“To our soon-to-be officers, congratulations,” said Jack Keane, GABELLI ’66, a national security and foreign policy expert and Fordham trustee fellow who was the ceremony’s featured guest speaker. Later, he added: “The oath which you are about to take is a sacred trust between you and the American people.”

“We who take it, embrace it, and take it very seriously. I expect you to do the same,” said Keane, who administered the oath of office to the cadets. In his address, he outlined several security threats that he said will continue to challenge the military worldwide, ranging from a resurgent Russia to a belligerent and nuclear-armed North Korea.

Twenty-two cadets became second lieutenants at the May 17 commissioning ceremony, held in the University Church on the Rose Hill campus the day before Fordham’s 174th Annual Commencement. Another cadet was commissioned on May 20. Nine members of Fordham’s Class of 2019 were among the cadets, who attended a number of New York-area universities.

In his address, Keane told the cadets they are entering not just a job or a career but something “more akin to a vocation” because of the sacrifices and discipline it demands.

Keane noted that he began his own military career as a cadet in the Fordham ROTC program. Following his commissioning, he was assigned to an infantry paratroop unit at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

It was intimidating. “They were our very best. I did not know if I could measure up,” he said. “The noncommissioned officers, though subordinate to me, were also my teachers. Outside of our beloved Jesuits, they were the most professional and different group of men I ever encountered—smart, confident, totally dedicated, and completely selfless.”

They cared little about his background, he said. “What they wanted to know was, who was I? Was I willing to work hard to learn the necessary skills, did I really care, would my troops truly come first? In other words, they were … more interested in my heart than anything else.”

“I tried awfully hard to earn their respect and trust,” he said. “I eventually became one of them. I lived a life of shared experiences that enriched my life and my family’s beyond expectations.”

A career infantry paratrooper, Keane was a platoon leader and company commander in Vietnam, where he was decorated for valor. He commanded the 101st Airborne Division and the 18th Airborne Corps, the Army’s largest war-fighting organization, and served as the Army’s acting chief of staff and vice chief of staff before retiring from the Army in 2003. He spoke about the Russia threat before the Committee on Foreign Affairs on May 1, one of many times he has provided expert testimony before Congress.

Keane said the U.S. faces security challenges “on a scale we have not seen since the end of World War II and the rise of the Soviet Union.” They include China’s efforts to dominate the Indo-Pacific region and supplant the U.S. as the world’s leader; radical Islam; and tensions being inflamed by Iran in the Middle East, in addition to the challenges posed by Russia and North Korea, he said.

In light of these threats, along with past defense budget cuts and the erosion of America’s military dominance, the Trump administration’s defense buildup “is even more critical than the Reagan defense buildup of the 1980s,” he said. “The United States military is a much-needed deterrent to these dangers. Your job will be to prepare yourself, your unit and your troops, to be ready.”

“I am proud you want to serve your country,” he said. “We do not take your commitment lightly.”

Protecting America’s Ideals

Speaking before Keane took the podium, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, reflected on the ideals in the country’s founding documents, calling them “luminously beautiful” but also “inherently fragile.”

“They must be protected, defended, and nurtured in every generation,” he told the soon-to-be-commissioned cadets. “They have called out to you and they have awakened in you the same bold generosity that has marked the lives of our greatest heroes.”

“I admire your courage. I am grateful for your generosity,” Father McShane said. “I am challenged—as I always am when I am in the presence of heroes—by your selfless love of our nation.”

During the ceremony, Father McShane presented Lt. Col. Samuel Linn, professor of military science at Fordham, with a certificate praising him for his “transformative leadership” of the ROTC program over the past three years. Linn is departing for Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to command an artillery battalion.

Two cadets were presented with awards honoring distinguished military graduates: Declan Wollard, GABELLI ’19, received the President’s Sabre, and Chris Bolton of Columbia University earned the General Jack Keane Award.

