Certain messages get repeated so often with respect to North Korea that to write them risks little disagreement. Among these is the statement: “North Korea should be flooded with outside information.”

Defector memoirs recount, with greater and lesser degrees of emotion, the importance that outside information has had for individuals in need of a spark of consciousness of the world beyond the rigid physical and ideological boundaries of the DPRK.

For some, it was a Dvorak symphony that triggered a desire for freedom; for others, a Hollywood film or a South Korean drama. Indeed, at the time of writing, the U.S. State