AWARD YEAR
2017
CATEGORY
Community
GOALS
Peace, Justice & Strong Institutions
KEYWORDS
censorship, access to information
COUNTRY
United States of America
DESIGNED BY
Human Rights Foundation with Forum 280.
WEBSITE
http://flashdrivesforfreedom.org/
Flash drives for freedom
Flash Drives for Freedom Smuggles Media into North Korea breaking information blockade.
New York-based Human Rights Foundation and the Silicon Valley nonprofit Forum 280 launched Flash Drives for Freedom, an initiative to collect USB flash drive donations from Americans and then ship those slices of silicon to North Korean defector groups. The Korean activist organizations, starting with the Seoul-based non-profit North Korean Strategy Center, will then fill the drives with Western and South Korean films and TV shows and smuggle them across the border into North Korea, where their contraband contents can break Kim Jong-un’s ban on all foreign media. The glimpse of the outside world that those TV shows and films provide is meant to dispel the ideology and illusions the Kim regime depends on to control its populace: that the outside world is poor, dangerous, hostile, and inferior to North Korea.
This year Disrupt North Korea collected nearly 20,000 Flash Drives for Freedom to help groups in South Korea undermine the regime’s rhetoric.