Serious question, if the United States decided to unilaterally cut North Korea off from the Internet, how hard would that be to do? Could we just knock out a few cables?
North Korea pretty much only uses the Internet for scams Or to make money in violation of sanctions. They certainly don’t allow their citizens to use it for anything else, and they don’t allow their citizens to leave the country because they would never come back.
Even if it were only temporary, suddenly cutting off the Internet to the country would expose all of those remote workers to the people who employ them and don’t realize they are employing North Koreans when they all disappear at once.
Is this just not logistically feasible? or are we just too afraid it would be unpalatable to our allies? I can’t be the first person who has thought of this.
Out of interest I looked up who controls the DNS root servers:
Europe (2): RIPE and Netnod AB. RIPE is Europe’s RIR, run as a conference by European ISPs. Netnod is a Swedish ISP.
Asia (1): Project WIDE, part of the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
US (9): Verisign, Cogent, NASA, US Department of Defense, US Army, the University of Maryland, ISC (as in the Bind9 people), ICANN itself, and the University of Southern California.
The last two seem to have some overlap and there is probably a lot of overlap between all of these organisations.
Verisign runs two root servers which is why the list has twelve entries but the root servers run from A to M.
If you think losing DNS root servers means that NK would have to use smoke signals then I think you don't understand how the internet works frankly. If you blocked your own computers access to the DNS root servers right now you probably wouldn't even notice the difference
+1, One cab likely also presume that especially DNS at the root level is already handled locally for NK. They reportedly have their own intranet so presumably they also have common services like DNS hosted their.
Of course but the contention is that Internet infrastructure, of which DNS is a fairly indicative example, is controlled by US entities.
It’s not, but it mostly is, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of other centralised components — hardware, cables, numbering, protocols — were similarly organized.
It would be very easy to run without DNS. Just have someone bring a decent sized chunk of the world's DNS entries into the country in a diplomatic pouch every month.
The US owns the world, the same way any big empire does. Exersice of soft power when it works, and violently explosive power when it doesn't. Power flows from the barrel of a gun, not from who owns some DNS servers.
When was the last time they used that "explosive power" to good effect? They got humiliated in Afghanistan and Russia isn't even scared to act out any more. The only people who think America still rules the world is it's delusional populace.
America is unquestionably the foremost cultural, financial
, and military power on earth. The fact that your best example is a war that america lost voluntarily because they were unwilling to engage in scorched earth tactics is pretty telling. Afghanistan was a quagmire with no real starting goal, no real end condition, and no motivation to fight. If america decided to drop a few platoons into the country and massacre civilians with mechanized infantry and close air support it would have been over in a month, but to what end? It would make them barely better than the Russians who tried to actually use those tactics and didn't have the resources to pull it off.
Both conflicts were about punishment and troop training, and they achieved that. If they wanted to they could have razed every square km with conventional weapons alone.
Americans keep saying this and it makes me laugh every time, because you didn't learn anything from Vietnam.
Just like in Vietnam, the stated goal was to replace the government - in this case, to remove the Taliban - that's why you created the Afghan National Army and their flimsy democracy. All told, the US has spent $8 trillion and several thousand young men on the GWOT. Once the US pulled out, the Taliban strolled back into Kabul.
$8 trillion will reduce the US debt by 25%, or pay off all student debt, or build 80 million $100k homes. Wasted, and the only thing you have to show for it is nothing tangible, except more vibrant terror groups, and immigrants flooding Europe. Meanwhile, 8k US veterans die by suicide yearly.
You had the firepower but failed to achieve your political goals. Just like in Vietnam, Iran, Syria, Laos, Cambodia, and more countries than I care to mention. While ruining the lives of innocent millions, of course.
So, you failed. Admitting it might be hard, but it will bring the US to a place of humility and help you avoid adventures like this going forward.
And to be pedantic, no you can't raze every sq. km of 652,860 km². Assuming, even just 1000 tons of explosives per km2, that's nearly 700 million tons of explosives. At $30k a ton, you'd be spending $21 trillion on enough explosives.
Yes, for destabilizing Libya and Syria. Those millions of Syrian immigrants that suddenly started flooding Europe had been living contently in their homeland. What changed starting in 2014? Gaddafi was a major force in stemming illegal immigration through the Sahara. What changed in Libya in 2011?
The US hasn't destabilized Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador, yet they get migrants from those countries. And Gaddafi also got screwed by Szarkozy and Tony Blair. The US probably had other plans which didn't quite work out as intended.
