Extreme censorship and surveillance: A cell phone stolen from North Korea exposed Kim Jong-un's digital control network.

A North Korean phone was secretly smuggled out of the country and analyzed by the BBC in conjunction with South Korean outlet Daily NK . At first glance, it looks like any other cell phone , but inside, it's a sophisticated surveillance tool designed for social control.

The operating system is modified to do things unthinkable in other contexts: it takes screenshots every five minutes and saves them in a hidden folder accessible only to authorities.

It also has a propaganda autocorrect. If a user types the word "oppa," a popular South Korean term that can refer to an older brother or boyfriend, the system automatically replaces it with "comrade" and displays a warning message. A similar thing happens if you type "South Korea," which is replaced with "puppet state."

According to Martyn Williams, a researcher at the Stimson Center specializing in North Korean technology, these types of devices demonstrate how smartphones have become part of the regime's strategy to ideologically shape the population . " North Korea is beginning to take the lead in the information war," he warned in an interview with the BBC.

The objective is clear: to prevent citizens from accessing foreign content, especially from the South, and to record all activity to suppress any dissent. Periodic captures allow officials to review what was done with the phone at any time, without the user having any way of knowing or preventing it.

However, this control is not absolute. A small group of citizens, many of whom have trained at elite universities like Kim Il Sung University, are dedicated to "jailbreaking" these phones. Using USB connections and Windows computers, they manage to modify the software to circumvent the restrictions imposed by the regime. Their goal: access prohibited content such as South Korean series, pop music (K-pop), and unapproved apps.

This kind of clandestine "jailbreaking" is not only an act of disobedience, but also a business. Some of these experts charge for unlocking other people's devices, which forced the regime to enact specific laws against so-called "phone-tapping tools." The mere existence of this legislation demonstrates that, although the government has enormous surveillance powers, it is still concerned about information leaks.

At the same time, the North Korean cellphone industry violates international sanctions. An estimated one-quarter of the population—about six million people—owns mobile phones, which cost between $100 and $400 in a country where the average monthly salary is around $100. The devices include Taiwanese components, Chinese batteries, and customized Android software, all despite UN sanctions prohibiting the export of technology to North Korea.

Manufactured by companies like Gionee and with inputs from firms like MediaTek and Toshiba—which deny any direct ties to the regime—North Korean smartphones serve both to sustain the informal market and to expand the government's surveillance capabilities. They are, in short, tools of control disguised as consumer technology.

Internet access in North Korea is virtually nonexistent for the majority of the population. Only a small party elite, the military, and certain researchers can connect to the global network. For the rest, there is a closed network called Kwangmyong, an intranet system that only allows access to regime-approved sites with strictly controlled propaganda and educational content.

Mobile phones cannot connect to the internet as they do in the rest of the world. They can only make calls within the country and use state-run apps with limited functionality. There is no access to international social media, nor is it possible to send messages abroad. To strengthen control, youth patrols monitor young people's devices to ensure they don't use expressions popular in the south.

This digital isolation is part of the ideological control apparatus maintained by Kim Jong-un 's regime. Fear of South Korean cultural influence—much more modern, open, and technological—partly explains this obsession with monitoring every word written on a cell phone. Even when it involves something as simple as calling someone "boyfriend."

Although North Korea takes state surveillance to the extreme, it is not the only place where cell phones are used as tools to collect user data. In Western democracies, big tech companies have also been accused of spying or monitoring without people's explicit consent.

In 2018, a New York Times investigation revealed that Facebook (now Meta) was sharing sensitive user data with companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Netflix without clear authorization . Apple, meanwhile, was called out in 2020 for automatically recording users' interactions with Siri, even when the assistant wasn't intentionally activated. Google also faced allegations of tracking the location of Android users even when they had Location History disabled.

While in these cases there is no secret police punishing the use of certain words, surveillance occurs for other purposes: ad personalization, consumer profiling, or training artificial intelligence systems. In many cases, the terms of use that enable these practices are written in fine print, and user consent is more formal than real.

The fundamental difference between a dictatorship like North Korea's and liberal democracies lies in the purposes and consequences of surveillance. But the economic model based on massive data extraction—what theorist Shoshana Zuboff calls "surveillance capitalism" —also poses risks to privacy and individual autonomy. In that sense, although the methods differ, the debate over digital control is far from exclusive to authoritarianism.