North Korea News Podcast by NK News - Martyn Williams: How digital tech strengthens North Korean state control

Episode Date: February 17, 2026

North Korea media and tech specialist Martyn Williams joins this week’s episode to discuss his trips to the inter-Korean border with NK News CEO Chad O’Carroll, which have explored how technology is reshaping control and communication in the DPRK. The conversation covers smartphones and digital infrastructure inside North Korea, including how mobile technology has expanded […]

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strategic decisions, visit careerrisk.com slash solutions today. Hello listeners and welcome to the NK News podcast. I'm your host, Jacko Zwetlut. And today, it is Wednesday, the 11th of February, 2026, and I'm here in the NK News studio with a return guest, Martin Williams and also our boss Chatter O'Carroll. Welcome, gentlemen. Hello. For those who haven't heard of you before, Martin Williams is a senior fellow with the Stimson

Center where he works primarily with the 38 North Project. His primary interests are in North Korea's technology, infrastructure, broadcasting system and propaganda. And Martin was last on this podcast on the 6th of October 2020, episode 149 for those who want to go back and listen. Wow, that was the pandemic. Yes. Yeah. Today we'll be talking about how North Korea uses technology, North Korea cell phone coverage, and Chad and Martin's road trips to monitor North Korean propaganda broadcasts here in South Korea.

So since we've got Chad here and you haven't got him for the whole broadcast, let's start with him first. Chad, you and Martin have spent countless hours over several of Martin's visits to South Korea, driving to the border to listen to North Korean radio and check out TV signals where you could pick them up. What keeps pulling you both out there? And I'll have Chad start first. Well, I think the first time we went there was also probably shortly after the pandemic, maybe 2022, 2023. And obviously, you can't go to North Korea as a westerner really anymore.

And I hadn't ever been with Martin, but I'd heard. He'd gone on these bus journeys up there to near Padju to listen to radio. So I thought it would be cool just to, me and Martin known each other for almost 15 years probably. So I thought it'd just be a nice day out. And it's kind of what happened, really. No, Martin, I can picture an interesting documentary about a man who comes to South Korea to take bus trips up to the military zone to listen to radio. But apart from the image of that, why do you do it? What's in there?

What's interesting? Yeah, as Chad said, it's difficult to get. into North Korea, well, impossible at the moment. But even when it was possible, it wasn't easier. It was expensive. It was a long trip. And going up to near the border a couple of things. First of all, there are obviously the observatories along the border.

You get to have a look into North Korea. You're only seeing a little bit of North Korea, right? It's only the border towns. But it's still good to see with your own eyes. And then I think the other part of it is, yeah, listening to the different radio that is being broadcast back and forth because South Korea is broadcasting to the north. North is broadcasting to the south, at least this all used to be the case.

And you can pick up both from the border area. Pick up both from the border area and the domestic radio as well. There's nothing, sort of, no massive revelations in what comes across, but I think it just all adds to the basic kind of picture of what North Korea is and what's going on these days. And from a technical perspective, is there anything? that you're actually listening or looking for on those trips that you can't get, for example, from satellite imagery or official statements? In terms of looking for things, I mean, just life in some of those border towns.

You know, I've been up in the summer, I've been up in the winter. It's always amazing to see, you know, particularly when it's very cold weather, people out working in the fields. It's interesting to see some of the vehicles driving a by or the lack of vehicles and things like that. That's the kind of thing you don't see from satellite imagery. There is always this sort of tale told of these towns along the border as being, you know, showcase towns and things like that. They, to be honest, they look very showcased to me. They look kind of very ordinary and normal.

But even if they're not, you know, it's just a chance to kind of see some of that stuff with your own eyes. It's not something that North Korean TV really shows very much. It's not something you kind of get access to unless you take the time and go there. And it's not very far from Seoul. And when someone's driving you, like, you know, Chad was with his car, it's even easier than taking it. in the bus. Yeah. Anything to add to it, Chad?

I just agree with what Martin says. It's really, I think interesting for a couple of reasons. One, because it just demonstrates very vividly how close we are in Seoul. And a lot of South Koreans I know have never even been up there. And, you know, secondly, I think with the radio and what's going on over the airwaves, it's just really also interesting to see, to see like what you can pick up, what you can't pick up, and to try and get your head around all these jamming systems. because, you know, I grew up in London in the 90s.

There was a lot of pirate radio and there wasn't jamming going on. So you could, but there was like radio stations fighting each other on the same frequency. Oh, wow. And so having grown up with that kind of like atmosphere and being on the radio a lot, trying to tune into foreign radio at night from like France or Ireland, I find it really interesting that it's actually quite hard, even at the best of times, on that inter-Korean border to get signal when you're so much closer. Right.

