A former officer in South Korea’s military reserve has been arrested on charges of passing documents to a North Korea agent, according to South Korean media reports. The individual, who was only identified as a 37-year old with the family name of “Jeon,” was arrested under the National Security Law for allegedly passing information to North Korea…

 

South Korea’s top court has upheld the acquittal of a free-speech activist for retweeting North Korean tweets, according to several local media reports. Park Jung-geun, a Seoul-based photographer, was arrested under the country’s anti-communist National Security Law for a series of tweets posted in late 2010 and early 2011. They included retweets from Uriminzokkiri, a China-based website with…

 

A recently-launched iPhone app that delivers articles from the Korean Central News Agency to iPhones and iPads has been banned in South Korea. The app, iJuche, was developed and published in late 2013 and was highlighted on NorthKoreaTech earlier this week. That publicity was apparently enough to get it blocked. “I just got a call…

 

Despite living in one of the most wired societies in the world, South Korean Internet users enjoy a “partly free” Internet due to government censorship of content, according to the results of a global survey on Internet freedom. Censorship of content, which includes many websites that carry North Korean content, has shot up in recent…

 

File this one under business as usual. North Korea was again ranked second-to-last in Reporters Without Borders’ annual press freedom index while South Korea continued to drop down the ranking. The Paris-based press censorship watchdog ranked North Korea as 178th in its survey, just one rank above Eritrea. “Kim Jong-un’s arrival at the head of…

 

 

 

North Korea has again been ranked the second-worst country in the world for press freedom by Reporters Without Borders. The Paris-based organization has consistently ranked the DPRK at the bottom of the world in terms of press freedom for the last decade. “It is no surprise that the same trio of countries, Eritrea, Turkmenistan and North Korea, absolute dictatorships that…

 

South Korea’s attempts to keep North Korean material from the eyes and ears of its citizens is coming under the global media spotlight as the country launches a new sweep of domestic web sites and discussion forums. Led by U.S. National Public Radio, the country’s arrests of citizens for the seemingly benign posting of North…

 

The live stream of North Korea’s KCTV, reported here last week, is currently down. Seoul-based Unification Broadcasting apparently took it offline after a flood of traffic prompted by a South Korean media report on the service. That report was triggered by the posting here. The stream has apparently been available for sometime but the address…