Interviews and surveys: South Korean NGO Pscore details North Koreans' limited online use, including a days-long approval process for monitored internet access
Matt Burgess / Wired : Tweets: @martyn_williams Tweets: Martyn Williams / @martyn_williams : A new report from PSCORE provides some fascinating details on how North Koreans access the Internet. Some of this we knew, but the fingerprint scanning every 5 minutes was new to me. Story from @wired: https://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The picture has been building for years: interviews with defectors already showed North Koreans carrying heavily monitored intranet phones back in 2017, and by 2020 researchers measured internet use surging ~300% since 2017 despite US sanctions, with roughly half the traffic flowing through a new connection in Russia. What was missing was the mechanics on the ground.
PSCORE's new report, built from interviews and surveys with North Koreans themselves, fills that gap: access requires a days-long approval process, sessions are monitored, and users are checked by fingerprint scan every five minutes — turning connectivity into an individually attributed, continuously verified privilege.
First-order effects
- North Koreans granted access now leave a near-real-time biometric audit trail — five-minute fingerprint scans mean every session is tied to a specific person, not just a registered device, extending the monitoring model described in earlier defector accounts.
Second-order effects
- The Russia-routed bandwidth documented in 2020 lets the state grow citizen access without depending on US-linked infrastructure, blunting sanctions pressure that would otherwise constrain network expansion — routing geography becomes part of the control system.
- The same state runs unrestricted operations abroad through the Reconnaissance General Bureau, whose hackers were estimated to have stolen $650M+ (per expert and defector interviews) — a two-tier structure where elite units get open internet while citizens get fingerprint-gated walled gardens.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, surveillance intensity scales up with connectivity rather than limiting it: as more North Koreans come online through approved channels, each new user arrives pre-enrolled in a biometric identity system — connectivity growth and population-level tracking advance together.
- For outside observers, defector testimony from NGOs like PSCORE remains one of the only windows into internal controls, since the country's externally visible footprint (outages like the hours-long blackout in 2014, the tiny .kp namespace) reveals little about how citizens actually experience the network.
The trend: North Korea is expanding domestic internet access as an identity-verified, biometrically monitored privilege, with routing through non-Western infrastructure keeping growth insulated from sanctions.