So, yeah. For the uninitiated, if there were two broadcasters competing on the same frequency, is it simply a matter of the one with the strongest signal or the biggest antenna wins? So it depends. If we're talking about medium-wave broadcasts, then those... That's the same as AM? That's the same as AM, yeah. Those signals will mix together.

So the strongest one is the one that will win out. But you'll usually hear the other one underneath it. If you're talking about FM, then FM is a kind of either-or. and it again is the strongest one that wins out, but you don't hear anything in the background. Interesting. Okay. Now, am I correct in understanding that both careers have stopped all broadcast at the moment? Is that right? Yes. At least broadcast to each other. There's nothing on the air at the moment and the television also. Okay. So if you were to do one of your road trips this time, essentially you're expecting to pick up nothing at all. If I did one of my road trips this time,

I'd be looking to pick up North Korea's domestic radio. Ah, which accidentally comes across Which accidentally comes across because, you know, like any border area between two countries, you can pick up television or radio from the other country because you're very close to it. Right. So that's what it would be this time. But it is getting, yeah, a little less interesting because a lot of these radio stations have gone off the air over the last few years. Now, Chad, over the years, have you noticed changes in how North Korean broadcasts are structured or timed or targeted, especially as internal communications technology improves? Well, I mean, I can talk broadly about what we used to pick up. I mean, we used to be able to pick up North Korean radio from this very office building on shortwave.

We had a small radio and I think it was like 2017 when the tensions were really high. We were really worried that North Korea may just flick off TV, flick off state media. And, you know, at that point, being able to get even a shortwave radio signal would be better than nothing. So we invested in that radio. I don't know if we can even do that, and I haven't tried it for a while, but what we did see after Kim Jong-un renounced reunification as a strategic goal, they switched off all of these unification-focused radio stations. And just picking up off what Martin said just now,

I mean, it used to be the case you could drive along with a car radio on FM and be locked into North Korean frequencies, and it would just burst through every now and then. I remember doing that with you on one of the islands, either Yon Pyongyangdo or Pengong. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, it was very easy out there. But I was there in December with a guest and we brought a radio up and we just couldn't get anything whatsoever. So it's really, the radio stuff has got a lot harder to get.

In terms of how it's the technology or the purpose of radio and TV has changed, Martin probably knows more about that. But I guess the growth in intranet use in cell phone is probably becoming a much more important channel for information distribution inside the north. Yeah, and we're definitely going to talk a bit more about cell phone. Well, a lot more about cell phone technology, but just coming back to the road trips for a second, Martin, do they give you a different, a more sort of ground-scale human sense of how seriously Pyongyang took at that time? Information warfare, even in an era of smartphones and internet and intranets? Yeah, it's always been a little bit of sort of, I think it's very strange the way that North Korea does information warfare, especially to other countries.

You know, you have a lot of countries around the world that are very sophisticated about their foreign message. and, you know, you have a lot of disinformation on the internet now as well and things like that. And North Korea is still trucking along with like shortwave radio broadcasts in eight different languages that I'm sure nobody around the world is listening to. There's, you know, maybe like 10 people that tune into that kind of stuff. Well, somebody recently shared a website with me. I think it's cordial.tv that rebroadcast North Korean shortwave radio as well as TV broadcast. I've got no idea how many people listen to that.

That was a group in Poland, one of those North Korean friendship groups. it does that? Yeah, it's a new website and they're picking the shortwave stream is also on satellite, so they're picking that up from satellite to rebroadcast it. But if you listen to those broadcasts, they are deadly boring. They're reading, they're basically reading KCNA stories. And if you're trying to, I think, convince people around the world about your country, you don't take what you put out domestically and just translate it because it's not going to work for overseas audiences. If you look at some of the other international efforts at countries, do, you know, China has a very slick

CGTN TV channel that is very kind of Western in its presentation style because if they just did it in the Chinese style in English they wouldn't have as many viewers. And they have some Western news readers on that. Exactly, exactly. So they've tried to make this much more accessible to audiences overseas. North Korea doesn't really do that.

