USB Sticks, Bribed Guards, and Secret Screenings: How North Koreans Are Watching the World Kim Jong-un Doesn't Want Them to See

On a freezing night in January 2019, in a fourth-floor apartment on the outskirts of Chongjin — North Korea's third-largest city — a group of eight factory workers huddled around a 14-inch television set with the volume turned to almost nothing. The curtains were triple-layered. A child stood watch at the door. On the screen flickered episodes of the South Korean drama Crash Landing on You, loaded onto a smuggled USB drive that had passed through at least four pairs of hands before reaching this room. Had any one of those eight people been reported to the Bowibu — the dreaded State Security Department — they faced years in a political prison camp, or worse. They watched anyway.

North Korean soldiers — Wikimedia Commons

The Contraband Underground

This is not an isolated story. According to a 2023 survey conducted by Seoul-based NGO Database Center for North Korean Human Rights (NKDB), which interviewed 612 defectors who left North Korea between 2018 and 2022, more than 70 percent reported regular access to foreign media before their departure. The figure would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Today, it represents the most sustained act of collective civil disobedience in one of the world's most totalitarian states.

The mechanics of the underground media network are strikingly sophisticated. At its foundation is the USB drive — small, easily concealed, and devastatingly effective at carrying entire television series, Hollywood blockbusters, South Korean pop music, and even foreign news broadcasts. These devices are smuggled primarily across the 1,400-kilometre border with China, carried by jangmadang traders — the black-market merchants who emerged during the catastrophic famine of the 1990s and never disappeared. A single USB stick containing fifty episodes of a South Korean drama can sell for the equivalent of two weeks' salary in Pyongyang, and significantly more in remote provincial cities like Hyesan or Musan.

Park Ji-hyun, who defected via China in March 2021 and now lives in Seoul, described the distribution chain with precision when interviewed by North Korea Untold in October 2023. "There were people we called 'USB merchants,'" she said. "They were separate from the ones selling rice or medicine. They had contacts near the border, usually someone with a relative in Yanbian, the Korean-Chinese region just across the Tumen River. The content would come in, be copied, renamed with innocent-looking file names in case of inspection, and then redistributed. Everyone along the chain took a cut."

The Notel Revolution and the Technology of Defiance

The hardware enabling this underground culture is as remarkable as the network distributing it. The so-called notel — a portable, battery-powered media player roughly the size of a paperback book — became the device of choice for illicit media consumption across North Korea through the 2010s. Unlike state-issued televisions, which are fixed to receive only domestic broadcasts, notels can play files from USB sticks and SD cards. They are cheap, durable, and — crucially — easy to hide. Korean-language versions manufactured in China flooded into the country through the same border channels used for other contraband goods.

Arch of Triumph, Pyongyang — Wikimedia Commons

The regime has not been passive. Kim Jong-un, acutely aware of how foreign media accelerated the collapse of regimes across Eastern Europe and the Arab world, has escalated enforcement with dramatic ferocity since coming to power in December 2011. In April 2020, Pyongyang enacted the Reactionary Thought and Culture Rejection Law, which for the first time imposed the death penalty for distributing South Korean films or music in large quantities. A follow-up law passed in December 2021 extended potential execution to individuals caught watching such content. State media announced the public execution of two teenagers in Wonsan in 2022, allegedly for sharing South Korean dramas, according to testimony gathered by human rights group Korea Future and corroborated by two separate defector accounts obtained by this publication.

Despite this, enforcement remains deeply inconsistent — and deliberately so, according to defectors who worked within the system. Lee Sung-chul, a former low-ranking official in North Hamgyong Province's People's Safety Ministry who defected to South Korea in 2020, told North Korea Untold that bribery has hollowed out the surveillance apparatus from within. "The inspectors knew exactly what was happening," he said. "They would come to do a check, and the family would offer money — sometimes cigarettes or rice wine, sometimes Chinese yuan. The inspector would leave. Nobody wanted to destroy their own neighbourhood relationships. We all watched the dramas ourselves."

Pyongyang's Privileged Watchers

It would be a mistake to assume this phenomenon is limited to the poor and provincial. Multiple sources with direct knowledge of elite society in Pyongyang confirm that foreign media consumption extends deep into the capital's privileged class — including, according to one account, the families of mid-level Korean Workers' Party officials in the Moranbong and Ryugyong districts. A woman identified only as "Ms. Yoon" — a former university lecturer in Pyongyang who defected in 2022 — described watching Netflix content downloaded onto a Chinese-made tablet smuggled into the country by a diplomat's household staff. "The irony," she told this reporter in Seoul in September 2023, "is that the people who enforced the laws often had the best access. They had money, and money bought safety."

The ideological impact of this exposure is difficult to quantify but impossible to dismiss. Research published in 2022 by Sokeel Park of Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), drawing on interviews with 200 recent defectors, found that access to foreign media was cited as the single most important factor in eroding belief in the Kim regime's official narrative among those surveyed. Defectors consistently describe a moment of cognitive rupture — seeing South Korean supermarkets stacked with goods, or watching ordinary Chinese citizens argue openly with police — that permanently altered their understanding of what their government had told them about the outside world.

Flash Drives Against a Dictatorship

In response, a coalition of South Korea-based activist groups has worked to accelerate and systematize the flow of information into the North. Fighters For a Free North Korea, led by defector Park Sang-hak, has launched balloons carrying USB sticks and leaflets across the border since the mid-2000s. Human Rights Foundation's Flash Drives for Freedom campaign has collected and dispatched hundreds of thousands of drives loaded with encyclopedias, films, and news content. In March 2023, the group announced it had distributed over 100,000 drives since the campaign's founding in 2016.

The South Korean government, under pressure from Pyongyang which has described balloon launches as acts of war, passed legislation in 2020 banning activist balloon launches — legislation that was subsequently struck down as unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court in September 2023. The ruling was a quiet but significant victory for those who argue that information, flowing freely across one of the world's most guarded borders one USB stick at a time, may ultimately accomplish what sanctions and diplomacy have not.

Back in Chongjin, the group of eight factory workers finished their episode and powered down the notel. The child at the door gave the all-clear. The USB drive was passed to a neighbour for the following night. The curtains stayed drawn. And somewhere in the dark, the world Kim Jong-un had tried to keep out flickered on.