North Korea's dictator Kim Jong-un has his people constantly spied on. The regime relies on high-tech from China – including in schools and kindergartens.
The number of surveillance cameras appears to have increased significantly over the past five years. The cameras are not intended to ensure more security in schools but rather to monitor the students and, above all, the teachers. The East Asian dictatorship has a huge army of hackers to extort large sums of foreign currency through Bitcoin fraud and other cyber crimes. It uses this to finance its missile program but also luxury goods to keep the upper class in the capital Pyongyang happy. And there is also increasing technology to monitor our own population, says Martyn Williams, a North Korea expert at the US think tank Stimson Center. The study was presented by Williams and his co-author Natalia Slavney in front of the UN Security Council on Tuesday. It was based on a comprehensive study on digital surveillance in the isolated country, including reports from North Korean state television.