Contraband in the Dark: How North Koreans Risk Everything to Watch Foreign Films and Tune Into Banned Broadcasts
On a freezing January night in 2019, in the industrial city of Chongjin, a 34-year-old factory worker known to defectors' networks only as "Mr. Baek" huddled beneath two blankets in his apartment, earphones pressed tightly against his skull, listening to a South Korean radio drama crackling through a modified shortwave receiver. Forty meters away, a uniformed agent of the Bowibu — North Korea's feared State Security Department — conducted routine nighttime surveillance rounds. Baek did not move until dawn. He had been doing this for six years. He is now in Seoul, and he is talking.
The Black Market of Forbidden Images
North Korea Untold has spent eight months interviewing seventeen defectors who fled between 2018 and 2024, cross-referencing their accounts with reports from Seoul-based NGO Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB) and intelligence assessments reviewed by this outlet. The picture that emerges is of a sprawling, adaptive, and extraordinarily dangerous underground media economy operating beneath the nose of one of the most surveillance-saturated states on earth.
At the center of this economy is a deceptively ordinary piece of hardware: the notel. A portable, battery-powered media player roughly the size of a paperback novel, the notel accepts USB drives and SD cards loaded with video files. First smuggled into North Korea through the Chinese border town of Dandong in the mid-2000s, the device became the primary vehicle through which South Korean dramas, Chinese soap operas, Hollywood action films, and K-pop music videos began flooding the hermit kingdom. By 2015, according to a survey conducted by InterMedia and funded by the US Agency for Global Media, roughly 27 percent of North Koreans outside Pyongyang had accessed foreign media in the previous six months. Security analysts believe that figure has risen sharply since.
"Everyone in my apartment block in Hamhung had a notel," said Park Jiyeon, 29, who defected via the Tumen River crossing in March 2022 and now lives in Incheon, South Korea. "We watched 'Crash Landing on You' in a group of five women. We posted a guard at the door. If anyone knocked, we covered everything with a blanket and pretended to be sewing." The South Korean romantic drama, featuring a wealthy Seoul heiress who accidentally paraglides into North Korean territory, has been cited by multiple defectors as among the most widely circulated contraband titles inside the country — an irony not lost on anyone familiar with its plot.
The Middlemen: Donju, USB Brokers, and the Shadow Supply Chain
The logistics of distributing forbidden content require a network as sophisticated as any commercial media operation. At the top sit the donju — North Korea's emergent merchant class, individuals who accumulated capital through the chaotic post-famine marketization of the 1990s and now operate semi-legitimately across multiple sectors. Several defectors described a specific tier of donju who specialize in information contraband, sourcing content from Chinese partners across the border and wholesaling it to local distributors in exchange for North Korean won, Chinese yuan, or increasingly, favors within the party bureaucracy.
"There was a man in Hyesan we called 'Uncle Video,'" recounted Choi Sungmin, 41, a former mid-level Rodong party official who defected in October 2023 and spoke to this outlet in a Seoul café in February 2024. "He had a contact in Yanji who sent him hard drives on trucks carrying coal. The drivers were paid. The border guards were paid. Everything was paid." Choi estimates that Uncle Video — whose real name he declined to provide for safety reasons — cleared the equivalent of $3,000 USD per month in a country where the average state salary hovers below $5. "He bribed the local Bowibu chief directly. That was the business model."
Below the wholesalers operate micro-distributors: individuals who purchase a USB drive of content for the equivalent of one to three US dollars and rent individual episodes to neighbors for a fraction of that cost. A full season of a popular South Korean drama might circulate through an entire apartment block within a week before the drive is wiped and refilled. The content itself degrades through repeated copying — defectors frequently describe watching pixelated, subtitle-heavy files — but demand has never faltered.
