https://apnews.com/article/north-korea-weapons-program-it-workers-f3df7c120522b0581db5c0b9682ebc9b
Court documents allege that the government of North Korea dispatched thousands of skilled IT workers to live primarily in China and Russia with the goal of deceiving businesses from the U.S. and elsewhere into hiring them as freelance remote employees.
Alternate headline: Millions of workers have their wages sent to the US government to fund weapons programs. Every day. For decades.
Millions of workers have their wages sent to the
USIsntrael government to fund weapons programs. Every day. For decadesIn the world's largest open-air concentration camp, the United States government holds an approximately 330 Million people hostage in a continent the size of China, siphoning away their hard earned wealth to fund weapons programs that kill People of Color across the world
What are the odds this is actually just "some immigrant workers from the DPRK got jobs at call centers, and sent money home to their families which was then taxed by the DPRK or otherwise spent in ways that ended up paying the state in some fashion," instead of a real conspiracy by state agents to provide call center workers in exchange for a portion of their extremely low wages?
I mean could be. Where'd you get call-center workers tho?
I was just grasping for a succinct way of describing a low-wage remote service farm outfit and "call center" was just the shortest and most generic way of phrasing it so it wouldn't mess up the flow of the line (I started with "outsourced IT farm" and it read kind of wonky so I changed it). Although "outsourced remote IT work for US businesses" sounds a whole lot like a way of spicing up a description of call center work, especially since the accusation isn't that they were backdooring US systems to steal from them just sending part of their wages back home.
I mean it could just as easily be programmers, server admins, etc. In fact it seems far more likely than a customer service role where having an accent is pretty noticeable. They do say "skilled" workers
but yeah, its hardly nefarious for a country embargoed by the world to train workers to go abroad where they can earn higher wages in useful foreign currencies
In North Korea they don't have computers or the internet, so to train IT workers they sit in a big auditorium and listen to one person read zeros and ones off a big book through a megaphone.
I didn't know of this anime before and now I have to watch the whole thing
See?! They're transferring money. It must be for missiles!lol, the DPRK has a single account for ballistic missiles that everyone transfers to or something? Did the workers put 'nukes' down in their Venmo?
US gov stole money that I transferred to my landlord once. No explanation. Closest I could come to an explanation was that his name sounded likely to be Muslim. I must have been supporting terrorism, I guess.
Giving money to landlords is supporting terrorism. From tenants, anything short of Maoist revolution is collaborationism. No, I will not explain.
That's weird, liberals told me in no uncertain terms just 2 weeks ago that North Koreans aren't allowed to leave so nice try lying FBI
They're allowed to leave as long as they go to St. Louis, which will undoubtedly cause them to miss North Korea terribly.
St. Louis has air ride sirens that go off whenever Mark Wahlberg is in town with his Shillelagh "Asia Slaya"
Wait, I thought North Koreans weren't allowed to leave? And if they did, they would defect? And if they left, they'd have access to the rest of the world and see what living in a normal society with internet and TV would be like? The North Korean government is stupidly incompetent; this sounds like a recipe for the birth of thousands of willing CIA assets. Also thousands of people spilling the beans anonymously to the news about the horrifying reality of life in North Korea. I'm sure that's exactly what happened too but I'm not hearing about it cause I haven't checked the news too closely; I mean it must have happened, we were promised about how the North Korean population are all basically the DPRK's prison population, eager for freedom.
Haha, can you imagine how dumb the average North Korean is because they definitely believe Kim Jong Un doesn't poop? Haha, dumb North Koreans, not like us smart Westerners. They can't even get haircuts unless it makes them look like the supreme leader!
Is the simplest explanation really that a hostage situation that is always active and victimizing like a minimum of 10,000 people at a time, with zero public leaks, defectors, or anything else, while opening the DPRK up to revolt by creating a class of thousands of people whose families they directly threatened who also have easy access to the broader internet (Korean IT workers in China), versus . . .
These workers are supporting their families and an income tax was applied? Or just that the US is making shit up?
Is the byzantine conspiracy with an astonishing level of success really the most probably answer? What does it say about your worldview that this was what you "feel like" they are doing?
