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In the past week, North Korea has allowed some Western journalists into the country to report on its military parade, and government officials have given a handful of rare interviews to international media outlets including The Associated Press, BBC, and Al-Jazeera as tensions escalated with the United States.

But this brief flurry of engagement should not be misinterpreted: North Korea remains one of the most heavily censored countries in the world. Supreme leader Kim Jong Un retains an absolute grip on the flow of public information. All media is state-owned, with the official Central Korean News Agency serving as a government mouthpiece, and the regime metes out harsh punishments for anyone accused of accessing uncensored information or sharing news from countries that it considers its enemies. Its own journalists remain strident propagandists, and advances in technology that could open up channels to independent news are fought with ever-stricter censorship and surveillance measures.

The AP maintains a permanent presence in the country, with a small team of international correspondents and photographers, and a few North Koreans who work primarily as fixers. Eric Talmadge, who has led the bureau since 2013, likens working in Pyongyang to being embedded with the military. Obviously the context is quite different, he said. But in practical and psychological terms, I find it very similar to my experiences embedded in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The freedoms granted to the AP reporters are denied to would-be journalists from inside the country, said Kang Cheol Hwan, president of the North Korea Strategy Center. Journalism in North Korea is run by the state, Kang said.

Jean H. Lee, a former AP reporter who opened its Pyongyang bureau and is now a global fellow at the Washington, D.C.based Wilson Center, said North Korean citizens rarely have access to a daily newspaper, and lack adequate electricity to watch television at home. Instead, most read copies of papers posted on news boards across the city or watch TV in public areas such as Pyongyangs main train station, said Lee, who also teaches a class on North Korean media studies at Yonsei University in South Korea.

Kang said the party elite has access to a secretive newspaper, Chango Sinmun (Reference Newspaper), with stories from Voice of America, Russias TASS agency, Chinas state-run Xinhua, and NHK in Japan. The average citizen who wants uncensored news either illegally tunes into foreign radio or relies on word of mouth, Kang said.

Advances in communications technology are mitigated by official steps to censor. Lee said the regimes elite can access news via the countrys intranet. But access to the internet is highly restricted, with only North Koreans who have a specific task, such as monitoring coverage, granted permission, she said.

In keeping with Kims efforts to appear that he is at the forefront of technology, North Korea has developed its own smartphones, tablets, and software, including Red Star 3.0, an operating system that mimics iOS, Kang said. Ultimately, these products were carefully designed to control and monitor information, he said. Red Star 3.0 has surveillance capabilities, and the interface of the intranet, Kwangmyong, is set up to give the impression that the user has full internet access. An analysis of Red Stars capabilities by the tech-focused outlet Fast Company found that its approximately 5,000 web pages mostly contain propaganda. Kang added that the countrys Arirang smartphone looks, feels and uses like a Samsung . . . but lacks the very component that makes a smartphone a smartphone such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and an internet browser.

When researchers from the German security company ERNW studied Red Star 3.0, they found it contained sophisticated surveillance properties, Reuters reported. This capability is particularly concerning since citizens trade flash drives to access news. The North Korean Strategy Center is among the groups distributing flash drives in an effort to combat censorship. Kang said the content typically includes PDFs of South Korean newspapers, Wikipedia pages translated into the North Korean dialect, guides on how to run businesses, radio programs, and TV shows and films, including some about the foundations of democracy such as Lincoln.

The use of cell phones has been rising in North Korea thanks to a black market and porous border with China, but the general population is barred from making and receiving international calls, Lee said. The Daily NK reported in March 2014 that North Korea had added new clauses to Article 60 of the penal codeattempts to overthrow the statewhich include a minimum penalty of five years of re-education in a prison camp and a maximum penalty of death for communicating with the outside world, including through cell phone contact. Watching South Korean media or listening to foreign radio can result in 10 years of re-education.

Even with the availability of censorship work-arounds, Kang said, Once North Koreans escape and resettle, its quite difficult for them to come to terms with the influx of information available to them.

Jessica Jerreat is senior editor at the Committee to Protect Journalists. She previously edited news for the broadsheet press in the U.K., including for the foreign desk of The Times of London and at The Telegraph. She has a masters degree in war, propaganda, and society from the University of Kent at Canterbury.

This article is adapted from CPJs publication Attacks on the Press: The New Face of Censorship, which will be released on April 25.

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North Korean censorship | The Huffington Post - Huffington Post

The courts have failed. The culture is failing. Unless Congress acts, we may lose not only free speech on college campuses, but free speech in America. In the memorable phrase of my friend, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education president Greg Lukianoff, college students are unlearning liberty, carrying the virus of censorship and oppression beyond the university and into the nation.

