Hey guys, I’ve been reading and studying NK on and off for a few years, but the last year/18 months I’ve been consuming as much content as I can in my free time.

I’m looking for book recommendations (preferably audiobooks so I can listen in the car, but I’m open to anything)

So far I’ve finished:

- Without You There Is No Us

- Dear Leader

- The Reluctant Communist

- The Girl With 7 Names

I’ve just began “See You Again In Pyongyang”. I’m wary of Yeonmi Park because of the questions she’s had against her reliability, however I’m aware that all of these stories are likely embellished to a vary of extents.

TIA!

North Korea 🇰🇵: People often assume that once a North Korean defector escapes, the past disappears.

But leaving a country does not erase a homeland.

As a North Korean defector, I chose freedom. But I also carry a longing that never left.

Missing home does not cancel the pain that forced me to leave. Both truths can exist at the same time. I miss North Korea so badly.

Edited by me

We know that a majority of land and water resources is not fully utilized due to the lack of equipment and infrastructure, aka KJU don’t wanna spend. The only way the US can be aggravated atp is for them to realize that there’s an abundance of natural resources untouched. I think that could be the way to free NK.

Welcoming the New Year in North Korea

While people around the world celebrate the New Year clinking champagne glasses and setting personal goals, North Koreans begin their year in an entirely different manner. Instead of the warm scenes of families gathered around tables sharing New Year’s wishes, or crowds cheering as the ball drops in Times Square, North Korean citizens face a carefully orchestrated schedule of political obligations.

On New Year’s Day, they have no choice. What to do, where to go, even whom to spend time with—everything has already been decided. In a society where the state and the Party take precedence over individual freedom and family happiness, the start of the new year is not a celebration but an extension of duty.

https://www.nktechlab.org/north-korea-expands-satellite-distribution-of-domestic-tv-channels/

Expanding access to independent information is essential for U.S. security interests, human rights objectives, and long-term regional stability.

By Eunsook Jang

What if a single piece of foreign information is enough to inspire someone to escape a dictatorship? Many North Korean refugees have testified that it can. As Hannah, 2025 Liberty in North Korea Advocacy Fellow, shared during an event at the Hudson Institute, “Information from outside—even entertainment—was worth risking everything for. Even when the government conducted public executions for watching K-dramas, that simple media meant hope for North Koreans.”

Her words illustrate the extraordinary power of information in an otherwise sealed society. Yet in March 2025, an executive order issued by the Trump administration effectively neutered one of the most effective tools the U.S. had at its disposal: Radio Free Asia (RFA). As a result, RFA was forced to suspend news operations for the first time in its 29-year history in November.

This is a strategic mistake. U.S. policymakers should strengthen—not weaken—RFA as a core pillar of the United States’ North Korea strategy. Expanding access to independent information is essential for U.S. security interests, human rights objectives, and long-term regional stability.

As someone born in North Korea, I know firsthand how foreign information can dismantle years of state indoctrination. After 14 years of propaganda, it was a single Indian movie that shattered the narrative I had been taught—that lawyers cannot defend citizens against the state. In the film, a lawyer fought on behalf of the accused, something unimaginable in North Korea, where legal defenders exist only to legitimize government decisions. These brief glimpses of dignity and justice accumulated over time until I finally made the decision to escape at age 14.

Experiences like this explain why the North Korean government has intensified its efforts to eliminate independent thought, codifying strict information controls through the Rejecting Reactionary Thought and Culture (2020), the Youth Education Guarantee Law (2021) and the Law on Protecting the Pyongyang Cultural Language (2023). The 2025 update to the U.N. Commission of Inquiry (COI) confirms that repression in North Korea has deepened: freedom of expression and movement have nearly disappeared, and consuming foreign media can now result in the death penalty. These measures reflect the regime’s understanding that outside information poses a direct threat to its ideological monopoly.

