We often wonder what surveillance tactics our digital overlords and their friends in law enforcement might have in store for us one day — if they get their way.
Speaking broadly, the surveillance tactics of nosy democracies flow downstream from authoritarian states. Sure, the United States or the United Kingdom, say, don’t have something like China’s social credit system, yet, and something exactly like it would be met with immediate resistance by the people of either country.
And yet, when the U.K. rounded up people who posted stuff on social media in the wake of the Southport stabbings and unrest last year, there was a shrug on both sides of the Atlantic even though it should have been a major story — especially when you consider these were the tactics that the CCP was using against its own people 20 years ago.
It’s in that unsettling spirit that we bring you what a North Korean smartphone looks like — and can do to a user’s un-comradely activities if they decide to act in a way that Kim Jong Un would find distasteful.
According to a report in Korea JoongAng Daily from earlier this month, a phone smuggled out of North Korea shows advanced surveillance capabilities — including the ability to warn you if you were using slang usually found in South Korean lingo and TV shows.
“If [K-drama] ‘Crash Landing on You’ (2019-20) had played out on a North Korean smartphone, Yoon Se-ri wouldn’t be calling Ri Jeong-hyeok jagiya, an affectionate word used to call romantic partners. Instead, she’d get a warning,” the outlet reported.
“North Korea is blocking people from using South Korean-style slang and terms of endearment, using surveillance-loaded smartphones that automatically censor popular phrases from K-dramas and everyday South Korean speech,” it noted.
The results are quite terrifying:
For example, oppa is changed to dongji, meaning “comrade,” and a warning message explains that the term is only appropriate for referring to an older brother. When users enter “South Korea,” the device automatically replaces it with “puppet state.”
Is this what technocrats want for the American people?
The phone also takes automatic screenshots every five minutes without the user’s knowledge. Only authorities can access the captured images, leaving the phone’s owner unaware of the monitoring.
The phone was initially smuggled out of North Korea last year by the BBC, which reported on it in late May — and it looks just like any other Android phone except for the waving North Korean flag as wallpaper, which you usually don’t see in the background of many phones at American malls.
The report revealed that the phone was part of an effort to tamp down on the smuggling of South Korean-produced K-dramas and pop culture into the country.
In fact, the BBC reported, the country now has “youth crackdown squads,” as well as these phones, which will correct you if you type in a blocked word.
Needless to say, the phones don’t have access to the internet — North Korea is one of the few nations that doesn’t have access to the world-wide web, although it has its own constellation of domestic websites (that can, apparently, be very easily taken offline) — but Big Brother does have access to you through the device.
NEW: The BBC has obtained a phone that was smuggled out of North Korea that edits words North Koreans aren’t supposed to use.
Wild.
North Korea has now adopted smartphones to indoctrinate its citizens.
If a user tries typing a blocked word, the phone will edit it to a word… pic.twitter.com/InvnIBZPsf
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) May 31, 2025
“Smartphones are now part and parcel of the way North Korea tries to indoctrinate people,” said Martyn Williams of the Washington, D.C.-based Stimson Center who’s an expert in Pyongyang’s tech and information infrastructure, according to the New York Post.
What’s worse, he said, North Korea is “starting to gain the upper hand.”
“The reason for this control is that so much of the mythology around the Kim family is made up. A lot of what they tell people is lies,” Williams explained.
Yes, well, you don’t say. The point is that the United States, South Korea, and their allies have tried to both beam radio and TV broadcasts into the country, in addition to USB sticks and micro-SD cards filled with the K-dramas smuggled into the country with produce.
A dissident named Kang Gyuri, 24 years old, said these shows were responsible for her leaving North Korea by boat in 2023 for South Korea.
“I felt so suffocated, and I suddenly had an urge to leave,” she said.
“I used to think it was normal that the state restricted us so much. I thought other countries lived with this control. But then I realized it was only in North Korea.”
In North Korea, this sort of thing is taken for granted, so much is it a part of everyday life. In the rest of the world, meanwhile, such steps would need to be implemented with more deftness — but the phone is proof, in case you needed it, that such control is possible.
Say lawmakers decide that they want to make sure you’re working out enough. Do you perhaps get nudges through your phone to exercise more? Maybe encourage — not force, naturally; lawmakers would never do that — but just really politely but firmly encourage Apple and Google to put them in there, for our health’s sake.
Is it so farfetched? Remember, when hard totalitarianisms manage to achieve some censorship or surveillance breakthrough in the tech sphere, it isn’t a question of if but when soft paternalisms attempt to integrate their methods in something less pernicious. This isn’t tinfoil-hat thinking, nor is it rocket science; it’s just a matter of time and scope.
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