So that's always been, I've always wondered why they kind of waste so much time doing it. And I suspect the reason might be that, you know, sometime, I don't know, 30, 40, years ago or something, Kim Il-sung said that we should be broadcasting on shortwave to the world, and because no one's ever said, don't do it anymore, they just keep on doing it. In that sense, do you think that there's no possible return on investment that they're hoping to get from it? It's kind of divorced from a business concept of ROI because probably one of the

leaders said, do this, and no one countermandered that. Yeah, I think so. I mean, there's still also, I don't know if they're printed anymore, but North Korea still does the monthly magazines. Korea? Yeah, Korea and foreign trade, which a lot of. of, you know, back in the 80s and 90s, a lot of countries would do a monthly magazine that presented. North Korea is still doing that in the 21st century. Foreign trade, I mean, for all the glossy magazines they publish, if you were to pick that up and be interested, none of the emails work and you can't call the phone numbers. Oh dear.

That's right. That's right. Now, Chad, do you think that the regime really still sees external broadcasting coming into North Korea as more or is less dangerous than it did a decade ago? More dangerous for sure. I mean, we can tell based on the laws that have been passed in the last four or five years, increasing the penalties for those who consume or distribute media from South Korea especially. I don't know what the jamming has got like inside North Korea, but I would imagine it's been improved somewhat just to ensure that these radio stations don't manage to get in. I mean, I've always said it's like the Achilles heel of North Korea's power, really. And if the country was awash with radio, TV signals from overseas, I think it would be quite catastrophic for Kim Jong-un.

But, you know, just building up, we were talking about earlier, one thing, so I'm preparing these short videos about some of our classic content. And do you remember Nate Thayer wrote that big piece on white supremacist Americans who were... Oh, yeah. Who were strangely fascinated with North Korea, right? And he zeroes in on this guy called John Paul Cup, who at the age of 22, founded a pro North Korea support group. And he was all over KCNA in the early 2000s and went on three trips to North Korea that were heavily featured in North Korean state media, described in North Korean state media as an important personage.

But he was a homeless guy living in a tent under a bridge in like Ohio or somewhere. Oh, dude. But the interesting thing is you don't really see that so much anymore. North Korean's media zooming in on these kind of wacko foreigner support groups, they seem to have realized that the return on investment on that is also not so strong. Yeah. So it's an interesting dichotomy, isn't it? You've got North Korea that does its own external propaganda broadcasts to apparently,

you know, very little return. But at the same time, it sees any foreign broadcast coming into its territory as being more dangerous than bombs or bullets potentially. I mean, absolutely. I think one of the biggest or these. single biggest threat to Kim Jong-un is the free flow of information. The entire system is based on control of information. You know, it goes down to even control of movement in the country, control of the way that people communicate. All of that information has to be controlled. So

broadcasts coming into the country, be the radio or television, internet is obviously, you know, basically completely banned. They have to keep that up if they want to keep the system going. And I think what we've seen in the last few years, I would say that, Kim Jong-un-un in the last five years, certainly since COVID, has been easily winning the war on information. It's gotten a lot more difficult for information to get into the country.

And last year, 2025, you know, the decisions of the US and South Korean governments to stop the broadcast, just gave him a massive boost in this battle as well. Can I ask a question? Go on. You might remember in the early days of the Ukraine, Russia war,

and also with the timing of some of these protests in Iran, there have been these mysterious hacking efforts into state TV in Tehran and Moscow that have sort of overtaken like the 7 o'clock news. Do you think something like that could ever be possible with North Korea? I think the way that some of that's been done in the other hacks has been breaking into satellite broadcasts. You know, the satellite is used to distribute the signal across the country. North Korea does use satellite broadcasts.

And if we look on satellite imagery at some of the TV transmitters around the country, there are dishes, but I suspect that that's maybe just a backup, and I suspect primarily they're not using dishes, so it's probably quite difficult to do. But also one of the surprising things that we've seen in Iran and Russia and other countries is that if you have the equipment to break into TV transmission systems, there's not an awful lot of security on them, because the assumption is that no one's ever going to try to do that and no one can do that. So it could well be possible. Interesting. I'm reminded of, well, about 22 years ago here in Seoul, I had the pleasure of seeing the last chancellor of the German Democratic Republic, Lortad de Mazier,

who was talking about, you know, German unification and lessons for Korea. And one of the final points he made was information. You've got to get information into North Korea to affect any kind of change. And that was something that, yeah, he argued very strongly for, and we see that North Korea sees that as a threat too. I think this situation in Germany was very different because most of what used to be Eastern Germany was covered by Western German television signals. I think there was a small area that wasn't, but most people could get it.

