to deal with. On the North Korean phone, “South Korea” was auto-corrected to “puppet state.” The word “oppa,”which means older brother in North Korea but is slang in South Korea for a boyfriend, was auto-corrected to “Comrade.”

“Smartphone smuggled out of North Korea is designed to support Kim Jong Un’s regime,” June 3, 2025

The phones offer no internet access. A screenshot, automatically taken every five minutes, is deposited in a folder inaccessible to the user but, investigators suspect, could be opened by the authorities.

Jean Mackenzie‘s BBC story paints a grim picture of the overall level of control that the government in North Korea has over information: “North Korea is the only country in the world the internet has not penetrated. All TV channels, radio stations and newspapers are run by the state.”

And new laws introduced from 2020 have increased the punishments for people who are caught consuming and sharing foreign media. One stated that those who distribute the content could be imprisoned or executed…

After the crackdown began Ms Kang [a recent successful escapee] and her friends became more cautious too. “We don’t talk to each other about this anymore, unless we’re really close, and even then we’re much more secretive,” she admits.

She says she is aware of more young people being executed for being caught with South Korean content…

Members of ‘youth crackdown squads’, patrol the streets, tasked with monitoring young people’s behaviour. Ms Kang recalls being stopped more often, before she escaped, and reprimanded for dressing and styling her hair like a South Korean.

The squads would confiscate her phone and read her text messages, she adds, to make sure she had not used any South Korean terms.

Jean Mackenzie, “North and South Korea are in an underground war – Kim Jong Un might now be winning,” May 31, 2025

Don’t overlook the possibility that bright souls in other governments will want to copy this approach — for our own good, of course.