North Korean defector to airdrop DVD, USB copies of The Interview

Human Rights Foundation has explained that Park’s efforts were part of a broader campaign called “Hack Them Back.”

After all the controversy surrounding the film which was thought to be the reason for the Sony Pictures hack, a famous North Korean defector has made an announcement stating that he is going to launch 100,000 DVDs and USB sticks along with copies of The Interview as part of his regularly scheduled balloon launches into the Hermit Kingdom. The theatrical release of the film was carried out by Sony Pictures despite the hacks which recently stalled regular working in the corporate networks. During an interview with the Associated Press on Wednesday, Park Sang-hak revealed that he has planned his next launch for late January.

He told AP that “North Korea’s absolute leadership will crumble if the idolization of leader Kim breaks down.” It has also been revealed that these dispatched versions are going to have Korean subtitles. These efforts to launch copies if the film are in concert with Human Rights Foundation (HRF) and Alex Gladstein, HRF’s director of international affairs, sent an email on Wednesday in which he explained that Park’s efforts were part of a broader campaign called “Hack Them Back.” The campaign is going to stretch over a period of a year in which HRF, Park and other related groups intend to distribute 100,000 legal copies of the film.

“Given security concerns and given that the North Korean government has established a task force to prevent The Interview from entering North Korea, we will not be making our distribution efforts public,” he noted in a statement. “They will be conducted covertly.”

During the interview, Park revealed that the cost of launching 10 of the long, thin, translucent, 36-foot-long (12-meter) balloons is $5,000. With each balloon there are USB sticks with Wikipedia entries, DVDs of popular TV shows, anti-government leaflets, and even single American dollar bills. The dollar bills are positively included so that the starving North Koreans can buy rice in the black market. The balloons normally have the tendency to go beyond only a few kilometers or so from the border but sometimes they can reach as far away as Pyongyang, about 125 miles from the border.

“I believe that if we can get 100 times more balloons, then we will make [North Korean dictator] Kim Jong Un paranoid—sending more and more balloons to North Korea is more effective than sending a bomb on North Korea,” Park said at the time. “The thing is that if South Korea or the United States Air Force dropped a bomb, there’s a way that [North Korea] would react to it, but the thing is with leaflets there’s no way to react.”