There also weren't, I think, the door-to-door searches that you get in North Korea and things like that. You know, Iran is another country where satellite TV is banned, but if you look at photos of Tehran, lots of satellite dishes on roofs, and there's occasional crackdowns, but it's kind of banned, but it's kind of being done everywhere. North Korea, of course, completely different. It would, I think, be unthinkable for anyone to try to sneak a satellite dish into North Korea and to use. use it and the penalties, as Chad said earlier, receiving these broadcasts has gotten even more severe. Okay. And that's where we're going to say goodbye to chat for now.

All right. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you. And then it's just you and me from now on. Martin, you've spent years looking at how technology exists in North Korea, not as a neutral tool, but as something that's deeply shaped by state priorities and used for state ends. What do you think people outside North Korea maybe still don't understand or don't fully appreciate about how technology actually functions inside the North Korean system?

Yeah, a good question. I think one of the biggest things has been, especially since COVID, that the importance of technology has really increased. A lot of North Koreans didn't have access to much technology, including in the commercial sector as well, in the government sector. You know, it was a country where a lot of things were done in a very traditional way on paper and things like that. Smartphones kind of started changing that. But since COVID, there seems to have been an explosion, not just in the number and variety of smartphones available, but in the apps that are available. And we've seen, I think, the beginnings of a push by the North Korean government to start transitioning certain government services onto apps and things like that. Some of that is not

necessarily for the convenience of the people, but to try to bring more control into things like supply chains. So, for example, grain coupons, it's now possible to get those on cell phone. Okay. What do you then do with that grain coupon? Do you go to some sort of ration distribution? Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, if you can record how much grain you've got and at the ministry level, if you're recording where it's going, and then you've got a digital record of everybody that takes it, it gets much more difficult for example grain to be stolen. Right. It gets more difficult for people to pay bribes and things like that. So I think the North Korean government are seeing this as a way to kind of, kind of clamp down on a lot of the shadow economy that is so important in North Korea at the moment. Now, in June last year, the BBC quoted you as saying smartphones are now part and parcel of

the way North Korea tries to indoctrinate people. What does that actually look like in day-to-day smartphone use? So a lot of the smartphones that are available in North Korea would not look out of place anywhere in the world. They're all quite modern smartphones. They all run Android, you know, great cameras, that kind of thing. Of course, they only have access to an intranet, not an internet, but there are hundreds of apps available domestically that produce all of the same things that you'd be used to. There's news apps, there's a weather app. There are lots and lots of games as well. You can do streaming video on the apps as well. But this is all within the North Korean system. So the first most obvious thing is that there's no internet access.

It is just the intranet. The apps that you put on the phone, in fact, any content you put on the phone needs to have been approved by the government. There's a digital signature that goes on any content. If the phone gets a file and it doesn't have that government digital signature, it immediately deletes it. There's also an app on the phone that takes random screenshots. It puts them into a directory. You can see that it's taken a screenshot,

but it won't show you what the screenshot is and you can't delete it. That's stastardly. How did you find this out? I mean, looking at North Korean phones. We've managed to obtain a couple of North Korean phones over the years. Does it flash or make a noise when it takes a screenshot? No, it doesn't. Right.

And you also can't see the screenshots. You can browse the list of screenshots, but you can't see what the screenshot is. So it really forces self-censorship. It really, so, you know, that's a couple of the ways they do it. But also within this system, you know, it is very Orwellian in the way it works. But I think we also need to recognize that for most North Korean people, they're used to that kind of thing. and the smartphones now that they are bringing some real positive benefits to their lives. Well, yeah, let's talk about one of the apps that you were analysed last year in the summer.

People can find it on nketechlab.org, I think. It's a North Korean health app called Kongang or health. Tell us a little bit about that app. So this is from the Ministry of Health, from their drug distribution department. We were really surprised. We got a phone and opened up this app, and it promises door-to-door delivery of, medicines across the country. Non-prescription medicines or?

Well, the whole prescription side of things wasn't really made very clear on there. Certainly a lot of the drugs that were on there would probably normally require a prescription overseas. But it was a sort of had some telehealth on it as well. Like actually you could get a consultation with a doctor. So of course we can't run the app because we weren't on the North Korean network.

But we look through the help file. Yes. And the help file explained, you know, You can click go in this menu and you can connect with a doctor or a nurse or something and ask questions. Interesting. How well that works in reality, of course, don't know. But I think even if it doesn't work that well at the moment, the fact that this app was developed shows that this is a direction that they want to take things. The app included, though, a database of around 3,000 different medicines.

A lot of medicines, a lot of traditional Korean remedies, but then a lot of medicines from overseas. the medicines were priced in two different currencies. There was a lot of stuff available in domestic North Korean one, and then a lot of stuff available in essentially foreign currency one, which means that you have to start with foreign currency to gain this foreign currency one to buy this stuff. So it was a kind of way of forcing you to use foreign currency to buy some of these things that came in from overseas.

