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Jake Selvera
HELA 10
Mrs. Wilson
February 23, 2015
The Architecture of Oppression
Most people around the world are familiar with the oppressed nation of North Korea. Countless
stories have come from the witnesses and survivors who escaped the brutal concentration camps and
harsh political rule of the supreme leader, Kim Jong Un. What the majority of U.S. citizens do not realize
is that some of the same rights made unavailable to North Koreans could be stripped away from
Americans as well, in the near future. The groundwork for this process has been in place since the
government changes made shortly after September 11th 2001. The privacy of every individuals online and
personal information has been drastically affected as a result. One specific government agent brought this
subject into the light recently. The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost
everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested
without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I
can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards, anything... says Edward Snowden, the
former NSA contractor. Snowden leaked this information, as well as many classified documents to the
media in June of 2013. The response to this leak was one of outrage and it forced the citizens of the
United States to question what real privacy they actually have. If American citizens do not act quickly on
this matter and protect their rights, the U.S. could soon be an oppressed country just like North Korea.

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North Korea is oppression at its finest and it
is the best example of what can happen when a
government has too much power and the citizens do
nothing about it. The people of North Korea have
absolutely no privacy whatsoever because the government has been specifically molded to have access to
every single one of its citizens personal information. None of the liberties in the U.S. constitution are in
place in North Korea. A depressing example of this would be if an individual were to openly express a
negative opinion about the North Korean government in Pyongyang, the North Korean Capital. This
would result in immediate execution or a life sentence to the infamous camp 14 (described as resembling
Nazi-Germany concentration camps), where the individual would endure torture and starvation until they
inevitably died. These camps are often quite large in size, (see image in top right) filling up several acres.
The average camp is home to around 20,000 political prisoners but even the life of a law abiding citizen is
not much better than those who are in the camps. One third of the population is subjected to extreme
poverty. Usually, electricity is only available one to two hours a day and that time is normally used for
bathing and cleaning since it is the only time at which running water can be accessed. Internet is nonexistent and the few North Koreans who have the luxury of owning a cell phone experience bad reception
and limited usage. Some may think bad reception is a miniscule sacrifice in order to have a connection to
the rest of the world. However, the only connection North Koreans actually have besides to other North
Koreans is to their own government. Any phone call made inside the borders is censored and monitored
by a government agent. One North Korean defector states, Our phones were routinely seized and
inspected for politically inappropriate content. The punishment if such content was found would most
likely be some of kind of torture or imprisonment. Whilst all of this time is devoted to maintaining
ultimate control over the citizens of North Korea, the government has failed to properly nourish its
citizens and the extremely impoverished country is losing more of its small population every day. It is not
that the country simply does not have the resources to complete this action. North Korea has received a
large sum of money from the UN to buy the materials necessary for growing crops, cleaning water, and

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refining the countrys educational system. Almost all of this money has gone straight to the production of
military weapons and the entertainment purposes of the supreme leader and other high ranking officials,
as they are seen wearing luxurious clothing and living in the most magnificent homes in North Korea. If
the North Korean people were able to unify and rebel against the North Korean government, like other
countries have done throughout history, things would be able to change, and if the country has any chance
of surviving, that is exactly what needs to happen.
Nobody wants to have their personal life invaded by the government, and the discovery that all
the data on every American individual was being ingested into some kind of U.S. government server was
more than enough to raise tensions. Changes to the law have been made since the twin tower bombings in
2001 to ensure the future safety of the U.S., but at the same time, many constitutional rights are being
ignored through the invasion of ones private information. An interview between NBCs Brian Williams
and the former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden helped shed some light on the topic. According to
Snowden, any type of information shared electronically, whether it is over the internet or on the phone,
can be stolen by the government by means of national security. The government has been doing this for
years but only recently have they been discovered. One could argue the positive and negative affects
which arose from this. To the American citizen, this information was an outrage. Not only U.S. citizens
but citizens of other countries as well soon discovered the power of the NSA. This brought questions to
the table such as; how far of a reach did the NSA have on a global scale? Could they be wiretapping
phone calls in other nations around the world? How much information could the NSA potentially
consume? All of these questions were directed at the political leaders of each country. In a sense, this leak
caused a worldwide panic for a short time. The U.S. government sees what Edward Snowden did as
espionage, and he is considered a political criminal in the United States. Snowden now lives in
Moscow, Russia where the U.S. has stranded him currently after suspending his passport.
Despite how the situation may seem, Snowdens decision to expose the NSA may have been a
mistake. Doing so, provided all other nations of the world with a theoretical blueprint of how the U.S.

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intercepts information and protects itself. This gives them the opportunity to better prepare themselves
defensively against the countrys technology. It also creates the idea to begin working on global
surveillance systems of their own. Another negative affect of the situation is the infuriation and distrust it
caused towards the United States government internally and in other nations. If Snowden would have
stayed silent, the people of America would continue their daily lives contently, without knowing their
privacy was being violated, hence the saying what they dont know cant hurt them. The rest of the
world would also continue life as normal without the suspicion that the U.S. is spying on them day and
night. America would then be able to protect itself efficiently, not to mention it would have an advantage
over other countries by being able to monitor information much better. However, the people of America
have a constitutional right to the privacy of their personal information. The fact that the U.S. government
did this in the first place is a disgrace to what the nation stands for.
The abuses of power in the North Korean government and the United States government
(however, miniscule in the U.S.) are important facts to examine. America will most likely never come
close to being anything like North Korea, but one must confess that the architecture for a potential
oppressive state is intact and still working currently. If there were stages of the abuse of power, North
Korea is at the highest. Oppression has been normalized there, and the North Korean citizens are
powerless against it. As for the U.S., any abuse of power is only in its infancy and therefore causing little
to no harm at the moment. Despite this, the citizens of the U.S. cannot allow the invasion of privacy to
increase any further. Allowing this to happen would only encourage the U.S. government to take more
liberties from its citizens and eventually, we would begin shaping into an oppressive country, similar to
North Korea. A nation cannot abuse its power unless its citizens allow it to. When Americans were
unlawfully taxed by the British, the Americans revolted and hopefully they would do it again, should the
governments power be unlawfully used. Many other success stories from other countries around the
world begin with the people of a nation rising up as one and overthrowing an oppressive government or
leader. This is exactly what the North Korean citizens must do if they wish to make a change in their

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nation. Forming this rebellion would not be easy but it is absolutely necessary for the survival of North
Korea as a country.

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Works Cited

Hintze, Tom. "5 Ways the U.S. Government Has Built 'An Architecture of Oppression'" AlterNet. 19 June
2013. Web. <http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/5-ways-us-government-has-built-architectureoppression>.
Lee, Hyeonseo. "North Korean Truths." The New York Times. 5 Feb. 2015. Web.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/06/opinion/north-korean-truths.html?_r=0>
Snowden, Edward. "Inside the Mind of Edward Snowden." Interview by Brian Williams. NBC News.
N.p., 28 May 2014. Web. <http://www.nbcnews.com/feature/edward-snowden-interview/watchprimetime-special-inside-mind-edward-snowden-n117126>.
Walters, Guy. "Voices of the Damned Mail Online. Associated Newspapers, 21 Feb. 2014.
23 Feb. 2015

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