About
Who is behind this site
Free North Korea is an open-source project. A small group of volunteers builds it in the open, together with anyone who sends a fix on GitHub. No company, government or NGO runs it, and nobody pays for it.
Who writes it
The explainers under Learn are written by Cladius Dedeler. When an article says “I”, that is the writer’s own judgment, for example which paths to change look most likely.
Everything else, the map, the data pages and the lists, is put together by the group from public sources. Every number links to where it came from, and anyone can correct any of it.
Why there are no faces or bios here
This site is about the 26 million people living in North Korea, not about the people who build it.
There is a practical reason too. North Korean state hackers go after people who work on North Korea, including experts and think tanks, according to a 2020 US government advisory. So the people behind the site stay out of the spotlight. Judge the site by its sources, not by who we are.
Not affiliated with anyone
We are not Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), and not any other group this site links to. Our address is liberatenorthkorea.org; LiNK’s is libertyinnorthkorea.org.
We point readers to groups like LiNK because they do the work on the ground. We have no ties to any government.
How the data is collected
Most of the site updates itself from official and research sources on a schedule. Nothing is typed in from memory.
- Sanctions lists come straight from the UN 1718 Committee and the US Treasury (OFAC) files, every week.
- Earthquakes come from the USGS catalog and missile launches from Japan’s Ministry of Defense, checked every three hours.
- Satellite pictures of the camps and military sites are our own cuts of free Sentinel-2 imagery from Copernicus.
- Camp locations, human rights records and missile tests come from documentation groups and researchers (NKDB, HRNK, the CNS missile database). Their numbers keep their names on them.
- Facts about people come from Wikidata and official lists. A claim is dropped if its source page doesn’t load or doesn’t say it.
- A weekly job checks every source link for changes, moves and dead pages, and shows the result on the Sources page.
Some things are left out on purpose: no one’s home, no exact execution or burial sites, no incident stories that could identify a person. Those only appear as counts per county.
Get in touch
Open an issue on GitHub for anything: a wrong number, a broken page, a source we missed, a translation that reads badly. Pull requests are welcome.
If something on the site could put a person at risk, open an issue that only names the page, without the details. We take it down first and ask questions after.