June 4, 2004
North Korea bans mobile phones
North Korea may have banned mobile phones only 18 months after allowing them to be introduced, and reports are coming in of the already isolated country building a barbed-wire fence along its border with China to prevent smuggling, according to Canadian daily Canoe.
"An official at the South's Unification Ministry, which handles relations with the North, was unable to confirm either report. But if true, the measures would retard the Stalinist regime's recent meagre moves toward openness.
There were some 20,000 mobile phone subscribers in November 2003, a year after the service began".
Read also Mike Masnick's interesting piece, Repressive Regimes Repress Technologies, in TheFeature.com. Mike points out that "no nation can hope to do much in the world economy without some access to modern technology - which has meant there is always an ongoing struggle in which repressive regimes try to allow new technologies and encourage their use, while turning around and heavily restricting them at the same time".
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