https://apnews.com/article/north-korea-weapons-program-it-workers-f3df7c120522b0581db5c0b9682ebc9b
Court documents allege that the government of North Korea dispatched thousands of skilled IT workers to live primarily in China and Russia with the goal of deceiving businesses from the U.S. and elsewhere into hiring them as freelance remote employees.
Alternate headline: Millions of workers have their wages sent to the US government to fund weapons programs. Every day. For decades.
Millions of workers have their wages sent to the
USIsntrael government to fund weapons programs. Every day. For decadesIn the world’s largest open-air concentration camp, the United States government holds an approximately 330 Million people hostage in a continent the size of China, siphoning away their hard earned wealth to fund weapons programs that kill People of Color across the world
What are the odds this is actually just “some immigrant workers from the DPRK got jobs at call centers, and sent money home to their families which was then taxed by the DPRK or otherwise spent in ways that ended up paying the state in some fashion,” instead of a real conspiracy by state agents to provide call center workers in exchange for a portion of their extremely low wages?
I mean could be. Where’d you get call-center workers tho?
I was just grasping for a succinct way of describing a low-wage remote service farm outfit and “call center” was just the shortest and most generic way of phrasing it so it wouldn’t mess up the flow of the line (I started with “outsourced IT farm” and it read kind of wonky so I changed it). Although “outsourced remote IT work for US businesses” sounds a whole lot like a way of spicing up a description of call center work, especially since the accusation isn’t that they were backdooring US systems to steal from them just sending part of their wages back home.
I mean it could just as easily be programmers, server admins, etc. In fact it seems far more likely than a customer service role where having an accent is pretty noticeable. They do say “skilled” workers
but yeah, its hardly nefarious for a country embargoed by the world to train workers to go abroad where they can earn higher wages in useful foreign currencies
In North Korea they don’t have computers or the internet, so to train IT workers they sit in a big auditorium and listen to one person read zeros and ones off a big book through a megaphone.
I didn’t know of this anime before and now I have to watch the whole thing
See?! They’re transferring money. It must be for missiles!lol, the DPRK has a single account for ballistic missiles that everyone transfers to or something? Did the workers put ‘nukes’ down in their Venmo?
Weird round about way of justifying the end of remote work
That’s weird, liberals told me in no uncertain terms just 2 weeks ago that North Koreans aren’t allowed to leave so nice try lying FBI
They’re allowed to leave as long as they go to St. Louis, which will undoubtedly cause them to miss North Korea terribly.
St. Louis has air ride sirens that go off whenever Mark Wahlberg is in town with his Shillelagh “Asia Slaya”
Wait, I thought North Koreans weren’t allowed to leave? And if they did, they would defect? And if they left, they’d have access to the rest of the world and see what living in a normal society with internet and TV would be like? The North Korean government is stupidly incompetent; this sounds like a recipe for the birth of thousands of willing CIA assets. Also thousands of people spilling the beans anonymously to the news about the horrifying reality of life in North Korea. I’m sure that’s exactly what happened too but I’m not hearing about it cause I haven’t checked the news too closely; I mean it must have happened, we were promised about how the North Korean population are all basically the DPRK’s prison population, eager for freedom.
Haha, can you imagine how dumb the average North Korean is because they definitely believe Kim Jong Un doesn’t poop? Haha, dumb North Koreans, not like us smart Westerners. They can’t even get haircuts unless it makes them look like the supreme leader!
How do they know that the money is specifically sent to missile programmes? Is there a DPRK ICMB Patreon or something like that?
there is and the highest tier gets you early access to 일심단결은 주체혁명의 천하지대본, 필승의 무기! plus free 백두의 칼바람정신 자력부강, 자력번영, 경공업부문에서는 인민들이 좋아하는 여러가지 소비품들을 생산보장하자!, and my personal favorite, 모두다 찬성투표하자!
In the DPRK can you can join supporter clubs for individual weapons of mass destruction or some shit idfk I can’t riff on Western propaganda anymore, it’s just so tiresome.,
Money is free speech when it’s our businesses and political donors, but it stops being free speech when that’s inconvenient for our foreign policy narrative.
Amazing how free Koreans learn IT while subsisting on a diet of rats.
Every thousand lines of code, the workers are allowed to take one small nibble of rat
If a network outage is ongoing for more than 5 minutes they are fed to the rats that the rest of the workers eat.
And it’s hard for people to fix the servers since Lim Jong Un is the only one in the country with admin permissions
I feel like this can only mean workers in China sent money to their families and an income tax was applied
Thats my assumption here too.
“Remote IT workers in US funding US war machine through a nefarious channel called the IRS”
big if troo!
thousands of remote IT workers sent wages to North Korea to help fund weapons program.
the nation we bombed to smithereens and embargoed for 73 years needs to seek extra-legal means of securing a national revenue. One of the forms this took was doing real labor generating surplus value for the American bourgeoisie and then sending their pittance wages back to the DPRK. We will use this as propaganda against them to justify hurting them even more. We are the baddies!Based IT workers
