Through its Disrupt North Korea project, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) is working with North Korean defectors and refugees to help end the monopoly of information the Kim dictatorship holds over 25 million citizens. Read more about our efforts at Motherboard, The Atlantic, Wired, Ars Technica, and the Mercury News. As documented by North Koreans, this influx of truth and culture is making change in the world’s most repressive regime inevitable.
Informed by ongoing conversations with Bay Area technology companies, engineers, hackers, and product developers, HRF is organizing a Hackathon for North Korea in San Francisco on August 2-3. Our goal is to help spark better ideas for getting information into the world's most closed and isolated society. Just as a recent hackathon focused on getting information out of Cuba, we are looking to get information inside North Korea. It is not an easy task, as there are many technical and political challenges and roadblocks, but it is definitely possible. HRF has contact with several defector-led groups that regularly send information into North Korea using black market trade routes, radio waves, and packages dropped from helium-nitrogen balloons. When HRF brought two defectors to San Francisco this past February, we found that their methods could be augmented, improved, and even revolutionized through dialogue with the tech community. It is this community that can offer new perspectives to approaching the current challenges. Hack North Korea will be held in downtown San Francisco, where HRF will provide a space from Saturday morning, August 2, until Sunday morning, August 3, for individuals and teams to create various innovative proposals for getting information into North Korea. Competitors will address a range of questions: What storage mediums should be used to get information inside the dictatorship? Where would one obtain the most inexpensive technology? How would information best be coded and loaded onto devices? Could stealth, auto-play, or one-click functionality be incorporated? What markets and cities inside North Korea would the devices be sent to? How would this be physically accomplished? Is the target audience the few citizens with computers, or the masses who typically just have access to DVD players? How can we maximize the copying and sharing of information once it gets into the country? How could this be done in a way that puts North Koreans at the lowest risk for government punishment? With a new network of thinkers, this kind of brainstorming can vastly improve current educational techniques. HRF will invite several North Korean defectors to attend and serve as expert advisors and judges throughout the weekend. HRF’s goal is to translate some of the winning ideas into the work of defector-led organizations in the months following the hackathon. We already have half a dozen committed teams and a small advisory group assembled. If you are interested in participating in the event, attending as an observer, or contributing with in-kind or financial sponsorship, please contact Alex Gladstein at [email protected]. -- Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations of list guidelines will get you moderated: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech. Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at [email protected].
