The Internet Comes to North Korea

By next year, at the earliest, North Korea will restrictively supply the Internet to governmental organizations and individuals.

Kim Sang Myung (pen name), a researcher at the Institute of North Korea Studies, stated at a symposium held by the Institute of Broadcasting and Telecommunications on the 6th that “North Korea will start an Internet service according to the Internet opening roadmap established in 2002 according to the instructions of Kim Jong Il.”

Kim Sang Myung is an IT expert from North Korea who escaped from the country in 2004, while he was a Computer Science professor in the Engineering department of Kongsang University. He now works as a professor at Kyonggi University in Gyeonggi Province, South Korea.

He continued, “However, the most serious anxiety for North Korea while preparing to connect up to the Internet is the potential outflow of North Korean internal information.”

North Korea has succeeded in upgrading the Internet security program, “Neungra 88,” to prevent interruption by hackers from outside and to stem the outflow of North Korean information.

Kim added that “Due to setting up enormous layered filtering devices, North Koreans cannot leave any information on other sites when they search the Internet.”

He said that “In order to establish infrastructure for the Internet, North Korea constructed the “backbone,” the fiber-optic cable network, between Pyongyang and Hamheung last year.”

He revealed that “North Korean authorities believed that the cause of Iraq’s failure in the war was the disruption of command systems. Therefore, they constructed the four backbone networks to deal with such cases. “If North Korean soil is totally devastated by bombing, they believe that all the cables must not be cut off at the same time.