Also on May 17, two Fordham students earned commissions in the Navy ROTC program based at SUNY Maritime College in the Bronx, and the University held an inaugural Victory Bell ceremony at the Rose Hill campus to honor the veterans among the Class of 2019.

“Before taking office people were assuming that we were going to War with North Korea. President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer – sleep well tonight!”

In a recent conversation with Fordham News, Raymond Kuo, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science and an expert on international relations and Asia, said it’s not quite that simple.

Full transcript below

Raymond Kuo: The major lesson is that if you have nuclear weapons, you get a seat at the table. If you’re Iraq and you’re hiding the fact or a little coy about the fact that you may or may not have nuclear weapons, you’ll get invaded by the United States. If you give up your weapons like you did in Libya, eventually you as a leader will get killed, and if you’re Iran and negotiate an agreement, well the U.S. isn’t going to hold up its end of the bargain. So, much, much better to just have the nuclear weapons and hold onto them because that is your one guarantee, and you get a seat at the table.

Patrick Verel: “Before taking office, people were assuming that we were going to war with North Korea. President Obama said North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer. Sleep well tonight.” After a June 12th visit to Singapore with the first ever meeting between the leaders of the United States and North Korea, this was how President Trump summed things up in a June 13th tweet. Sounds promising, right? But before we break out the Nobel Peace Prize polish, we sat down with assistant professor of political science, Raymond Kuo, an expert on international relations in Asia. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham News.

Patrick Verel: How much safer do you feel after this meeting?

Raymond Kuo: Not that much safer. Compared to last year, it’s better that they’re not insulting each other. Trump’s not calling Kim little rocket man and threatening each other with nuclear attack. The fact that they didn’t end up killing each other at the summit, that’s a pretty good sign. But generally speaking, I don’t know if you really get credit for de-escalating a conflict that you previously escalated. And there has been no real change in North Korea’s capabilities. They’re still able to hit the United States with their nuclear weapons, their ballistic missile and nuclear weapons technology. The on the ground facts really haven’t changed all that much after the summit. So, in terms of how much safer I feel? Eh, we didn’t die in a nuclear holocaust. That’s great.

Patrick Verel: Do you feel as if the meeting achieved anything new or concrete, or was it all just basically a photo op?

Raymond Kuo: It was mostly a photo op. It had some marginal achievements, but North Korea has promised denuclearization many times in the past, 1985, 1992, 1994, 2005, 2007, 2012. And there are more that aren’t even on that list. Those are just some major agreements. It’s good to get North Korea and the United States talking, but the process was a real mess. Normally the way these summits happen is that you have a build-up on the lower levels of the government to try to reach some kind of foundational agreement, and then you build more and more towards more advanced, more comprehensive agreements. Then you bring in the president and the heads of state to finalize those treaties.

Generally this wasn’t what happened here at all. It was a real missed opportunity. Trying to get complete and verifiable dismantling of the nuclear weapons, setting that as a goal of the meeting, wasn’t gonna be possible, and it meant that they didn’t do a lot of lower level process stuff. Information sharing, verification of the number of nuclear sites. We could have done a lot more work to help reduce the North Korean arsenal. Even if it may have not eliminated it, but reduce it, deter the export of nuclear technology, which they’ve done to Pakistan, and then help to avoid accidents or accidental escalation. So, generally speaking this was a photo op, or as Ankit Panda has said, a really great nuclear nonproliferation expert called it a “goat rodeo.”

His major point about all of this was that  especially in the media, have tended to treat the summit as a normal presidential head of state summit, which it wasn’t that. You didn’t have the foundational process. You didn’t have the lower level people getting involved. There was a danger I think even a week before that the U.S. side would pull out. And the lack of U.S. preparation really showed. The meeting itself was a giveaway. It’s something that the North Koreans have wanted for literally decades. Trump’s suggestion that we would cancel the joint military exercised with the South Koreans wasn’t coordinated with South Korea or Japan. Then he adopted the Chinese and North Korean language on those exercises, which was a propaganda coup for both the Chinese as well as North Korea.