Kim Jong-un's Crackdown: The Reactionary Thought Act of 2020
The regime has not remained passive. In December 2020, the Supreme People's Assembly passed the Law on the Rejection of Reactionary Thought and Culture — referred to internally as the "anti-hallyu" law, targeting the Korean Wave of South Korean cultural exports. The legislation, first reported by Radio Free Asia and subsequently analyzed by the Sejong Institute in Seoul, dramatically escalated penalties for media offenses. Individuals caught distributing South Korean content now face sentences of up to fifteen years in a labor camp. Those caught merely watching face five years. In the most extreme cases documented by NKDB, public executions have been carried out as deterrent spectacles.
In September 2021, according to testimony gathered by human rights organization Korean Future and shared with this outlet, a 22-year-old student in Pyongsong city, South Pyongan Province, was publicly executed by firing squad after being found in possession of a USB drive containing seventeen South Korean films. Two classmates who had watched the films with him received sentences of five years' hard labor at a political prison camp. A teacher at their school who failed to report suspicious behavior was dismissed and sent for "re-education."
Kim Jong-un has framed this crackdown in explicitly existential terms. In an April 2021 speech before the Korean Workers' Party Central Committee, he warned that "anti-socialist and non-socialist practices" spread through foreign media represented a threat equivalent to military attack, warning that the nation's youth were being "infected" by capitalist ideology. State media subsequently launched a campaign entitled "Let Us Thoroughly Reject Alien Ideology," featuring propaganda posters depicting USB drives encircled by crossed-out red lines.
Radio in the Dark: The Shortwave Resistance
Beyond video content, a quieter but equally determined information current flows through the airwaves. Organizations including Radio Free Asia's Korean Service, Voice of America Korean, and Seoul-based outlets Echo of Hope (KBS World Radio) and Open Radio for North Korea broadcast daily programming specifically targeting North Korean audiences. Reception requires either a factory-set shortwave radio — legally fixed to state frequencies — or a modified set with a manually tunable dial, itself a criminal offense.
"My father modified three radios using parts from broken televisions," said Lee Hyeonsuk, 37, a nurse from Wonsan who defected in July 2020 and now volunteers with the NGO Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights in Seoul. "He taught me how to find the frequencies. We listened every night after 11 p.m. We heard about the outside world that way for years before I left." Lee describes learning about South Korea's economic prosperity, the existence of international sanctions on Pyongyang, and the 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry report on North Korean human rights abuses entirely through shortwave radio — information that, she says, fundamentally reframed her understanding of the state she lived in.
The Seoul-based NGO Fighters for a Free North Korea has since 2003 supplemented radio broadcasts with balloon launches along the demilitarized zone, sending USB drives, SD cards, and dollar bills attached to hydrogen-filled balloons across the border. The practice has drawn furious official condemnation from Pyongyang and periodic diplomatic protests to Seoul. In June 2020, North Korea dramatically demolished the Inter-Korean Liaison Office in Kaesong — a structure valued at approximately $16 million — partly in retaliation for what state media described as "human scum" conducting the launches. The balloons continue.
The Transformation That Cannot Be Unseen
What does all of this exposure actually do? Defector researchers, psychologists working with resettled North Koreans in Seoul, and analysts at the Korea Institute for National Unification converge on a consistent finding: foreign media consumption fundamentally destabilizes the ideological framework the regime depends upon for its survival. Seeing ordinary South Koreans living in clean apartments, driving cars, and speaking freely — even through the distorted lens of a television drama — creates what researchers call "cognitive dissonance" that state propaganda increasingly struggles to resolve.
"After I watched my first South Korean drama, I could not look at a portrait of Kim Jong-un the same way," Choi Sungmin told this outlet quietly, staring at his coffee cup. "Something broke inside me. Not all at once. Slowly. Like a crack in ice." He paused. "Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. That is what they are most afraid of."
The regime's terror is rational. Across seven decades, the Kim family has maintained control through the most comprehensive information monopoly in modern history. The notel, the USB drive, the crackly shortwave signal — each represents a microscopic breach in that monopoly. Multiply those breaches by hundreds of thousands of acts of daily defiance, and the architecture of total control begins, imperceptibly but irreversibly, to fracture. Kim Jong-un knows this. So does Mr. Baek, safe now in Seoul, remembering those freezing nights in Chongjin with his earphones and his blankets and his borrowed window onto another world.
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