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Rare footage shows North Korean teens being sentenced in front of hundreds of their peers, getting 12 years of hard labour for watching South Korean videos (www.bbc.com)

submitted 10 months ago by 0x815@feddit.de to c/news@beehaw.org

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In 2020, however, Pyongyang enacted a law to make watching or distributing South Korean entertainment punishable by death.

A defector previously told the BBC that he was forced to watch a 22-year-old man shot to death. He said the man was accused of listening to South Korean music and had shared films from the South with his friend.

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[–] petrescatraian@libranet.de 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

@underwire212 imagine that you can tune in on Spotify, YouTube or wherever you want and listen to whatever you want. Imagine that you can legally buy whatever newspaper from the local shop, or go to whatever internet website and legally read whatever news you might find there, whether it is a government website, a conspiracy website, a satirical website or whatever. Legally. That's what democracy makes it special. This is what freedom is all about.

Here in Romania, during communism, if you were caught listening to Radio Free Europe, you would be prosecuted immediately. If you listened to AC/DC, Beatles, The Doors, Pink Floyd, Sex Pistols, Led Zeppelin or other iconic Rock bands back in the day, you would be labeled as a potential risk for the society, possibly extremist, and followed 24/7 by the secret police. You could have a police record with this, all with this nonsense like what were you wearing, where were you going, what you were doing etc., and it would weigh down hard on your career. Your phones could be tapped, your mail could be tampered, especially if you sent it outside. The secret police was so well infiltrated in the society that anyone could report you. Anyone could be a collaborator, and you wouldn't be aware of it. Imagine you throw a party, and you make some random jokes about the regime, or that you all listen to one of these bands. In your group of friends, it was enough for just one of them to be a collaborator. You can imagine that all of you might be fucked, the next day if you're lucky enough, on the spot if not.

There were cases of spouses reporting to the secret police, parents, children, relatives of all sorts. Teachers could be collaborators as well. Priests were known to be collaborators of the secret police, as people would go to confess their sins, and then in turn, they would confess these sins of them to (you guessed it) the secret police. You just couldn't trust anybody.

It's just mind-boggling how the secret police (in Romania even aptly named Securitate meaning Security) could follow you for basically nothing. And probably the teens in the article in the OP were in a similar situation.

@0x815

[–] 0x815@feddit.de 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

@petrescatraian

A friend of mine is from Romania, and I know many who lived in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic). They don't talk often about it, but when they do their stories seem absurd, hard to believe sometimes that these things happened, and each of these stories is a reason to avoid mass surveillance imo.

[–] petrescatraian@libranet.de 6 points 10 months ago

@0x815 oh, wow. Yea, their stories just seem unbelievable. And also the way some people crossed the border to reach the "free world" seems unbelievable. For example, a band managed to cross the border inside Marshall speakers. Others tried to cross the Danube into Yugoslavia (which was more liberal at the time) and got shot by the Romanian border patrols. It was pretty much hell on Earth.

each of these stories is a reason to avoid mass surveillance imo.

Absolutely. Every time I hear about governments snooping inside personal communication I think of how phones were tapped and letters were read for every known or possible dissidents back then. And when an extremist party seems to be on the verge of taking power (and we do have extremist parties as well in Romania) I just think that measures like these would be the first they would implement, along with reducing democratic rights.