Was insulin on there? Is that something that people can buy if they're diabetic? I believe insulin was on there, yeah. I'm not a medical profession, obviously. We did have a couple of subsequent stories from the folks at Harvard Medical School who look through the drugs to the part of the career health program there. Right. To look through the drugs to, you know, come up with some insight into what was available.

But I think this app is, this app is interesting. It goes back to what I was saying about, you know, why the government is doing this. And I think one of the reasons is that, again, it's supply chain management. And if you have everyone ordering drugs on an app, then, you can follow the drugs and account for all of the drugs in the system, and it makes more, it makes it more difficult for people to steal drugs along the way and things like that. So a use of technology that perhaps is an advantage to people, because if you can order it and it gets delivered to your door, that's better than going down to a pharmacy.

Perhaps the drugs are more available, but then also from the state point of view, it helps them start to record what's going on in that supply chain. They're not just sending drugs off and then they're disappearing somewhere. Was there anything in the help file or in the app itself that suggested that maybe not all of the country could receive deliveries? No, I mean, it said it was nationwide, but I suspect it probably wasn't. I suspect it was probably just Pyongyang. If you were living in a little village in a long way from Pyongyang, maybe you would get this. Maybe it would take a long time.

But I think the intention is there, though, to do that. And that's what some of this stuff shows us. But it is something we always need to remind ourselves. is just because a North Korean app says that something's possible, we shouldn't get too taken away with the technology. To what extent do you think that smartphones in North Korea train users into particular habits like what they can search or what they expect technology to do for them

and where the boundaries lie? That's a good question. Because a lot of what available is, well, everything that's available has already been approved by the state, I think probably people feel quite safe browsing around for things. As for searching, I mean, certainly I think it's the self-sense. censorship that North Koreans normally would normally exercise, especially, you know, typing text messages, things like that. They know what they can type and they know what they can't type.

And I think it's probably second nature to them. Was there anything in the health app about sexual health? I don't think. Any medicines or products? Because I saw that there was quite a, from the screenshots that you shared, you could even buy like health equipment, I mean gym equipment, weights and whatever. So I just wondered if there's anything there that adults might use. That's a good question. I don't think there was, but there were 3,000 things in there. Oh, wow. We looked at a lot of them, but didn't look at all of them. So maybe there were... Some future research, hey?

Yeah. Now, just a couple of days ago, you published an article at nkatechlab.org about the Sujongchon 5010 smartwatch. What is it, and why is its appearance on the North Korean market significant? Yeah, it's, you know, just showing the direction, I think everything is going in North Korea. There are now, I mean, NK News had a story saying there were, I think, 14 different smartphone brands in North Korea. It's a lot. I think there's even a couple more now since that story was published. It seems that the North Korean government has sort of said to the technology companies, the ones that deal with China and things, you know, you guys can all kind of compete amongst yourselves.

And that's why there are so many, there's so much competition in that area. And then the smartwatch is just an extension of that. A lot of people already have smartphones. so now let's go to the next big thing, which is smart watches. The watch connect to the phone? Is that the idea that, like, you know, when you get a text and it shows on your wristwatch? So that smart watch actually takes a SIM card. So that's a phone in itself.

Okay. So it's not an extension of your phone, it's at its own phone. That's a standalone phone. I think it said you can do calls on it. Wow. Okay. Now, speaking of calls, just last month in January, you wrote a piece for 38 North that maps a significant expansion of cell phone coverage in North Korea, including into more rural areas.

And I've brought a print out of the map that goes with that. It's very impressive to see certainly the West Coast there in and around Pyongyang and the East Coast, a lot of overlap, still a lot of white areas in the middle of the country. So just give us a bit of a, you know, draw a picture of what this expansion is or what it means. Yeah, so this is something that we first did, I think, back in 2022. So this is the first update in about four years. Sorry, how do you do it? Is it looking at satellite photos to spot a mast or what's the methodology?

