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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   37110 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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even though they have a history of cyberattacks and crypto scams? I don't know why you think there's no risk, or any benefit, in freely helping them increase their IT skills.

Eh... I think the cyberattacks/crypto scams are blown way out of proportion. Literally every country on earth does this. For some reason, however, it's only used as an excuse to block exchanges with North Korea and not with countries like Israel.

Also, FWIW, I used to work for the NSA red team running these types of operations. I have a pretty good sense of what types of training contribute to hacking capabilities and can ensure that the academic exchanges stay far away from that material.

it frees up their state resources to work on other, more black-hat stuff

I disagree. For example:

  1. Albert Einstein was part of an enemy state in WWI. This led to his theory of relativity being ignored by the outside world because a Good American (TM) wouldn't support German physics. If non-Germans had paid more attention to Einstein, then we would have understood relativity ~10 years earlier, and the whole world would be better off because of it. Ignoring Einstein did not result in increased capabilities of the German war machine, and I think was clearly a mistake in hindsight. Who knows what types of Einsteins are living in North Korea right now that we don't even know about because we don't want to support North Korean science?

  2. Above I give two examples of the work I did in North Korea that resulted in North Korean programmers being assigned peaceful tasks (contributing to open source software and fixing the KCNA webpage) that they would not have otherwise completed. If these exchanges hadn't been happening, then those programmers would have been assigned other tasks (possibly military related) instead. I personally know several American machine learning researchers who have benefited from the pull requests, and several government analysts who rely on the improved KCNA website to perform their jobs.

There's a lot more examples of why I think this work is a net-benefit in the /r/theschism link above. If you disagree with any of those particulars, I'd love to learn why.

Also, FWIW, I used to work for the NSA red team running these types of operations. I have a pretty good sense of what types of training contribute to hacking capabilities and can ensure that the academic exchanges stay far away from that material.

I'm fascinated (not being sarcastic) by your journey from NSA employee to working for North Korea. I would really like to know what motivated such a journey.

I also must admit I have a lot of skepticism about the value of helping North Korea. The DPRK is one of the few countries left in the world I would unambiguously call "bad" and while I understand the argument that "We should try to entice them into joining the international community and normalizing," I just... really don't think that will work with the existing regime.

You can find a summary of my career in this college newspaper bio of me: https://tsl.news/professor-mike-izbicki-discusses-path-to-pacifism/. There's more details about me leaving the navy on my blog at https://izbicki.me/blog/my-co-discharge.html.

Also, FWIW, I used to work for the NSA red team running these types of operations.

Holy shit! And you still went to North Korea?

With that kind of past I would not have wanted to put myself within grasp of a regime with little to lose and a lot to gain in picking your brain.

Man, this is such a strange conversation! I don't want to accuse you of being an NK propaganda tool but... I feel like you're hitting a lot of their talking points.

Let's go back to the start:

For me, it helps shed light on why the North Koreans felt like they "needed" to start the Korean War and invade the South in 1950.

It makes no sense that they would invade a peaceful neighbor just one random terrorist- who defected from North Korea! tried to lob a homemade bomb at their leader. That sounds like something North Korean army officers would use as an excuse. Kim Il Sung was looking to take over all of Korea ever since the day he got into power, and was heavily backed by the USSR the whole time, just waiting for the right time to invade. They invaded 4 years after the assassination attempt, during which South Korea made absolutely no attempt to kill Kim Il Sung or even build up their military.

You want to make a meme connecting Trump to Kim Il Sung... why? Kim Il Sung is not very popular in the US, even among the fringe online right. Are you trying to make Kim Il Sung more popular with Trump fans?

Eh... I think the cyberattacks/crypto scams are blown way out of proportion. Literally every country on earth does this. For some reason, however, it's only used as an excuse to block exchanges with North Korea and not with countries like Israel.

Every country has some degree of cyberwarfare ability, sure. But most of them simply keep it in reserve as an emergency warfware option, or (like the US and Israel) occasionally to target terrorists and nuclear weapons development. North Korea uses it regularly, either to "earn respect" for their regime, or to bring in foreign cash when they have no legitimate exports. See eg: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/dprk-cyber-espionage.pdf. These attacks are increasing over time, suggesting that they are gaining technical skills and are not bound by any sort of international norms. This is actually becoming a large part of their "economy!" ("Remarkably, North Korea is also deemed responsible for the world’s biggest cryptocurrency heist, worth $530 million, to the detriment of the Japanese exchange Coincheck.34 It appears cyber thefts have become an integral part of Pyongyang’s strategy as a way of survival.")

