https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Warmbier
Imagine what they do to their own citizens. Virgil Griffith apparently was ok doing business with a murderous dictator.
It's funny to see the difference in attitudes between how South Koreans view the north and how westerners view them. They are starkly different.
"The interest of participants to continue building bridges of friendship and collaboration with the DPR of Korea, as well as the exclusive environment of confidentiality and contacts with the highest government officials and engineers"
What do you suppose that entails? Do you think in a state like North Korea is going to permit anyone North Korean except state officials into a conference like this, triply so with wording like that?
We already know beyond a shadow of a doubt that North Korea is trading in crypto currency to fund their regime.
https://bitcoinist.com/un-north-korea-accumulating-cryptocur...
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/N-Korea-at-crossroads/Nort...
This conference had absolutely nothing to do with enabling regular North Koreans to access cryptocurrency, they don't even have access to the internet to begin with.
I wouldn't know, all I know about the country is from mainstream media.
> is trading in crypto currency to fund their regime
So why not do the same if that's our enemies are doing? Governments around the world are often some of the biggest wallet owners apart from exchanges due to confiscation.
> they don't even have access to the internet to begin with
NK Internet is weird, but non-nonexistent. How is one of the biggest nations on Earth who are implicated in hacking nearly everyone not connected to the internet? (do mean everyone, even their own friends) Are their hackers somehow not regular soldiers? Last I saw they aren't elites. Would be interested to hear some more wild allegations.
It's messy but for fucks sake please learn something from the last 70 years of the cold war and see where it ends up everytime.
People really need to step back and think about where these things lead. I would assert that the vast majority of North Koreans are good decent people. Do we really need another proxy war fought over ideologies?
Well that's your fault for being uniformed.
There is plenty of non-mainstream media coverage, ranging from evangelical Christians[1] to those globalists at human rights watch[2] to not-for-profit groups[3][4] to more globalists at the UN[5], so you can pick you poison.
It's almost like there are actual facts, and your falling victim to the conspiricy-fueled anti-fact propaganda machine has blinded you to it.
[1] https://www.opendoorsuk.org/news/stories/north-korea-180103/
[2] https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/north...
[3] https://www.c4reports.org/dispatched
[4] https://c4ads.org/about-us
[5] https://www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/hrc/coidprk/pages/reportof...
The conference was about enabling the North Korean government to trade in cryptocurrency to evade sanctions, do you expect the American government to not take issue with that?
As for the North Korean internet, government elites get access to the global internet, but everyone else gets access to a tightly controlled intranet.
https://money.cnn.com/2014/12/22/technology/security/north-k...
It's not just "mainstream media" reporting that North Korea is a totalitarian regime. It's a universally-acknowledged fact.
Good thing he didn't try to steal a propaganda poster while he was there.