North Korea is buying Chinese surveillance cameras in a push to tighten control, report says

By KIM TONG-HYUNG
Associated Press

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A report from the website 38 North says that North Korea is putting surveillance cameras in schools and workplaces in a technology-driven push to monitor its population even more closely. The state’s growing use of digital surveillance tools, which combine equipment imported from China with domestically developed software, threatens to erase many of the small spaces North Koreans have left for private life, the researchers wrote. But the isolated country’s digital ambitions have to contend with poor electricity supplies and low network connectivity. The report says those challenges, and a history of reliance on human methods of spying on its citizens, mean that digital surveillance isn’t yet as pervasive as in China.