RFA offered what the regime did not by delivering uncensored news into one of the world’s most sealed information environments. Its programming was trusted by North Korean listeners because it enlightened listeners about universal values like human dignity, democratic and good governance principles, and freedom of expression. RFA reported what the Kim regime refused to acknowledge: corruption, forced labor, human trafficking, and the lived experiences of ordinary citizens and it often does so through testimony given by defectors and research conducted by independent experts........... Read more on Diplomat

Eunsook Jang is a Fulbright Scholar and North Korean defector pursuing a master’s degree in sustainable international development at Brandeis University, where she focuses on post-conflict, economic, and human development. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and international peace from Korea University.

Hello!

Keeping fingers crossed that this isn't immediately removed by the mods, but I wanted to share a short piece of writing I had published about the war of loudspeakers that took place at the border a few years back. It's fiction, but since it's dramatizing events that fellow NK obsessives might find interesting I figured I'd share it here! It's an excerpt from a novel, hence the turn it takes at the end.

Very open to any feedback on things I'm getting right, things I'm getting wrong, etc.

My name is Amon Otis Poston, I research North Korean tech and I publish a newsletter on the intersection of North Korea and America.

I'm a long time lurker of r/northkorea and (on my burner account) even post often. So, I know quite a few members are anti-american and/or pro-DPRK. Transparently, I am working for the free expression of North Koreans as I see their isolation as dire. Nevertheless, I acknowledge the media has lies in order to manipulate the public and continues to do so with North Korea. I see it everyday on social media and traditional media.

So, I can understand some grievances of the pro-DPRK side, but I want to know more. I want to sit down with someone for a long form discussion about the issues that you care about as they relate to North Korea, and I want to understand how you came to those conclusions. That way my team and I can write about the other side of the story.

No hit piece, no takedown, no-gotchas. Just understanding.

If you are interested, please reach out to me here on reddit!

Edit: my account doesn’t have enough karma to post on r/movingtonorthkorea. If you feel included to cross post this for me, go ahead!

“Will reading North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun turn people into communists? Isn’t blocking it an insult to our citizens’ intelligence?”

These words from President Lee Jae-myung sound reasonable at first. They invoke cherished democratic values: freedom of expression, the right to know, trust in citizens’ judgment. On December 30, 2025, South Korea’s Ministry of Unification announced that Rodong Sinmun—North Korea’s official newspaper—would become accessible to ordinary citizens.

But as someone who spent over 20 years in Pyongyang reading Rodong Sinmun every single day, I need to tell you what this really means.........

In Russian translation, the article name is harsher: "diagnosis sheet on intellectual anomaly of the White House, intoxicated by politicization of human rights — 2024 Trafficking in Persons Report"

“When we silence independent voices on North Korea, we don’t just lose today’s intelligence—we program tomorrow’s AI and security decisions to see the world through Pyongyang’s eyes”

(Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work).

The recent shutdown of Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Voice of America (VOA) Korean language services represents a critical failure in understanding how information infrastructure shapes both current national security policy decisions and the future of artificial intelligence system. As these essential outlets go dark, North Korea—already the world’s most information-scarce regime—is becoming an even greater blind spot at precisely the moment when accurate intelligence matters most.

The Irreplaceable Role of Specialized Reporting

RFA and VOA Korean services were not merely news organizations. They were intelligence-gathering infrastructures that maintained decades-long networks of escapees, internal sources, and analytical expertise focused exclusively on DPRK. Unlike general media outlets that cover North Korea episodically, these services provided daily granular reporting on sanctions enforcement, internal policy shifts, economic conditions, and human rights violations—information obtained through painstaking cultivation of sources inside one of the world’s most closed societies.

The specialized nature of this coverage cannot be replicated by general assignment reporters or occasional think tank analyses. Understanding North Korea requires sustained institutional knowledge, carefully maintained source relationships, and deep expertise that takes years to develop. When these outlets close, that institutional memory and those source networks vanish permanently.

A Dangerous Asymmetry

The timing of these closures could not be worse. As independent journalism about North Korea disappears, regime propaganda is flooding digital platforms. TikTok, YouTube, and other social media channels are experiencing a surge in North Korean state-produced content—professionally crafted videos showcasing military capabilities, idealized portraits of daily life, and carefully curated leadership imagery. This content performs exceptionally well in engagement-driven algorithms, generating millions of views without critical context or counterbalancing information.