Is the simplest explanation really that a hostage situation that is always active and victimizing like a minimum of 10,000 people at a time, with zero public leaks, defectors, or anything else, while opening the DPRK up to revolt by creating a class of thousands of people whose families they directly threatened who also have easy access to the broader internet (Korean IT workers in China), versus . . .
I feel like the real threat is 10,000 people coming home and teaching their family (maybe even community?) about what the rest of the world is like and what the real world outside North Korea looks like; can you imagine what 10,000 individuals in addition to 10,000 families all learning about democracy and freedom from the internet can do to the country? But I'm sure Kim Jong Un thought of that already; 10,000 families learning about modern society can't possibly spread like wildfire, after all it's only 10,000 families, that's nothing; Israel killed that many in individuals just this week.
This is why despite North Koreans being dumb enough to think Kim Jong Un doesn't poop, I love that they're all family men down to a man; thousands and not even a few percent of them defecting regardless? They're amazing. They could also still keep contact with the press and the CIA anonymously, but then again after the last time the press/CIA released the identity of the guy helping them which saw his family get executed they're probably scared; I can't recall who that person is and I can't seem to be able to find info on him but it must have happened cause why else wouldn't they keep in contact with the press/CIA anonymously through the internet?
Unless for their thousands of IT workers they also have thousands of handlers, and their thousands of handlers also have their own handlers. The Chinese and Russian government would also have to be collaborating with this system to be allowing North Korean handlers to be keeping watch over their charges and to be doing so secretively, but they're the bad guys so I'm sure that's happening.
God I love that real life is like a James Bond movie.
You have been lied to about North Korea. It is simply not the evil dictatorship it's constantly portrayed as. This was a shock to me too when I first started trying to dig into all the things I'd been hearing most of my life about the "hermit kingdom." But if it is something you're remotely interested in understanding, you owe it to yourself to start questioning those lies, which includes questioning the material reasons behind why they are told. Since you posted something from a "defector" below, that's an excellent place to start asking questions about the veracity of claims made by defectors and understanding the industry they are incentivized to participate in (often to the point of having no other options).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V4Hnl7J9H4 Loyal Citizens of Pyongyang in Seoul - "A documentary on the world of defectors and South Korean Intelligence"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDXxXYFweTs What's the Deal with Defectors? - shorter video essay that covers the basics.
If you like podcasts, I'd recommend Blowback. Any of their 4 seasons are excellent, but season 3 is about the Korean war and its consequences.
Uh huh, sure. That’s why visitors are heavily monitored and often end up being detained and taken prisoner. Not to mention the lengths their people have to go to if they want to leave. Surely the signs of a healthy and stable country.
"Uh sure, I'm not going to question these lies because here is yet another set of lies I already don't question that confirms the first set of lies. Checkmate, commie!" -You
Not to mention the lengths their people have to go to if they want to leave.
Why might they have to go to such lengths? Hmmm...
"Plenty of North Koreans leave and live in China with no problem. The big reason it is so difficult for them to leave in general isn't because they are being held prisoner there by the DPRK government, it's because of restrictions imposed by the US and UN making it impossible for them to live most anywhere else."
"5. North Korean Overseas Workers (OP8): Requires countries to expel all North Korean laborers earning income abroad immediately but no later than 24 months later (end of 2019)."
"Strengthens the ban on providing work authorizations for DPRK nationals by requiring Member States to repatriate all DRPK nationals earning income and all DPRK government safety oversight attachés monitoring DPRK workers abroad within their jurisdiction within 24 months from 22 December 2017."
Meanwhile the DPRK has no official restriction on the people's free movement.
That’s why visitors are heavily monitored and often end up being detained and taken prisoner
People visit there all the fucking time without issue, but you can keep comforting yourself with more lies like that so you don't have to confront reality. You're really proving you have no curiousity and no will to examine your misconceptions. Here's another vid I might have included in my other comment, this one about visiting North Korea. Not that you actually watched or have any intention of watching them, but this one is short and comedic, so maybe even someone with zero interest in intellectual honesty might watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BO83Ig-E8E
Surely the signs of a healthy and stable country.
