Marilyn Thipthorpe
Do you throw away or keep misplacing or are just plain confused about what to do with your old pen/flash drives. Don’t be, we have a solution for it and it comes with a cause.
Recently at the South by Southwest Festival a booth was showcased with a board covered with cartoonists’ drawings of North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un; the idea was to put your old flash drives in his mouth where a slot was located.
The idea behind this is to undermine the restriction of media allowed in North Korea. North Korea has been known for some time as the most worthless government on earth for a slew of reasons, some of which include the restrictions of information and media, imprisonment for supposed slander and executions. For some time both North and South Korea refugee have banded into groups and try to smuggle information and media of any sort into North Korea.
The drives can be sent via mail or just drop them at Flash Drives for Freedom, c/o Appbackr Inc., 2251 Yale St., Palo Alto CA 94306)
The Human Rights Foundation and Forum 280, launched the Flash Drive for Freedom cause in February in order to continue the decimation of information to North Korea, it has been estimated that about 7,500 drives made their way to Korea in 2015 while the number is predicted to rise to 25,000 in 2016.
The media in the drives can be anything ranging from Wikipedia information, encyclopedias, eBooks, newspapers, songs and dramas.
Theses drives are collected by volunteers and smuggled across the North Korean border using bribes where they are sold in an open market in the north.
People grabble for any sort of information they can lay their hands on. Arnold Fang, the East Asian researcher for Amnesty International says that he supports the cause and believes that North Korea has the right to seek and receive information as it is important for them to connect with any family and friends outside the country.
Fang further said that how the people act or if indeed they will act differently after having access to this information is a completely different story.