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Rare footage shows North Korean teens being sentenced in front of hundreds of their peers, getting 12 years of hard labour for watching South Korean videos (www.bbc.com)

submitted 9 months ago by 0x815@feddit.de to c/news@beehaw.org

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In 2020, however, Pyongyang enacted a law to make watching or distributing South Korean entertainment punishable by death.

A defector previously told the BBC that he was forced to watch a 22-year-old man shot to death. He said the man was accused of listening to South Korean music and had shared films from the South with his friend.

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[–] 0x815@feddit.de 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

@petrescatraian

A friend of mine is from Romania, and I know many who lived in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic). They don't talk often about it, but when they do their stories seem absurd, hard to believe sometimes that these things happened, and each of these stories is a reason to avoid mass surveillance imo.

[–] petrescatraian@libranet.de 6 points 9 months ago

@0x815 oh, wow. Yea, their stories just seem unbelievable. And also the way some people crossed the border to reach the "free world" seems unbelievable. For example, a band managed to cross the border inside Marshall speakers. Others tried to cross the Danube into Yugoslavia (which was more liberal at the time) and got shot by the Romanian border patrols. It was pretty much hell on Earth.

each of these stories is a reason to avoid mass surveillance imo.

Absolutely. Every time I hear about governments snooping inside personal communication I think of how phones were tapped and letters were read for every known or possible dissidents back then. And when an extremist party seems to be on the verge of taking power (and we do have extremist parties as well in Romania) I just think that measures like these would be the first they would implement, along with reducing democratic rights.