And the authorities arrested many officers of the North Korean intelligence service, which spies on all internal and external electronic communications, on charges of browsing the web without permission, as the authorities impose strict restrictions on access to the Internet to prevent its people from knowing the outside world, even intelligence officers need to request permission from their superiors to access the Internet.
A Pyongyang source said they were reported by a colleague of the officers at the Ministry of State Security, and investigations have been opened into their violation of restrictions on Internet searches in the country.
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A source in the ministry told the newspaper" Daily NK"(based in South Korea), the authorities in North Korea have isolated the intelligence officers involved, while one of the officers who searched for news of Kim Jong Un faces the death penalty.
The source indicated that "The departments of the Intelligence Bureau were granted access to the Internet, and the Bureau’s officers were allowed to turn off the devices entrusted with recording their searches, and to search the Web without hindrance.".
However, a new director who assumed the presidency of the office decided to turn the previously ordinary violations into major crimes, and the perpetrators of them into offenders deserving of punishment. The source told Daily NK: ‘Bureau 10 departments are given access to the internet, which had allowed agents to turn off their search word recording devices and search the web as much as they like without issue.
‘But after a new bureau chief took over, even these previously routine issues have turned into major incidents.’
Greg Scarlatoiu, director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, said the purge speaks to how the regime is increasingly struggling to maintain its iron grip on the flow of information into the country.
Mr Scarlatoiu said: ‘Even the most trusted agents of the Kim regime are now attempting to access information from the outside world.
‘The Kim family regime has stayed in power through overwhelming coercion, punishment, surveillance and information control.’
He added: ‘The regime continues to see the very limited information entering the country from the outside world as a grave threat to its grip on power. ‘Despite the regime’s efforts, the North Korean information firewall is slowly, but surely and steadily, crumbling.’
The intelligence officials caught up in the recent purge of Bureau 10 are all understood to have been young, having joined the agency not long after graduating last year.
They were mostly of mid-to-high rank at the organisation, charged with developing programmes for controlling the country’s information firewall, according to Daily NK.
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