That's how it began is it began from satellite imagery and the cell phone base stations are quite distinctive. There's a big antenna tower. There's a little hut next to it and a solar panel. So it's not like in South Korea where they would build it on the roof of a building, perhaps disguised inside a church spire, for example. I haven't seen, well, if it's disguised, then of course we're not going to be able to see it because it's disguised. I mean, this was, it began with these large towers, and then subsequently,

the map has been supplemented a little bit by our just sort of obsessive monitoring of North Korean television. And whenever I see a cellular antenna on the roof of a building, I'll go onto the map and, like, add another pin for that one. Most of that is in cities that are already covered. But yeah, we did this. So there's, there's for sure, you know, if you look at the map, there are for sure areas that have coverage that are not in our map, just because we haven't found a tower and we can't see it, especially if the towers are surrounded by trees and things like that, they can be very difficult to see. The quality of some of the imagery on Google is not great. But it's basically all of the populated areas of North Korea. One of the things that surprised

us most was that even when you start going into some of these valleys in mountainous areas, where there are only a string of small villages, you'll find a cellular tower there. So this isn't just cities, it's not just towns. This is this network. is really becoming quite broad. And that was one of the things we found with the new map. And how does the coverage in general compare to, say, South Korea or the United States? I mean, coverage in, there's a couple of aspects to it. Coverage in South Korea is, South Korea is one of the best covered countries in the world.

I think it's probably better if you look at other kind of developing countries. But even in a lot of developing countries, there's a lot more competition. The networks are quite strong in a lot of places you go to now. North Korea has a couple of cell phone carriers and it was only two years ago that one of the carriers launched a 4G network. From the satellite images on the map, we can't tell if it's 3G or 4G.

But there hasn't been the same level of competition in North Korea and of course sanctions make this difficult. This all costs a lot of money to do. I think one of the reasons that 4G only just launched is because the carrier was able to take advantage of a lot of secondhand equipment that as 5.5, G was being launched, carriers around the world were taking 4G out and they were selling it on the second hand market. So things are, you know, developing less slowly, but at least at the moment, I think, for North Korea, the development of 4G, I think back to when I got a 4G phone and it was so much faster than 3G.

And I think North Koreans are probably just starting to experience that. And it'll be interesting to see what new kind of apps and services come out. now this faster data network is available. Well, that's what I was about to ask you. So how important is 4G, not just in terms of speed, because that's always a great thing, but just in terms of what kind of services and content the state can realistically push to users? So there's a couple of apps already that supposedly allow video streaming on 3G. But again, if you think all the way back to whenever it was the 2000s, video streaming on 3G was not that great

compared to what we have now. So I think, you know, more video streaming and things like that. I think it also gets interesting, not thinking about how the North Korean people are using this, but also the benefit to the economy, things like electronic payment systems that the government is pushing, again, I think because it kind of helps them control what's going on in the economy, but those electronic payment terminals need connections, fast data connections. I think one of the areas where it might run against the North Korean people is, for example, in surveillance technology. If you put a CCTV camera in somewhere, it needs a network connection.

In a lot of, especially rural areas, there maybe isn't a very good landline connection. But now if there's a 4G connection, it might start making some of that possible. So it's not all benefits to the people. But I think in general, you know, if you look in any country as telecommunications technology modernizes, you have a whole lot of new things that become available. So North Korea is about to go through that with 4G. Right. So the workings out of this will take some time to, we'll take some time to, we'll be.

really see that the long tail of that, yeah. Yeah. Well, what does this all tell us about the regime's confidence in its ability to manage information flows? I think it shows that at the moment the state feels supremely confident that it can manage all of this. I think that if it was worried about the unsanctioned spread of information, then there wouldn't be 14 or 16 or whatever it is, different companies making cell phones. I don't think it would be hundreds of different apps available. I don't think there would be that competition. There will be a lot more control. There will be a lot fewer phones available because they wouldn't want anything to kind of slip by. And I think since COVID, they have been very successful in blocking out a lot of

foreign information. The other thing that we've been seeing is that it's not just on the cell phone side, but we were talking about broadcasting earlier. The television broadcasting, for example, North Korea started deploying digital TV broadcasting. It's great for people because now all across the country you can get four TV channels, not just one. And this was one of the fun things at the border was being able to watch some of these channels that we don't see on satellite. But as North Korea goes digital, it's using the European format. South Korea has its own format. It's the US format that's in use in South Korea.

China has its own format. In the future when all TVs are digital in North Korea, even if the signal's there, they won't be able to receive TV from South Korea because it's a different format. Right. So South Korea would have to broadcast digitally in the North Korean format in order for it to reach. And that's actually what the NIS was doing. They had a couple of channels on the air. When I went with Chad last time up to the border, one of the most interesting things I saw was we took a European, North Korea uses the European digital TV format. We took a portable European TV up there. We were able to tune into these NIS broadcasts. It was two channels and it was a mix of South Korean TV programming from all the different networks. And then they had their own news bulletins and weather bulletins.

