Smuggled North Korean phone reveals a chilling surveillance system

At first glance, it looks like any other budget smartphone — touchscreen interface, Android-style icons, even a familiar camera app. But this device smuggled out of North Korea in late 2024 tells a darker story. Beneath the façade of consumer tech lies a meticulously engineered surveillance tool, designed not to connect users to the world but to keep them firmly walled inside Pyongyang’s ideological fortress.From banning internet access to auto-correcting “Oppa” to “Comrade”, this phone doesn’t just monitor what you say, it rewrites it. Every five minutes, it silently takes a screenshot. Every attempt to bypass its restrictions is a crime. And every word typed is filtered through a digital firewall of state propaganda. A BBC investigation, based on a device obtained through Seoul-based Daily NK, reveals how North Korea has turned the smartphone into an instrument of total control. In a 2022 report, Lumen, a US-based non-profit founded to provide North Koreans with access to uncensored information and media, said these screenshots were taken with the “Trace Viewer”, an application in each North Korean smartphone that takes random screenshots and locks them away from the user, to try and dissuade illicit activities, reported Reuters.This covert surveillance feature creates a comprehensive digital record of every user’s activity for government monitoring. “Smartphones are now part and parcel of the way North Korea tries to indoctrinate people,” Martyn Williams, a North Korean technology expert at the Stimson Center, told the BBC. He warned that North Korea is “starting to gain the upper hand” in the information war. How the public is fighting backA small but determined community of North Korean hackers is mounting resistance by jailbreaking these government-approved phones. According to a 2022 report by Lumen and the Stimson Center, these digital rebels, often educated at elite universities like Kim Il Sung University, use USB connections and Windows PCs to install unauthorised software that bypasses censorship controls. The jailbreakers primarily seek access to forbidden South Korean dramas, K-pop music, and unapproved apps, the very content Kim’s smartphone restrictions are designed to block. The BBC reported that while all outside newspapers and TV channels are banned, some broadcasters “have been able to secretly transmit information into the country late at night via short and medium radio waves.”That’s not all. South Korean K-pop songs and dramas are also smuggled across the border in thousands of USB sticks and micro-SD cards, “often hidden inside boxes of fruit”, the BBC added. Some jailbreakers even operate commercial services, helping others remove restrictions from their devices. Most of the knowledge needed to hack the phones came from North Koreans who had been sent to China for work, often in software outsourcing businesses, the Lumen report said.Their activities have prompted new laws specifically targeting “phone manipulation programs,” indicating that despite the regime’s apparent upper hand in the information war, authorities remain concerned about this underground resistance.But where is North Korea getting these phones from?An estimated six million North Koreans, a quarter of the population, now own mobile phones, with basic devices costing $100-$400 despite average monthly earnings of just $100. Analysis of North Korean phones by Reuters reveals they contain Taiwanese semiconductors, Chinese batteries, and modified Android operating systems, all imported despite 2017 UN sanctions prohibiting mobile hardware imports. Kim Jong Un has endorsed wireless networks, some reportedly built with the help of China's Huawei Technologies, and local mobile phone brands through public speeches and a tour to a mobile phone factory reported by state media.The phones are manufactured by Chinese companies like Gionee using components from MediaTek and Toshiba, though these companies deny direct business with North Korea. This digital infrastructure supports North Korea's informal market economy while providing the regime with unprecedented surveillance capabilities and sanctions-busting revenue streams, demonstrating how authoritarian governments can weaponise consumer technology for social control.Bans on all things South KoreaAccording to a human rights report by South Korea’s Unification Ministry, the regime's censorship efforts have only grown stronger under Kim Jong Un.The report, based on testimonies from 649 defectors, details how officials routinely inspect phones for slang, contact names, or media suggesting exposure to foreign—especially South Korean—culture.K-pop and Korean dramas are entirely banned. Cultural imports from the South are seen as subversive.One case cited in the report is particularly stark: a 22-year-old man was reportedly executed in public for listening to and sharing South Korean music and films.The government's aim is clear—complete insulation from external cultural influences. North Korea’s censorship model is extreme even by authoritarian standards.With inputs from Reuters