Patrick Verel: Now John Bolton, who’s Trump’s National Security Advisor, has touted Libya as a model for how North Korea might give up its nuclear weapons, but given that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was subsequently overthrown and killed in 2011, why would anybody look at that country and say, “Yeah that’s how this should be done”?

Raymond Kuo: Well they wouldn’t. Not if you want to have effective diplomacy, but that’s Bolton’s point. Bolton’s been pretty consistent and diplomacy was just something to get out of the way very, very quickly so we could get to that military solution. To some extent if I could say that there’s a loser out of the summit, then Bolton was actually it. Diplomacy didn’t end in warfare, so he wasn’t able to push diplomacy out of the way to get to that war, that military solution that he really wanted. But do remember that Bolton, it’s suggested, made the Libya connection because he wanted to derail the summit. Kim criticized Bolton’s statement because essentially it threatens regime change. When Trump effectively heard that Kim was thinking about canceling, he preemptively canceled on Kim. But that was also a bad move. It made Kim seem like the diplomat. It put China, South Korea, and North Korea all on the same side, and if he had just let Kim cancel it, then the South Korea and the Chinese would be on the US’s side and provide more leverage going into the negotiation.

Patrick Verel: Obviously when you talk about past agreements, the one that’s even more recent than Libya would be Iran. We managed to convince them to stop building nuclear weapons in 2015. Then we withdrew from that agreement in May. How do you think that withdrawal will effect these negotiations going forward with North Korea?

Raymond Kuo: Well it strongly undermines American credibility. Set aside if you think the JCPO, the Iran Nuclear Agreement, was a good deal or not, the fundamental point is that the U.S. made the agreement. Some people say, “Well it was done by executive agreement,” but most international agreements right now are done completely by the executive. We have very few actual treaties anymore. If the U.S. is unwilling to abide by executive agreement that it made with a whole bunch of different provisions and lots of detail, then why should Kim trust anything the U.S. says right now? That’s the fundamental problem of credibility in international negotiations. And reputations, consistency, these sorts of things really matter. Kim essentially baked that idea in, that the U.S. may not be a credible negotiator, but I’m coming to the table for this photo op. He didn’t necessarily get tricked into thinking that the US could be trusted because he didn’t give away all that much, if anything.

Patrick Verel: Where do you think China plays in all this?

Raymond Kuo: China and North Korea are probably the big winners out of the summit. China is North Korea’s only ally. It tends to be an uncertain one at that. They like the North Koreans because they’re a buffer state and a hedge against US power. If the U.S. wants to do anything in east Asia, it has to contend with the DPRK as well as the Chinese. And also any regime collapse happening in North Korea would be really, really bad. Kim’s standing in North Korea has evidently increased. The North Korea stays, it remains as a buffer state with nuclear weapons. There was a fear that North Korea was trying to shift to the United States, which wasn’t likely, but there was at least the idea that North Korea was gonna play the U.S. and Chinese off of each other. That didn’t seem to happen. And the summit gives China a pretext for reducing sanctions. That’s the critical thing, and it’s already starting to happen.

Trump talks about his maximum pressure campaign. What that means is that we’re getting all of our allies together in the Chinese and maybe even the Russians together to impose sanctions on the North Koreans, but the success or marginal success or the optic success of diplomacy in the summit means that China can already start to reduce those sanctions, reduce the bite that the North Koreans are feeling, and make a lot of money out of the situation. On top of that, there are a couple wins in terms of Trump called the joint military exercises war games. He called them provocative. This parrots the line of Beijing, and it’s pretty much a propaganda coup that you’re definitely gonna see in future videos and things from the Chinese.

Patrick Verel: Do you have any thoughts about what might happen going forward?