But it was specifically for North Korea. Unfortunately, that went off the air last year with the cessation of all the radio broadcasts to. Now, you noted in your article that expansion of the cell phone network seems to be more focused on capacity than geography. Does that suggest a shift from connecting new people, signing them up to doing more with people already connected? Yeah, I think so. And it points to people wanting to do more with their cell phones. the number of users increasing. So what the carriers are having to do is they're not worrying too much about connecting up some small little, you know, mountain pass where maybe five people a day travel across.

They're putting their energy into adding base stations into some of the towns and cities because there are more and more people using their phones. And again, you know, we're lucky to live in countries now where that isn't a problem. But it wasn't that long ago where, you know, if you were in a busy area, you were around a pop concert, it was New Year's Eve or something, you would lose signal on your cell phone because everybody was trying to do it. That doesn't happen these days in most developed countries. But I think what we're seeing in North Korea is that they're having to add that capacity which shows that people are using these phones. It's not just, you know, propaganda. It's not just for show.

This is real stuff that's happening. So from what you've seen, does it, does greater coverage increase the regime's surveillance burden? Or does that actually make population management easier? Yeah, it's another good question. I mean, I think we're, we don't, we don't estimate how many cell phone users there are in North Korea now, because it's been so long since there's been any reliable information. It is literally just a guess. But I think in 2022, we guessed about $7 million. It's probably higher now, but again, who knows how much it is.

But at that level, I think you're past the stage where the government can surveil what everybody's doing. and in fact from talking to people that have escaped North Korea, a lot of them seem to not worry too much about surveillance. Someone said something to me once, which is you don't do too much because then you don't pop up on the radar. But once you're on the radar, then everything you do is surveilled. And I think this does make it easier for the government to surveil people it's interested in because, you know, we know all of this through what Google and Facebook and meta,

All these different companies are doing to surveil what we do. Well, replace meta with the North Korean government. Actually, I'm not sure which one's scarier. Oh, boy. But anyway, you know, if you're doing electronic payments, you can kind of figure out where people are because they've used their phone to pay for something. You can follow people's locations with GPS.

Even if they're at home now and they're watching streaming video, you can tell somebody when they go to bed because suddenly, you know, at 11 o'clock every night, they stop watching streaming video. If you want to, you can start to build up a much more detailed picture of somebody's life through their cell phones. I don't think that that can't be happening for the entire population. It's just too much data.

But I think, yeah, if you are in the crosshairs, then it becomes definitely a little bit scarier for you. Now, one tension that I think runs through a lot of your work is that the state wants people digitally connected but not intellectually connected to the outside world. How fragile is that balance? I think actually, you know, usually information technology helps people get more connected. It helps people access more information. I have a little worry that at the moment, things are going in the opposite direction in North Korea

because, first of all, there's no internet access. But then with a lot of digital technology, it makes it more easy to just block things off. So like I said, you know, the cell phones earlier and this digital certificate that the government, It puts on content. A cell phone is the most amazing tool for media consumption. You can put it in your pocket. You can take it anywhere. You don't have to worry about the immune band leader knocking on the door and catching you watching a DVD.

You can sit in the forest and you can watch whatever you want, except the digital technology makes it impossible to watch any of that unsanctioned content on a phone because it doesn't have the government approval. Right. And even if you did, the random screenshots would get uploaded to the government. So they would find out, oh, he has found a way to jailbreak the phone and he's watching content that's been smuggled in on an SD card from China. So I think what we're seeing, the government, though, is trying to take advantage of all of this technology to give people alternatives. Because I think they recognize that you can't just tell people, you can't watch this, you can't listen to that, and then not give them an alternative. So there are now hundreds of games that are available on North Korean phones. You know, look around the world.

everyone's, a lot of people aren't watching TV because they're playing computer games now. There's streaming video. We did a story a little while ago about the Mambang service that used to be just the state television. Now it's a 20 channel IPTV service. You have to pay for it. But you've got 20 channels that you can potentially get. It's all state approved content, but it's not all propaganda. There's a nature channel.

There's a sports channel. There's a kids channel. There's propaganda weaved into some of that, of course. But it's giving people alternatives. So I think the state is looking to use digital technology to not just lock people off from what's going on around the world, but to keep them occupied, to give them other sources of entertainment so they don't necessarily search that stuff out as much as they used to.

Just a quick question here. You said earlier that there's no internet in North Korea, but we know, of course, that there are exceptions. There are some. Have you ever seen an estimate? for how many people sanctioned, of course, you know, working for the government, are allowed access to the internet? No, I don't think I've ever seen an estimate.