Hah! The US has a long and shameful history of meddling in Latin America: coups, outright invasions (Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua, Honduras, etc.) and overthrows or assassinations of democratically-elected leaders considered leftist.
Arbenz in Guatemala, Allende in Chile, etc.
Haiti: Historian Hans Schmidt notes that, “US Navy ships visited Haitian ports to ‘protect American lives and property’ in 1857, 1859, 1868, 1869, 1876, 1888, 1889, 1892, 1902, 1903, 1904, 1905, 1906, 1907, 1908, 1909, 1911, 1912, and 1913. Finally, tired of all those round trips, the U.S. occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934."
Among others, in the 1980s, a Guatemalan military that received U.S. support carried out scorched earth campaigns that massacred upwards of 200,000 mostly indigenous people [1].
And that's before you count all the other American-trained and armed military juntas that systematically murdered, tortured, and raped millions of dissidents "leftists" with Uncle Sam's blessing.
Wikipedia has an entire page on it: go take a look. [2]
Wait, that's what you caught from all I just explained? I don't even feel the need to explain anything, but if you want to actually debunk any of the assertions I made, I'll be waiting.
Not only in Latin America. The US also continues to keep their fascist allies alive in Europe, Asia, Africa and everywhere else.
Every leftist country will either be undermined secretly (Europe), will have fake elections to overcome this problem (Latin America), or endure another fascist coup.
In Europe this fascist US backed coups happened until the 70ies. Now the press is enough to vilify citizens and workers rights.
A bit of fun ... but my opinion is that a war with decades long ceasefire is common-law armistice. At the very least, stopping shelling is some sort of détente.
I'll admit that "War" is a somewhat colloquial term nowadays, for better or worse.
I disagree, it is still war-proper if you have troops amassed at each others border, constantly training to invade each other and developing weapons (NK's ICBM aresnal) specifically to target the other guys (you need ICBMs to target america,not SK). If american policy changed and america withdrew troops from SK, there will be a continuation of the Korean war, since NK's leadership believes the US is the only thing standing in their way of unifying the korean people.
NK can't strike the United States. Their low-quality "ICBM" probably can't even target another continent. They really have poor ballistic missiles. On the other hand, NK can't be targeted except from a sub in the ocean, or over Russia by ours.
I thought they at least claimed they can hit the west coast of the US? and that US ICBMs, launched from the US mainland can strike any target in the world.
tl;dr answer is "Eh, its not so simple." but you're right on a basic level.
No, the North Korean ballistic missiles have from my non-classified top-of-the-head understanding a range of around 1000 to 3000 KM. The best-case scenario ranges that are sabre-rattled are certainly theoretical. They do not have ICBM capability and are not capable of launching an ICBM or exiting the Earth's atmosphere, but they do threaten Japan.
Strike capabilities reaching North Korea do indeed exist. All three legs of the nuclear triad may strike a North Korean target, but airplanes must sortie from the Pacific (leaving them vulnerable to detection, interception or suppression) or follow the course of a land-based ballistic missile strike which by necessity must pass over Russia, China, or much less feasibly, India.
As you mention we do have ICBMs that are capable of striking basically and literally anywhere on the planet. This is not really enough, because those ICBMs must pass through many, many layers of enemy strategic defenses.
From a nuclear arms point of view, its likely that our longest range reach-out-and-touch-ya' weapon systems really need to carpet-bomb entire regions and cities to achieve their designed operational objective. In effect, we're going to lose too much accuracy as well as ordinance to shoot-downs, reducing our effectiveness in the vicinity to a near minimum. Minimum lethality is quite lethal, but considering a maniacal super-villain's armored bunker really and truly is what we need to begin constructing a realistic view of the challenges set forth here. This analysis completely disregards the possible side effect of poisoning Seoul, South Korea with nuclear fallout as well as triggering a chain reaction of thermonuclear retaliatory strikes in a horrific reprisal of the 1914 assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Prince Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
In short, its in a tricky spot. Luckily, the most danger they (North Korea) pose is to local Pacific naval operations, intense cold-war era artillery bombardment of South Korea (Seoul) or the possibility of a regionally effective ballistic missile. In addition to these threats, they also pose cybersecurity, money laundering and counterfeiting risks and of course, their people are starving in a totalitarian hell-hole regime.
I hope that one day there is an end to the pointless suffering of the people who live in North Korea.