Raymond Kuo: The Secretary of State Pompeo’s trying to follow up on these conversations and reach some sort of agreement, but it’s really difficult to see how the U.S. is gonna get anything close to a coherent agreement out of this or an effective agreement out of this. Maybe the U.S. will be able to leverage the summit, but if the Chinese are already reducing their sanctions, if the North Koreans are getting relief from the things that brought them to the table to begin with, and the U.S. didn’t get any of that stuff in advance, it’s hard to see how the U.S. gains more of a negotiation when it has less leverage. My general feeling is that we’ll be back here in a few years, just like we have been since the 1980’s, if not earlier.

Patrick Verel: One thing I heard was that there was a possibility that North Korea might be looking to China to model for them. Kim basically is looking to China and says, “Well they have this style of government, but they still have free markets, so they get the best of both worlds. They get access to markets, but they still get to maintain control over the society and get to keep nuclear weapons.”

Raymond Kuo: The Chinese economic structure and the North Korean economic structure are very, very different. There’s a concern. This hearkens back to old modernization theory from the 1950’s and 1960’s that if you try to modernize an economy too quickly, you’ll end up getting revolutions. There’s some concern that that North Koreans are so impoverished that even seeing Kim go to Singapore and the technology and the standard of living they have over there might cause some degree of unrest within North Korea. The idea that they Pyongyang would open up the same way that the Chinese have done, they would be much, much more cautious about that. On top of it, President Xi Jinping has been consolidating national industries. So the lesson that Kim might get is well, we don’t need to open up. We just need to have great power status or prestige. Then I can get all the luxury goods I want and I can maintain state control of a variety of different, like military production, agriculture, communications and that kind of thing.

In terms of nuclear weapons, I think the major lesson that Kim has drawn from all of this is not from China, but from Iraq, Libya, and Iran. The major lesson is that if you have nuclear weapons, you get a seat at the table. If you’re Iraq and you’re hiding the fact or are a little coy about the fact that you may or may not have nuclear weapons, you’ll get invaded by the United States. If you give up your weapons like you did in Libya, eventually you as a leader will get killed, and if you’re Iran and negotiate an agreement, well the U.S. isn’t gonna hold up its end of the bargain. So much, much better to just have the nuclear weapons and hold onto them because that is your one guarantee, and you get a seat at the table.

Patrick Verel: Okay, this has been seriously depressing.

Raymond Kuo: Yeah it is. But look, the way I tend to think about nuclear weapons is that it is a miracle that somehow these enormously powerful weapons have not been used on each other and that we’re still alive. It’s both depressing, absolutely true, but also it make you really appreciate every day you wake up.

Comey said it is certain that the cyberattack was instigated by a North Korean-based group.

“There is not much in this life that I have high confidence about. I have very high confidence in this attribution, as does the entire intelligence community,” he said.

Comey first publicly laid responsibility for the hacking, which is believed to have come in response to the studio’s satirical film The Interview, on Dec. 19. He shared the new information about the attack on the second conference day of the 2015 International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS2015), which offered three full days of conferences and talks co-hosted by Fordham and the FBI.

He told conference attendees that the “Guardians of Peace” a North Korean-based group that that was behind the hack, sent threatening e-mails to employees of Sony. Although most of the e-mails were sent via proxies that made the identities untraceable, the hackers got sloppy in some cases and revealed IP addresses that were exclusively used by North Korea.

In addition, malware used in the Sony attack bore striking similarities to a cyberattack that the North Koreans conducted in March of 2014 against South Korean banks and media outlets.

“Several times, either because they forgot or they had a technical problem, they connected directly—and we could see them,” he said. “They shut it off very quickly before they realized their mistake, but not before we saw it and knew where it was coming from.”

Comey said the FBI detected spear phishing attacks on Sony’s computer networks as recently as September, and that it seems likely to have been the method, or “vector,” of the attack.

Comey prefaced his remarks on Sony with an address about cybercrime, noting that the government’s decision to publicly name North Korea is part of a strategy to fight the biggest and baddest actors in what calls the “evil layer cake.”

