PYONGYANG, NORTH KOREA—It’s late afternoon at the e-library in North Korea’s Kim Il Sung University, where row after row of smartly dressed students sit quietly, their faces bathed in the glow of computer displays as they surf the Internet.
On the surface, it’s a familiar-seeming scene, which is why officials are offering it up for a look.
North Korea is off the charts regarding Internet freedoms. There essentially aren’t any. But the country is increasingly online. Though it deliberately and meticulously keeps its people isolated and in the dark about the outside world, North Korea knows it must enter the information age to survive in the global economy.
Hence, the creation of a self-contained, tightly controlled Intranet called Kwangmyong, or “Bright.” It is North Korea’s authoritarian answer to the freewheeling web.
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At Kim Il Sung University, the students are actually studying, not wasting time on Facebook, Reddit or BuzzFeed. In fact, the sites they surf most likely aren’t even on the Internet, but on Bright.
Chats and email? Monitored.
Content? Restricted to the point that the use of Bright hardly even needs to be watched by officials.
How about the OS? It’s “Red Star,” now available in version 3.0, which looks a lot like the Microsoft operating system, but is used only in North Korea.
Red Star has audio and video players, and even a game — Korean chess. There’s a Firefox-style search engine called “Our Country,” which helps users navigate around an estimated 1,000 to 5,500 websites, mostly for universities, government offices, libraries and state-run corporations. Most North Koreans have no access to the Internet at all.
Copies of Red Star have found their way outside of the North and been studied abroad. But North Korea is so secretive about Bright, which it launched more than a decade ago, that it is off-limits to even the foreign technical advisers it brings in. It can be accessed only in the North and is meant exclusively for domestic use.
“I haven’t had a time when I’ve been allowed to use the Intranet — since the point is that it is not open to foreigners,” said Will Scott, a computer sciences instructor at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology.
Through daily interactions with North Korean students, however, Scott has been able to glean a general outline of Bright.
“The Intranet provides a connection between industry, universities and the government. It seems to be focused on information propagation, rather than commerce, entertainment or communication,” he said.
“Given the limited resources in the country, where computers are likely not to be owned by individuals, and are a valuable resource, this has a striking resemblance to the uses first made of the Internet in the U.S. when it was introduced in the ’80s.”
Technologically, he said, North Korea’s Intranet is a mini-Internet, with a combination of joint venture companies and vaguely government-affiliated labs that collectively maintain the core infrastructure that exists on the global Web.
Graduate students and North Korean professors at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology are allowed to access the real Internet from a dedicated computer lab, similar to the e-library at Kim Il Sung University. They receive the same speed and unfiltered access that foreign instructors do, although everyone’s access is monitored.
Scott said the graduate students don’t use the Internet nearly as much as Americans would, treating it more like the way Western students might visit a library to find books.
Students’ emails must be reviewed and approved by one of the vice-presidents of the university before they can be sent, which, Scott said, means they rarely use email.
“There is some resistance to providing Internet access to students because it requires some level of political capital, and is generally discouraged by higher-up ministries as not worth the potential danger,” he said. “I think you would find a surprising lack of technical surveillance on the Intranet, due largely to the high level of self-censorship built into the collective psyche in the country.”
Because of the general population’s lack of experience with the Internet — and the perception that it is dangerous, forbidden territory — there is no grassroots clamour in North Korea for change.
“I use the Internet often to look for English reference books,” said Ri Jong Hyok, a 21-year-old math student. “But actually the national Intranet has most of the books that I need so I don’t need to use it so much.”
