Politics

Anonymous declares war on North Korea

Josh Peterson Tech Editor
Font Size:

Hacktivist collective Anonymous has declared war on North Korea, The Week reported Wednesday.

While maintaining a critical stance against U.S. government policy, a press release posted on HTMLPaste also voiced harsh criticism of the DPRK,  admonishing North Korean citizens “to rise up and bring these motherfuckers of [an] oppressive government down!”

The country’s technological isolationism, however, has caused some to view the impact of the announcement with skepticism.

The country’s national intranet is not connected to the larger Internet and features content from the rest of the globe only after it has been sanitized by government officials for its citizens’ consumption.

Sophie Schmidt, daughter of Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, said in a piece about her visit to North Korea as part of her father’s delegation that some university students had access to the intranet.

She also said that the delegation was shown an Internet-enabled tablet running on the Android operating system.

“Whether anyone, beyond very select students, high-ranking officials or occasional American delegation tourists, actually gets to use it is unknowable,” she said.

In 2007, a CIA analyst wrote that the North Korean government allowed its researchers to keep up with current global trends.

“Computers conducting Internet searches are more readily monitored than the photocopying machines that served to spread forbidden political tracts in the former Soviet Union,” wrote analyst Stephen C. Mercado.

North Korea announced Wednesday that it had authorized plans for the military to conduct nuclear strikes against targets in the U.S.

Follow Josh on Twitter