Japan and Russia don't have armies ready to kill each other standing by at each others' borders. There is no peace treaty to be signed between NK and SK because the conflict behind the war is still unresolved. They are actively sending spies to sabotage each other. NK built nukes specifically because of this conflict. They didn't build ICBMs for the sake of it, they built it to nuke america because of this active state of war.
Most of North Korea’s traffic is routed through China so it’d require cutting the latter off from the internet. With the amount of submarine cables connecting China to other countries, it wouldn’t be very feasible.
You think they are doing this from NK ip blocks/asn? Their physical links are more or less enemy of enemy with US, so they have no incentive to block. Its impossible to keep them off the internet.
I imagine pretty easily. They likely don’t have to find it, nothing gets dug in North Korea without US watching it via satellite. Chinas air defenses likely don’t exist in North Korea.
I have no doubt the US has plans to cut them (and probably anyone else you can imagine) off in the event of war.
It's probably of higher intelligence value to let them connect and intercept everything than it is to cut them off and not know what's going on. If you look at their border with China, it's only tens of meters from fairly populated areas, so setting up high bandwidth microwave links wouldn't be hard. Also bombing a sovereign nation is an act of war and comes with consequences.
It’s a dumb question simply because we know most North Korean cyber agents are working abroad- they literally live in China or somewhere else and setup infrastructure elsewhere to remote into.
Funny thing about American meddling is that it always comes back to bite the US in the ass. The War of Terror has cost $8 trillion and there's nothing tangible and lasting the US has to show for it. Groups like Al Qaeda, ISIS (esp. their networks across Libya, Iraq, etc.) are offshoots of American meddling in the region, growing healthily despite everything.
Afghanistan, Vietnam, Iran (now a rabid enemy), Iraq, Syria, and Libya, are all failures of that World Police ethos that the US refuses to disengage from.
They're not really selling solutions if it still costs them at the end. For the most part, US foreign policy is a net negative for America's pockets and many of their "allies."
Digging a hole and covering it at a cost of $22 trillion will double America's GDP overnight. But it doesn't create value for anyone.
All it does is transfer money to the contractor doing the digging (in America's case, the military-industrial complex) while everyone else becomes poorer.
$8 trillion has been spent on the War on Terror so far. Like I said in another comment, that's enough money to build 80 million $100k homes, or reduce America's debt by 25%, or pay off all student loans, or build 400,000 KM of high-speed rail at $20M/km, or give every American taxpayer a one-time check of $48k, etc.
Every bomb dropped on Afghanistan or Iraq was money diverted from something else useful the US could have done.
>Serious question, if the United States decided to unilaterally cut North Korea off from the Internet, how hard would that be to do? Could we just knock out a few cables?
You will have to cut cables going to Russia (and\or out of Russia) and China at least.
The Kims are likely the only reliable bet for people who would actually survive a nuclear war and the following nuclear winters, if the book Nuclear War by Anne Jacobsen is to be believed. They're the only ones that have built their bunkers deep enough (under mountains) that modern thermo nuclear weapons wouldn't destroy them, and they have years of supplies down there.
> cut North Korea off from the Internet, how hard would that be to do? Could we just knock out a few cables?
> Is this just not logistically feasible?
NK shares a physical border with China and Russia. Not to mention that we can send data by means other than a physical wire.
Even if you were willing to block Russia and China from "the internet" (lol) it would be nearly logistically impossible.
Even if you were willing to destroy all sense of privacy and track every single packet sent (what a terrible dystopian idea), there's still going to be ways to fake this. It would only make it harder, not impossible.
N.Korea is a Chinese weapon, unfortunately. To do something like cut off their internet would be considered an attack on China. China is their border where do you think they get connected to the internet.
First consider that the internet was designed to withstand and endure attacks upon it. So long as at least one connection remains, the nodes thereof remain accessible.
Next, consider that the authority of US sovereignty ends at US borders. The US legally cannot unilaterally do anything to anything outside of its own borders.
Next, consider that both North Korea and more importantly China have no damns to give about what the US wants.
Next, consider the first point again. Any actions made domestically can and likely will be circumvented by people who do not agree with them. An obvious example is people running their own DNS servers configured in defiance of US government orders.
> First consider that the internet was designed to withstand and endure attacks upon it. So long as at least one connection remains, the nodes thereof remain accessible.
Tell me you haven't worked in network infrastructure without telling me you haven't worked in network infrastructure.
> Next, consider that the authority of US sovereignty ends at US borders. The US legally cannot unilaterally do anything to anything outside of its own borders.
