That Asian meal you eat on holidays could launder money for North Korea If you dine out at an Asian restaurant on your next holiday, the United Nations thinks your meal could help North Korea to launder money. That bitter tidbit is detailed by the United Nations Panel of Experts dedicated to assessing the Security Council's sanctions against The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, aka …
I mean there is an official NK restaurant chain "Pyongang" in Vietnam, Thailand etc.
Which may or may not be selinng dodgy software as well.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/05/18/asia/hanoi-north-korea-restaurant-facial-recognition-software-intl/index.html
But as a percentage market wise I'd wonder what your odds are of actually hitting an undercover one. There is a huge amount of places to eat in these countries. Chances are low your going to hit many.
"Some of the eateries are clearly staffed by North Koreans, whose lousy Mandarin is a giveaway in China."
My Mandarin is extremely lousy, I only know about 3 words.
1. Does that mean I am also an agent of the North Korean Government?
2. How am I supposed to assess the Mandarin abilities of the staff?
1. People who speak a Mandarin as second language poorly would have thick accents distinctive of their first language, just like those who speak English as a second language poorly. English-accented Mandarin would not be confused with North-Korean-accented Mandarin.
2. This statement explains that the UN study was conducted with the help of native Mandarin speakers in China. It is not meant to be a protip on how you can avoid NK restaurants.
You don't like the NK regime? Take it down. You can take any regime down for less than $20m in a couple of months. Including Putin's.
But you don't really want to, do you? Because you need a foreign bogeyman and tribal wars for the nationalist mind games and theatre, justifying an obscene national security spend and universal surveillance to control your tribe when people are dying of hunger and the world is heating up. Thought as much. Go peddle the propaganda to the proles who will lap it up.
We are geeks on here, not politicians. We fix problems, we don't exploit them to manipulate people.
The restaurants in southeast Asia run by DPRK are well-known. There's a legitimate purpose which is to accumulate cash in foreign currencies for conducting trade and reducing trade imbalances. This is normal activity even if not normally done directly by a state.
I'll buy that there's some laundering but the scaremongering isn't necessary. Crypto heists are awful. Freelance tech workers? The world is full of workers from the global south working, possibly undocumented, in the global north and sending remittances home. Concealing their identity and "laundering" earnings through a restaurant in a non-sanctioned country isn't as nefarious as the linked article makes it out to be, nor is it unique to DPRK. The claim that these remittances "reportedly help to fund the country's development of weapons of mass destruction" could be said about the taxes of any wage-earner in a nuclear-armed country.
Please apply your critical thinking to all media, even El Reg.
"The world is full of workers from the global south working, possibly undocumented, in the global north and sending remittances home."
The difference, as you well know, is that people sending remittances home to other countries are sending it to their families or friends. North Koreans abroad are working for their government and passing the money to them directly, and their families will get little or none of it (none by official policy, but they probably find some ways to sneak in a bit). We also know that North Korea's government budgets are a bit slanted toward the military expenditures and against everything else, in fact they've put a nice name on it. The people working in other countries are not individual agents taking a risk for economic reward. They are slaves held in check by actions North Korea has been using for decades: threatening and punishing families and friends for any infraction and closely monitoring everybody. There is a difference, and we all know it.
You can't back a single claim with evidence. It's all conjecture. They're a poor country that no one will trade with. They have nukes solely so they don't get Iraq'd by the US. I don't doubt the state does some shady things from desperation. But in 2024 "axis of evil" claims will require evidence beyond quotes from State-Department-mouthpiece news outlets.
I can't back which claims with evidence? That they threaten anyone they let out of the country? Does testimony from escaped ambassadors and tech workers count? You can find that. But if you will dismiss this all as state department propaganda, then there's nothing I can do. Do you want to try convincing us with evidence of your own? If I can't back up anything I say with evidence, then surely that means you can? You could, for example, find me an interview with a North Korean who didn't either escape their country which wants to imprison them or is working for them right now? I can find you interviews with plenty of migrants, with legal documentation or not, from almost every country, but you tend not to find North Koreans who voluntarily left their country, were allowed to do so, and are willing to talk about it.
True, and it already works that way. However, if most countries and companies will not sell you the parts, it means the markup on those parts is pretty high, which means that there is an incentive for the person who is willing to break those sanctions and find the parts anyway. If I make chips that could be used in missiles for $10 apiece but refuse to sell them, and North Korea is willing to buy them for $60 each, then a company has a $50 per unit ability to cover any costs involved in getting them out of my control and into North Korea's. If they are general purpose chips, this can be pretty easy. If they're restricted technology that has to be obtained from one of a few people I'm willing to sell to, then it's harder, which increases the price even further.
The more cash North Korea has on them, the more their ability to pay those increased margins. You'd hope that, at some point, they would decide that more nuclear weapons they don't really need isn't worth the price, but if they thought that way, they probably would have stopped making them at least a decade ago. For other weapons systems, they have plenty of people who want to pay them to manufacture them. North Korea has been making and selling weapons as one of their major export industries for decades, and they've been making some advancements. Russia wants a bunch of cheap and modern missiles, and North Korea has a bunch of really cheap labor and factories built for missile manufacture, so if they can connect Russia's money and modern missile components, they can get them.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