The courts are failing not because the underlying legal doctrines are flawed but because the remedies for censorship are completely inadequate. As of right now, there is a far greater financial incentive for a university to keep its sidewalks shoveled in the winter than to protect one of our nations founding liberties. If a student slips and breaks an arm, they stand to win much larger damages in court than a professor denied a promotion because of his speech or a student group thrown off campus merely because its Christian.

As it is, students and professors can launch exhausting legal cases, fight the university tooth-and-nail through years of depositions, motions, trials, and appeals, and at the end of the ordeal win an injunction and attorneys fees. In one memorable case, I fought a university for more than seven years and won a week-long jury trial, only for my client to be awarded a total (including attorneys fees) of far, far less than $1 million. Universities are some of the richest institutions in American life. These dollar amounts are utterly meaningless to their bottom lines.

Its worth achieving individual justice in individual cases, but even the strongest precedent ends up providing only a minimal deterrent effect, especially when compared to the overwhelming cultural pressure for more censorship, more thought control, and less tolerance of even the most reasonable dissenting voices on campus.

The New York Times today published an op-ed that provided a public window into the kinds of free-speech arguments that dominate campus discourse. The piece, by Ulrich Baer, a vice provost at New York University, argues that restricting speech that invalidate[s] the humanity of some people is a public good.

Its necessary to translate Left-speak to understand what it means to invalidate the humanity of some people. In real terms, it doesnt mean belonging to the KKK, it means nothing more than merely disagreeing with racial and sexual identity politics. So, if youre Heather Mac Donald and believe that radical anti-police rhetoric and actions from Black Lives Matters is actually costing black lives, then youre (in the words of activists at Claremont Pomona college) questioning the right of Black people to exist. If youre Charles Murray, and youve come to campus to discuss the class divisions that are causing America to come apart, a mob can and will shut you down.

Heres Baer, with words that should chill every American heart:

The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community. Free-speech protections not only but especially in universities, which aim to educate students in how to belong to various communities should not mean that someones humanity, or their right to participate in political speech as political agents, can be freely attacked, demeaned or questioned.

In other words, campus radicals will let you speak only when they deem your speech is worthy. And if they dont? Then, the mob isnt a mob, its a collection of idealists keeping watch over the soul of our republic.

Enough. We cannot count on campus administrators to protect free speech. Theyre so terrified of the radicals that theyre more prone to apologize for free speech, arguably our nations most essential liberty, than they are to defend it. Witness Berkeley bowing before the mob time and again. Witness the groveling apology from the chairman of Middleburys political-science department to the campus community. A mob attacked and wounded a member of the faculty, and this man actually said that his decision to offer a symbolic department co-sponsorship of the event at which that attack occurred contributed to a feeling of voicelessness that many allegedly experience on campus.

Their voices seemed plenty loud when they violently shut down Murrays speech.

If we cant count on courts or colleges to protect free speech, then its time for Congress to step up. Theres a remarkably simple solution to the problem of free speech, at least on public university campuses: Adjust the incentives. Make it costlier to censor than to protect the Constitution.

All it would take is a law holding that if a court of final jurisdiction finds that a public university has violated the constitutional rights of a student or faculty member, then the university will pay liquidated damages to the plaintiff in the amount of no less than $5 million. It will also forfeit 25 percent of its federal funding in that current fiscal year. If a university is a repeat offender at any point in the five years following, it will forfeit 100 percent of its federal funding in that fiscal year.

Heres what will happen: Universities will respond with all the energy and fury of a person experiencing an electric shock. The rule of law will be restored, and our essential liberties will be protected anew.

Does all this sound draconian? Its not. The primary task of any public official in the United States is to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. It doesnt matter how well you perform your secondary role, whether its governing a state, distributing drivers licenses, or even teaching biology if you fail in the primary task of preserving our constitutional republic, you have no business calling yourself a public servant.

Furthermore, such a strong political statement in favor of free speech will have a potent cultural effect. Private universities that choose to maintain totalitarian enclaves will face powerful market pressures from more-free and less-expensive public universities, and the contrast between liberty and oppression will be made clear for all to see. (Its worth noting, too, that private universities are not immune from civil law. Mob violence is just as unlawful on private property as it is on a public campus, and law enforcement cannot and must not stand aside when radicals riot.)

At public universities, campus censors have the freedom to speak, but they do not have the freedom to oppress. Constitutional protections are meaningless if the law cant provide an adequate remedy for their infringement. Its time to change the calculus. Its time to crush campus censorship.

David French is a seniorwriter for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney.

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It's Time to Crush Campus Censorship - National Review