Smuggling foreign media into North Korea has mostly been handled with low tech tools—trucks, simple balloons, hand deliveries. But that doesn’t mean high tech solutions can’t also pierce the Luddite bubble. That’s where a hackathon comes in. Last summer, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and programmers pitched new methods of cross-border data penetration to North Korean activists at an event organized by the Human Rights Foundation. The goal: to get Korean information activists to start experimenting with tools devised by American engineers. The hackathon’s winning team was flown to Seoul for a round of meetings with North Korean defector groups. Here are some of the ideas the event produced.
Compact satellite dishes
A pair of Korean-American teenagers partnered with a former Google engineer to win the competition with a design for a flat and easily concealable satellite dish. Signals from Korean broadcaster Skylife already overlap the North and could be picked up by the dishes.
Smart balloons
Groups like Fighters for a Free North Korea launch giant USB-toting balloons toward the North, but many blow out to sea, into the mountains, or back to South Korea. Some means of directing those balloons—say, a propeller and a GPS unit—could make them far more effective.
Slingshots
By far the simplest idea from the HRF’s hackathon was a three-man water-balloon slingshot that can fire a package of USB drives hundreds of yards. The activist group North Korea Intellectuals Solidarity has already started experimenting with the concept by test-firing rocks.
Steganographic videogames
One developer group created a system to hide content in a classic videogame like Snake. Only after the player reaches a certain level—high enough that no inspector would have the attention span to reach it—does secret content become accessible.
Mesh network
Getting data across the border is only the first step. To better distribute digital contraband inside North Korea, one team demo'd a system of tiny. daisy-chained Raspberry Pi computers connected with peer-to-peer Wi-Fi.
Read our April cover story on the North Korean data-smuggling movement.
Michael Marsicano