Yeah, and hellholes like the US have such health and stability that they have the most prisoners in absolute terms and per capita by far where their ethnic minorities are murdered by their militarized police death squads with impunity. And why soldiers from the US are now defecting to North Korea because of the insane racism and oppression they face in the US.
Westerners are the most propagandized people on the planet.
(Not the guy you're responding to) Yo, thanks for the links about the US and UN laws; I'm showing them to my lib colleague (fat chance it'll have any effect though, the American Cinematic Universe is too important for him).
Glad to help. Truth be told, I got the links myself from someone either on hexbear or lemmygrad. And
the info might help get through to your colleague, sometimes the "right sources," like from characters in their precious ACU, actually can make an impact.
I feel like in this case you are wrong. And probably in every case involving the DPRK
https://www.nknews.org/2015/03/studying-abroad-with-your-family-held-hostage/
Wouldn’t be the first time…
The closest thing i can find to a claim of fact in this link is:
one of my South Korean friends went to middle school in Australia, she witnessed how one of her classmates, the daughter of a North Korean diplomat, had to leave her little brother in North Korea while her father worked as a diplomat in Australia.
So just to be clear you are citing a story told to the author by anonymous someone who heard it as a child from another child.
Ordinary people in North Korea don’t even know that people in other countries can freely choose to study abroad when they want to. They don’t even know the expression “study abroad.”
lmao
This is garbage from a professional defector (left in 2005) with no ability for the reader to verify anything, published by a single-purpose anti-DPRK propaganda mill.
Do you have a more compelling citation?
Things like these make me wish the US didn't ban its passport holders from even setting foot in the DPRK, some irony that is
The individual who wrote this article sounds horrible; at the bottom of his page it says he's from North Korea himself. I can't believe he sacrificed the lives of his family like that. If his family managed to escape with him, I wonder if they went after his extended family. Either way, I can't believe he'd/they'd sacrifice their family; absolutely callous.
Definitely not the first time you've been wrong about the DPRK.
Edit: Seems like they taught those IT workers to use lemmy too
If you want an actual conversation try starting with something that isn’t an unfalsifiable conspiracy theory next time
Congratulations, you are officially the dumbest motherfucker who ever lived. Your medal will arrive in the mail within 4-6 weeks.
That seems very likely. They probably have them all tied to chairs under the exhaust nozzles for the nuclear bombs the DPRK has aimed specifically at Meemaw's beloved church, the Holy A$$emnblie of God in Cash located in the third string suburbs of Lubbock, TX.
How do they know that the money is specifically sent to missile programmes? Is there a DPRK ICMB Patreon or something like that?
there is and the highest tier gets you early access to 일심단결은 주체혁명의 천하지대본, 필승의 무기! plus free 백두의 칼바람정신 자력부강, 자력번영, 경공업부문에서는 인민들이 좋아하는 여러가지 소비품들을 생산보장하자!, and my personal favorite, 모두다 찬성투표하자!
In the DPRK can you can join supporter clubs for individual weapons of mass destruction or some shit idfk I can't riff on Western propaganda anymore, it's just so tiresome.,
Amazing how free Koreans learn IT while subsisting on a diet of rats.
Every thousand lines of code, the workers are allowed to take one small nibble of rat
If a network outage is ongoing for more than 5 minutes they are fed to the rats that the rest of the workers eat.
And it's hard for people to fix the servers since Lim Jong Un is the only one in the country with admin permissions
I feel like this can only mean workers in China sent money to their families and an income tax was applied
Thats my assumption here too.
"Remote IT workers in US funding US war machine through a nefarious channel called the IRS"
Money is free speech when it's our businesses and political donors, but it stops being free speech when that's inconvenient for our foreign policy narrative.
thousands of remote IT workers sent wages to North Korea to help fund weapons program.
the nation we bombed to smithereens and embargoed for 73 years needs to seek extra-legal means of securing a national revenue. One of the forms this took was doing real labor generating surplus value for the American bourgeoisie and then sending their pittance wages back to the DPRK. We will use this as propaganda against them to justify hurting them even more. We are the baddies!Lazy NATOpedia understanding of history.