I mean, sure, officially, when all laws are followed and in a friction-less plane this is correct. However the United States does all kinds of shit unilaterally outside it's own borders, literally all the time, not the least of which every war we've been in post WWII, and incalculable numbers of other tom-fuckery carried out on all levels of secrecy and non-secrecy by all manner of organizations identified by three letters, most commonly the CIA.
>Tell me you haven't worked in network infrastructure without telling me you haven't worked in network infrastructure.
Am I wrong, though?
>I mean, sure, officially, when all laws are followed and in a friction-less plane this is correct. However the United States does all kinds of shit unilaterally outside it's own borders, literally all the time,
You can just say we went and blew up Nordstream, you know.
Yeah we’ve been drone bombing other countries, even ones we’re not at war at, for 20 years. If most Americans Google which countries we have troops in they’ll be shocked to find we’re invading countries they don’t know about.
There are some good reasons people have given here why we aren’t doing it, as I suspected, but I’m sure borders aren’t on the list.
> They certainly don’t allow their citizens to use it for anything else, and they don’t allow their citizens to leave the country because they would never come back.
I never thought about it like this but it’s the largest open air prison on earth.
This wouldn't work against the bad actors as they could just proxy through a friendly (to NK) country. And would set a bad precedent of using Internet access as a tool for sanctioning.
The Chinese government had built the infrastructure for the Great Firewall, allowing them to block whoever they want. The US does not have this capability.
What makes you think the same equipment would have the necessary mechanics and capacity for realtime mass-filtering?
Even in America, I imagine there are many other budget priorities competing for a limited spook-fund, that would displace a "national censor-wall but indefinitely inactive and secret just in case we need it someday."
You know how the internet and things like Tor are products of the Department of Defense?
The State Department has been using the internet (and anonymization tools like Tor) to organize dissidents in foreign countries for various purposes, often coups. One example is the Arab Spring[1].
I'd wager they are very afraid of someone doing it back to them, and might have some capability in place. Even if it's just to shut the internet off for a time (like
Pakistan and other nations have done during elections[0], maybe in response to US interference) or perhaps prevent connections to other nations/the rest of the world more generally.
So the issue isn't a PRC-esque Great Firewall, but instead a more generic "blanket interruption of service in some region for some time"? I feel those are significantly different scenarios.
For one, they're would be an enormous backlash if it were to somehow effect the many American businesses which rely on network access and have significant clout in our system. Most of the countries that have tried such things either (A) don't have the economic exposure or (B) limited the outage-scope to zones without the same stakeholders.
Another aspect is that such coarse interruptions are a lot easier to accomplish through a bunch of NSL-weilding lawyer-agents contacting ISPs, rather than spending money building dedicated hardware infrastructure, in advance, in secret, to support a Giant Red Button.
I'm not saying there's no possible Motive, but it's no substitute for Means and Opportunity.
>North Korea pretty much only uses the Internet for scams Or to make money in violation of sanctions. They certainly don’t allow their citizens to use it for anything else, and they don’t allow their citizens to leave the country because they would never come back.
Do you think that the only place north korean hackers operate from is inside north Korea?
They already partially operate from China. They would just do that more. They could even have their own connection to China and connect to the Internet from there. It's going to be a wack-a-mole thing that they easily win.
Sure. As if they couldn't reroute through any other country. They're already cut off by their leadership, except for the state sponsored cybercriminal groups which don't need a NK IP.
Taking you seriously: I’m pretty sure NK has non-oceanic interconnects with both China and Russia. So unless your plan involves attacking within the internationally recognized borders of either and living with the consequences, the answer is “not easy.”
I assume the US is willing to do this because we do it frequently, though not with China or Russia. I’m not sure about the DPRK, and was asking more of a technical question than a political one. Like, how many cables would we need to cut and how exposed are they? I’m aware they’re a nuclear power (ish) and the politics aren’t trivial.
If you mean SpaceX’s Starlink they obviously can’t. Elon clearly controls who uses it where.
If you are just using the term generically and mean other satellite connections, maybe, but limiting them to satellite internet only where we couldn’t take out a dish would certainly be crippling to the crimes I’m referencing!
North Korea pretty much only uses the Internet for scams Or to make money in violation of sanctions. They certainly don’t allow their citizens to use it for anything else, and they don’t allow their citizens to leave the country because they would never come back.
Even if it were only temporary, suddenly cutting off the Internet to the country would expose all of those remote workers to the people who employ them and don’t realize they are employing North Koreans when they all disappear at once.
Is this just not logistically feasible? or are we just too afraid it would be unpalatable to our allies? I can’t be the first person who has thought of this.