Western companies that monitor worldwide internet usage broke the news that North Korea’s version had gone offline, possibly due to a cyberattack. The US and North Korea are engaged in a fierce war of words over the hacking of Sony Pictures, and circumstantially, some suspect that the US government was involved to some extent. Also circumstantial, it’s a fact that some Silicon Valley tech people met with North Korean ‘dissidents’ in August to partake in a ‘hackathon’ to find ways to disrupt Pyongyang’s official management of information within the country, casting suspicion on their possible role in the globally publicized ‘internet’ shutdown. Should they have been part of it, this could demonstrate an application of one of the Pentagon’s ‘private-private’ partnerships in indirectly applying American virtual force abroad.
Why’s This Global News?
The first thing that many may be wondering is why would the shutoff of North Korea’s ‘internet’ be global news? After all, most Western citizens have already been made aware that the internet, as it’s understood in the West, doesn’t even exist in the country. Instead, it’s more of an ‘intranet’ that connects different nodes within North Korea, having only 1,024 IP address, just about as many ‘web sites’, 1 ISP, and only 1 outside connection to the rest of the world through China. It’s repeatedly been drilled into the Western psyche that North Korea’s ‘internet’ is for ultra-elite political and military officials only, with but a handful of students having sporadic access to it. So why would one of the people that CNN interviewed dramatically say that, “it’s as if North Korea got erased from the global map of the internet” when it was never even on there in the first place?
The simple reason is that the Western media is intent on hyping up anything that deals with the “Hermit Kingdom”, since it has already been browbeaten into their public’s consciousness that it’s a member of the “Axis of Evil” and thus a global ‘bad guy’. It’s all part of a larger information warfare campaign directed against Western citizens to reinforce North Korea’s negative image (which it unwittingly furthers at times) and thereby justify what are seen as ‘legitimate’ responses to it. The goal is not so much countering North Korea as it is containing China, using the first as an excuse to enact measures that indirectly weaken the second, such as the proposed US-Japan-South Korea intelligence sharing plan or the East Asian Missile Defense Shield.
Casting Suspicions On Silicon Valley
Given the timing of North Korea’s intranet shutdown, it’s more than likely that this was an intended cyberattack and not a random back-end maintenance failure. Since experts have assessed that the country’s information-sharing system is extremely underdeveloped relative to other countries’, it’s likely that its vulnerabilities didn’t need Pentagon-level hackers to exploit. This means that non-state actors, perhaps based in the US and with the blind-eye (or hidden hand) of the government, could have been behind the cyberattack.
This wouldn’t be far-fetched either, since the so-called ‘Human Rights Foundation’ hosted a ‘hackathon’ in Silicon Valley in August, where North Korean ‘dissidents’ lobbied hard for some type of cooperation in breaking the government’s management of information within the country. The organization’s website says that “The hackathon is part of HRF’s ongoing Disrupt North Korea project and is another step in building a bridge between the defector and Silicon Valley communities”.
Alex Gladstein, its director for institutional affairs, told CNN days before the intranet was disrupted that “If we can hack North Korea back, it'd be pretty powerful.” He said that the group’s stated objectives are to “[figure] out the best way to get Hollywood movies, Korean dramas and offline Wikipedias, different art, music into North Korea” in order "to disrupt [it] and help end the Kim regime's monopoly of knowledge.” This, however, doesn’t mean that shutting down its server isn’t a step towards accomplishing those goals, and ‘Human Rights Foundation’ and its Silicon Valley pals may have been testing out the system before planning to launch their intended attack, which could have something to do with the wide-scale dissemination of the previously mentioned information items.
The Pentagon’s ‘Private-Private’ Partnerships
If these two ‘private’ entities, the North Korean ‘dissidents’ and Silicon Valley, were indeed affiliated with the cyberattack, then they conveniently furthered the US Cyber Command’s goals in North Korea. The Pentagon, which controls the Command, has a history of engaging with private contractors and other entities, however, any coordination with the two mentioned ‘private’ actors in regards to the North Korean intranet shutdown would demonstrate a new and deeper level of cooperation.
Take for example the fact that the ‘dissidents’ and Silicon Valley aren’t as ‘private’ as one would at first believe. The US government has contact with countless anti-government individuals and groups agitating against states that are ‘hostile’ and/or strategic to US interests (even those it is currently ‘allied’ with, such as the Pennsylvania-based Gulen Movement that’s against Turkey’s government). It’s not a stretch whatsoever to imagine the close level of contact that the US government has with the North Korean ‘dissidents’. As for Silicon Valley, Snowden’s NSA revelations reveal the intimate relationship between it and Washington security structures.
Thus, the ‘private-private’ partnership between the North Korean ‘dissidents’ and Silicon Valley conveniently obscures any direct relationship to the US government, which both of them work with to varying degrees, essentially leaving open the possibility that they could be used as proxy agents of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command against North Korea. With government services of all kind increasingly being outsourced to private actors (e.g. space to SpaceX, intelligence to StratFor, military occupations to Blackwater), it’s reasonable that cyberwarfare would also be as well. This means that the takedown of the North Korean intranet may have been a simple and easy test run to gauge the efficiency of this relationship and identify further opportunities for expanding it in the future, perhaps even against China or Russia one day.
