North Korea Crackdown

Drudge linked to this story of a crackdown in North Korea. There are a couple of interesting points.

Part of the crackdown is on mobile phones.

Many North Koreans, including border peddlers and border guards, have Chinese cell phones, and they easily contact South Koreans with them in the border areas. They make cell phone calls to their South Korean relatives or North Korean defectors to ask for cash or other economic aid, South Korean officials say.

The North Koreans are going to find that this is a genie that just won't go back in the bottle. Yet another example of how modern technology is a liberating force.

Lastly, what does it tell you about life in North Korea if people are escaping by smuggling themselves to China?

5GW

The Federalist has put up an excellent paper on Fifth Generation Warfare. The authors pick apart the currently fashionable notion of Fourth Generation Warfare, providing a nice military history lesson in the process. Then they point out that 5GW is just now emerging.

In fact, the media has effectively become an altogether different sort of "non-state actor" on the world stage. The fact that the media can even entertain the notion of affecting political outcomes because it wields that much power, leads to the next concept: The weaponization of the media. This is a dangerous tool and one that our adversaries have mastered.

Courage

Good riddance, Dan.