Also, FWIW, I used to work for the NSA red team running these types of operations. I have a pretty good sense of what types of training contribute to hacking capabilities and can ensure that the academic exchanges stay far away from that material.

Not the point. I'm sure these academic exchanges don't directly teach hacking capabilities. But it's opportunity cost. When they teach basic, civilian skills for free, which Pyongyang would have had to fund itself, that allows the regime to use its own resources to create more "cyberwarriors." It's the same pattern we've seen from North Korea again and again- Giving them food, money, or technical equipment does not help their people like it would a normal country. It simply lets the regime transfer more people and resources into its military. Giving them food during the 90s famine didn't stop their military buildup, and the more recent sunshine policy did nothing to halt their nuclearization or cyberwarfare programs.

In a larger sense- you said you teach computer science? I'm sure you know more about computer and programming than I do. But don't you think the state department knows more about diplomacy and military matters than you? Of course your NK colleagues seem nice, they're not going to put you next to someone who's openly hostile. But the state department can monitor the nasty parts of their government much more than you can as a visiting professor, and there's a good reason why the government has decided that it's a bad idea to give them technical help or even to travel there as a tourist. Don't be a Useful Idiot.

Eh.. sorry it got strange. I definitely don't think the North should have invaded the South. It was a bad decision morally and strategically, and it decimated the Korean people. I just think it's worth understanding our enemies' motivations in order to be able to accurately predict their future behavior, which is necessary to make them less dangerous.

I understand your point about opportunity costs, and think it's quite valid. We just have a different model of how collaboration works. Your model is:

The North has a fixed set of possible projects it can work on. If we help even with "good" projects, then that lets the North divert resources they would have had to spend on those projects to military projects, and so the bad projects are indirectly helped.

My model is:

The North does not have a fixed set of possible projects. If we add more good projects to the set of projects they might want to work on, then that will divert resources that would have otherwise been spent on bad projects to these newly found good projects.

Of course, details matter about which model is true in any situation. I think the specific examples I've shown are solidly in the second category.

For what it's worth, I thought the 2014 Sony Pictures hack was hilarious and saw it as a vague fargroup vs vile neargroup.

It makes no sense that they would invade a peaceful neighbor just one random terrorist- who defected from North Korea.

I don't disagree personally but countries do stuff like that all the time.

What I've been taught in history class is that the casus belli and the reason for war are different. 99% of the time, at least.

Doesn't that make the case for "countries do it all the time" even stronger? I thought the original argument is that a respectable country would not use such a trivial casus belli.

"all the time?" Like what? Do you think Trump is going to invade Pennsylvania to get revenge for the assassination attempt?

Following a single terrorist attack, the US invaded two countries that had nothing to do with it. You might have also heard of a minor skirmish called World War I.

Not at all similar, for what I think should be obvious reasons.

I don't see any obvious reasons, and anything I can think of seems pretty superficial.

We invaded Afghanistan because they were sheltering Osama Bin Laden. We invaded Iraq as a result of a whole chain of events that didn't even start with 9/11. You can call the reasons bad and I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but it's not true that we just arbitrarily decided to attack a country because of one "unrelated" terrorist attack. That's like saying we went to war with Japan because a couple of ships got sunk. (And in fact Pearl Harbor was really only the proximate cause of a war that had been inevitable for a number of years.)

World War I might have been triggered by a single assassination, but it was basically a couple of countries who'd been waiting for an excuse to go to war, and then a bunch of other countries dragged in by a complicated web of treaties.

It really isn't comparable to claiming that North Korea up and decided to invade South Korea because a North Korean expat attempted an assassination.

Thank you for writing this! This is basically exactly what I would have written if I had more motivation to write a response.

IIRC, the Taliban wasn't even particularly unreasonable, it's just that the US was in no mood to jump through the hoops of a bunch of mountain-dwelling goatherders.

I'm about 80% sure that 9/11 was one of the stated reasons for invading Iraq. If you want to say that, as in the case of WWI, it might have been the stated reason but it wasn't the real reason, than it is actually no different from NK stating they're invading SK over a terrorist attack. Like I said countries do this stuff all the time.

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