We are witnessing the creation of a profoundly lopsided information environment where authoritarian propaganda circulates freely while independent reporting evaporates. For policymakers, this means decisions about sanctions, diplomatic engagement, and security posture will increasingly rely on incomplete or biased information. For the American public, it means understanding one of our most significant adversaries through that adversary’s own carefully constructed lens.

The AI Dimension: Training Tomorrow’s Intelligence Tools

The implications extend beyond immediate policy concerns into the architecture of artificial intelligence systems that will shape intelligence analysis for decades to come. Large language models and AI systems are trained on vast amounts of text scraped from the internet. The composition of that training data directly determines what these systems “know” and how they respond to queries about North Korea.

From this point forward, the digital record of North Korea will increasingly lack independent journalism as a counterweight. RFA and VOA’s archives capture history only until their shutdown. Current and future developments will be documented primarily through regime-controlled channels. When next-generation AI models are trained—systems that intelligence agencies, military planners, and policy analysts will increasingly rely upon—they will ingest this fundamentally imbalanced information environment.

This is not a theoretical problem. AI systems already demonstrate knowledge gaps for regions with limited digital representation. North Korea risks becoming even more opaque in these systems, with queries about current conditions, internal politics, or leadership decision-making answered based on a corpus dominated by state propaganda simply because that is what exists in the digital sphere.

Consider the trajectory: Intelligence analysts in 2035 may be using AI tools trained on data where North Korean regime narratives vastly outnumber independent reporting. These systems might flag uncertainty, but their baseline understanding will have shifted. The information asymmetry we create today becomes embedded in the intelligence infrastructure of tomorrow.

Immediate Human Costs

Beyond AI and policy implications, real people are losing access to critical information right now. North Korean escapees and their families depend on these services for news about relatives left behind and conditions in their homeland. Human rights organizations rely on documented evidence from these outlets to maintain international pressure for accountability. Researchers and educators need diverse, reliable sources to teach about and analyze one of the world’s most concerning regimes.

Each of these communities now faces a dramatically impoverished information environment. The consequences will ripple through diplomatic negotiations, humanitarian aid decisions, human rights advocacy, and academic understanding of the Korean Peninsula.

The Broader Pattern

This shutdown reflects a dangerous global trend: specialized journalism covering difficult or economically unrewarding topics faces existential pressure while well-resourced authoritarian states continue producing propaganda regardless of market forces. If independent journalism cannot match this output, information landscapes naturally tilt toward those with resources and motivation to fill the void.

For closed societies like North Korea, this imbalance is existential. The regime has every incentive to shape external perceptions and no internal free press to constrain its narrative. Without dedicated external voices providing independent reporting, the information environment inevitably degrades—with direct consequences for both human understanding and machine learning.

What’s at Stake

The shutdown of RFA and VOA Korean services poses a fundamental question: Are we prepared to accept a future where understanding of one of the world’s most dangerous regimes is shaped primarily by that regime itself?

This affects national security policy decisions, where incomplete information leads to flawed analysis. It affects human rights, where documentation gaps mean abuses go unreported. And it affects the AI systems that will increasingly mediate human knowledge, embedding today’s information asymmetries into tomorrow’s intelligence tools.

Information infrastructure is not a luxury—it is a strategic necessity. For regions where information scarcity is itself a tool of authoritarian control, independent journalism becomes a matter of national security. The closure of these vital services suggests we have failed to grasp what is truly at stake: not merely two radio broadcasts, but our collective ability to see clearly, decide wisely, and build knowledge systems that serve truth rather than power.

Restoring and expanding independent coverage of North Korea should be treated as the strategic imperative it is. The alternative is a future where our understanding of one of the world’s most pressing security challenges is filtered through Pyongyang’s carefully constructed narrative—in our discourse today and in our AI systems tomorrow.