You start the story in the middle because you've been taught that way. Korea was occupied by the Japanese from 1910 to 1945. Kim Il Sung gained fame as an anti-Japanese guerilla fighter. Korea was sliced in half after WW2. A soviet occupied half, and a US-occupied half. Here's how the Koreans were greeted respectively by the Americans and the Soviets, who were temporary allies in WW2.
Show
The Americans and the Soviets naturally couldn't agree on a trusteeship because the Americans wanted to force private enterprise and fascist Japanese collaborators onto the Koreans and the Soviets wanted Korea to be governed by the Korean working class (or, as imperialists call it, totalitarianism)
[Content warning: various atrocities]
The US instituted a US-backed military dictatorship in 1945, enabled that military dictatorship to begin executing socialists, anarchists, and Communists, placed people who had collaborated with the Japanese into positions of power, etc. The US-led South provoked the North with artillery strikes and armed incursions for 2 years leading up to the Korean war. When the "North" Koreans finally responded to this American occupation, the "Korean War" is said to have started (according to the Americans, who always start the story late), the American air force leveled every single city in the North, did not care about civilian casualties on either side, burned villages with flamethrowers, committed germ warfare, bombed schools, hospitals, dams, etc. And infantry committed sexual assault and executions on civilians. The fascist maniac General Douglas MacArthur (who Americans still worship as a "good man" in much the same fashion Americans accuse "North" Koreans of being brainwashed) wanted to nuke the entire 38th parallel but was thankfully stopped. After LOSING MISERABLY (as Americans always do in these kinds of wars, all they can do is get a high kill/death ratio by murdering civilians, they never actually achieve their strategic objectives) they continued to maintain a military occupation of the South (against the wishes of most South Koreans) LONG after the Soviets and PRC left North Korea, and they continue starving the North Koreans with sanctions for 70 years so they cannot achieve economic independence, and they blame the consequences of these sanctions on the "inferiority of socialism" while injecting billions of into the South Korean bourgeois system to keep it afloat and turn it into a giant theme park for US imperialist soldiers and sleezy businessmen to commit sexual assault on local women. Fuck off.
(you will naturally call this history "biased" because it tells the truth instead of devolving into lazy "both sides are equally bad" algorithmic assessment or the even stupider "actually the koreans themselves invaded their own country" narrative)
Burger Reich troops should GTFO of South Korea btw. They're not wanted there. They're fascist thieves and unwelcome occupiers and regularly get drunk and commit atrocities against locals
Show
you were just justifying 70 years of sanctions based on the false narrative that north korea "started" the war. you must not have read anything I said because I was describing the US military occupation which started BEFORE the war
Hell, a number of sanctions were put in place for the purpose of limiting their nuclear capability
More tests, showing off ICBMs in parades, and media tours of Kim Jong Un visiting nuclear facilities. A very smart and well adjusted government, definitely.
reminder that the united states has thousands of nuclear weapons, is the only country to ever actually nuke someone. Reminder that the United States has invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen in the past 20 years and left all those places in shambles. Reminder that the United States elected the fascist clown donald trump as president. Reminder that the united states elected the senile segregationist joe biden as president. Reminder that the United States helps the Israelis genocide Palestinians and helps the Saudis genocide the Yemeni. Reminder that the United States couped dozens of governments covertly with its CIA throughout the 20th century to prevent postcolonial governments from nationalizing their natural resources or to prevent labor movements from making life easier for the working class or to prevent socialists from holding elected office. Reminder that the United States is built on the genocide of indigenous and the slavery of africans. Reminder that the united states is a dictatorship of the bourgeois class. Reminder that the United States jails and/or assassinates civil rights activists and labor leaders like Eugene Debs, MLK, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton.
"very smart and well adjusted government, definitely." you clueless fascist
but I'm supposed to be afraid of the sanctioned north koreans because they occasionally test ICBMs. If they didn't have ICBMs America would just repeat 1950. They're right to have nukes. Eat shit.
You may not have convinced him, but you have totally convinced me that I need to do a deep dive into the Korean War because I knew next to nothing about what the US did there outside of the propaganda