I mean, I think it's probably in the tens of thousands. That's still quite high, isn't it? Still a lot of people looking at stuff. Well, if you add in, you know, maybe some universities have access as well. I think probably as you start adding people in, it does kind of add up quite fast. But it's not, yeah, it's not a massive number of people. And then, of course, all of the internet access is monitored when people are doing it. And it's very difficult for people to get onto the internet.

But interestingly, there was, I think in the anti-reactionary ideology law, I think it was that law. I can't remember which law it was. There was a law we were looking at. There were fines that were going to be levied on companies if they didn't control internet access as tightly as they should, which told me that they, of course have been cases where people have got online and looked at things when they weren't meant to. So it's interesting that, you know, maybe some of that is going on, but it's so difficult to tell. Last couple of questions. Zooming out, do you see North Korea moving towards a future where smartphones becomes the primary interface between the state and its citizens?

Yeah, I think it's moving that way at the moment for many reasons. A smart phones, a lot of people have them. people don't have computers, they're already network connected, where a lot of people don't have phone lines, and the government, like I said, is I think trying to stamp out a lot of corruption, so taking things online will help that. So I think everything's pointing in that direction. But they still have to get together for their regular indoctrination sessions, you know, the self-criticism, etc. So that one's always going to be there, I think, right? That can't be replaced easily by smartphone. Oh, absolutely, no.

I think that will continue. I think the in-min band system will continue, and I think that's going to be. be replaced. All of these systems have worked very well for the North Korean state over the last few decades. So I don't think they're going to be replacing them. They're just going to be using technology to kind of make, sort of erase their pain points and things like that. So what's the endgame for the regime here? A digitally efficient social estate where, you know, the supply chain is tracked and there's no black market or simply tighter control wrapped in modern interfaces? Is it the same thing? Yeah, I mean, I think both. I think both.

of those things. I mean, the state is looking at this for how it benefits itself in that kind of supply chain area, but also for the people. I mean, the other thing that we need to remember, which, you know, kind of pains me to say this, but in many countries where there's a lot of censorship, a lot of people don't actually care. They're either used to it or they don't, you know, sometimes when I've spoken to North Korean escapees and we've asked, well, why did you listen to the voice of America? It wasn't because I want to learn about democracy and what's going on in the world. It was like, I was bored one night and I just happened to find it. And of course, that's, you know, it's not one size fits all and everybody's different.

There will always be people that fight against this. But we're seeing in many countries that I think a lot of people, if they are entertained, they're just kind of happy with the entertainment. And I think the North Korean government's figured that out. And I think that's one of the reasons why they're kind of flooding the market with digital entertainment. And the new gaming cafe in Pyongyang that just opened as well, right? The like 200-seat computer gaming cafe that just opened is another sort of entertainment thing. So I think they're kind of cottoned onto that and they're moving in that direction.

Final question. For people who work in the area of information access, human rights or engagement with North Korea, what do you think they need to maybe rethink most urgently in light of how fast the digital ecosystem in North Korea is evolving? I think the most important thing to do is just to, I think, keep up with what's going on. One of the other biggest issues we have these days is the flow of escapees has drastically dropped since COVID. It's down to, I think, double digits a year now. And a lot of those people, so getting information about what's going on in North Korea is getting more, more difficult. But North Korea does seem to be changing.

The control of the people is changing. how people live their lives are changing. So just not to kind of keep in the, you know, keep thinking about what was going on 10 years ago or 15 years ago because the country is rapidly changing for better and for worse. And yeah, it's just, it's difficult to keep up with, but just, I guess, keep reading nketeclab.org and NKNews and all of the other publications that talk about what's going on.

Indeed, great way to end it. Thank you very much, Martin Williams, for coming on the NK News podcast again. have you again another couple of years. Thank you very much. Bestsellers unveiled at NK News Shop. Step out in style with our top-selling apparel from the NKnews shop, fly high with the Air Cordial T-shirt celebrating DPRK's golden era of aviation in vintage airline chic. Explore the stars with our NADA inspired by North Korea's answer to NASA, or toast to tradition with our Terdonggang beer t-shirt, capturing the essence of North Korea's renowned brew. Each design is a conversation

starter. Find yours at shop.nknews.org. Again, that's shop.nknews.org. Ladies and gentlemen, that brings us to the end of our podcast episode for today. Our thanks go to Brian Betts and David Choi for facilitating this episode and to our post-recording producer Alana Hill, who cuts out all the extraneous noises, awkward silences, bodily functions, and fixes the audio levels. Thank you for listening and listen again next time.