Joseph DeThomas on 38 North notes how the sanctions put in place against North Korea has inadvertently crippled the research sector devoted to North Korea:
YouTube’s decision to delete North Korean YouTube channels has served to highlight the sometimes-unintended consequences of sanctions and the absolute power enjoyed by Internet companies over their users. In doing so, the company has cut off a vital supply of video used by open source researchers, which means there is now less visibility into what’s happening in North Korea. The Western world’s understanding of North Korea is limited to begin with, cutting off access to these few windows into North Korean thinking and life further hampers our knowledge of the country.
On September 8, some in the open source intelligence community logged on to YouTube to find the “Uriminzokkiri” (우리민족끼리) channel was gone.
The only explanation from Google was a simple notice: “This account has been terminated for violating YouTube’s community guidelines.” At about the same time, the same message appeared on the “StimmeKoreas” YouTube channel.
Both had been on YouTube for about 7 years, each had thousands of archived videos and millions of views, and had become essential references for video from the DPRK. There were hours of news videos, documentaries and military programming that had enabled researchers to uncover numerous secrets about the DPRK over the years. Needless to say, those researchers were not pleased.
A multitude of viewpoints is vital to understanding enigmas such as North Korea, and by losing their access to the information on the Internet because of a simple decision by Google, a number of viewpoints are lost. Don’t just think the United States government, or for that matter the UK or Chinese governments, are on the ball and have everything under control; difficult to crack nuts often require expertise from academic and independent experts.
And all of them run on information.
This isn’t a call to nationalize the Internet, but it is a salutary example of how the Internet must be managed carefully in order to not lose information which has national and international security facets to it. If there is a threat of war, private companies are not going to have the firepower to make North Korea back down.
[EDIT: Added forgotten link to source article]