Nation states sit at the top layer and are followed by terrorists, organized criminal actors, sophisticated worldwide hackers and botnets, “hack-tivists,” weirdos, bullies, pedophiles, and creeps.

Cisco has predicted that in five years, there will be 50 billion devices connected to the Internet, making protection against cybercrime more important every day. Comey said the FBI’s five-point strategy for combating it includes: Focus ourselves; Shrink the world; Impose real costs on bad actors; Improve relationships with state and local law enforcement; and Improve relationships with the private sector.

He compared the current changes in crime to the great vector change that happened in the 1920s and 1930s when automobiles and asphalt enabled criminals to move quickly, making it easy to rob banks across state lines.

“[Cybercrime] is that times a million. Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde could not do a thousand robberies in all 50 states in the same day in their pajamas, from Belarus. That’s the challenge we face today,” he said.

—Patrick Verel

Director of National Intelligence on Sony:
“Most Serious Cyberattack Ever Made Against U.S.”

In the Day 2 opening keynote, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper cautioned those gathered not to underestimate North Korea’s cyber capabilities or national animosity, especially in light of the recent cyberattacks against Sony, which Clapper called “the most serious cyberattack ever made against U.S. interests.”

Clapper, who Fordham President Joseph M. McShane, S.J. said is “at the vortex of keeping things right for all of us” and who the New York Times described as “gruff, blunt-speaking… an unlikely diplomat, but perfect for the North Koreans,” offered as evidence a personal account of dealing with North Korean intelligence.

In November, Clapper traveled to the secluded country as a presidential envoy to retrieve two imprisoned Americans. Damaging their airplane’s tire while landing on a decrepit runway was only the first sign of “eerie” troubles that Clapper’s team would encounter during their two days in Pyongyang.

“From what I saw of downtown Pyongyang, I was struck by how impassive everyone was,” Clapper said. “They didn’t show emotion, didn’t stop to greet each other, didn’t nod hello, didn’t converse or laugh. They just went on about their business, almost like automatons.”

Later that night, Clapper and his team enjoyed an elaborate, 12-course dinner with the general of North Korea’s Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), who spent the meal railing against “American aggressors” aiding and abetting South Korea in provoking a war against the north, said Clapper.

The following morning, an emissary from the country’s state security arrived at Clapper’s hotel and informed him that North Korea no longer considered him a presidential envoy and thus could not guarantee his safety and security from the people of Pyongyang, who knew who he was and why he was there.

Four hours later, the same emissary returned and told Clapper that his team had 28 minutes to gather their luggage and check out of the hotel. From there, the team was ushered to a conference center where the two American prisoners were waiting. There, the North Korean minister of security read a proclamation from Kim Jong-un granting the prisoners amnesty.

“They were turned over to us, we got in our vehicles, and took off toward the airport,” Clapper said. “I can’t remember another time that an American airplane looked so good.”

Though not explicitly related to cyberterrorism, the incident offered important insights into North Korean hostility, Clapper said.

“The general I had dinner with is the one would have had to okay the cyberattack against Sony,” he said. “He is illustrative of the people we’re dealing with in the cyberworld. The vitriol he spewed at me over dinner was real. They really do believe they’re under siege from all directions. They paint us as an enemy about to invade their country every day… and they are deadly serious about fronts to their supreme leader, whom they consider to be a deity.”

Moreover, he added, North Korea is striving to be recognized as a world power. In the past, the country’s efforts to exert dominance involved amassing nuclear weapons. Now, it views cyberspace as the weapon of the future.

“Cyberwarfare is a powerful new realm for them, because they believe than can exert maximum influence at minimum cost,” Clapper said. “That’s why we have to push back. If there is no consequence, they will do it again and keep doing it. And others will follow suit.”

—Joanna Mercuri

Panelists Advocate for
Strong Privacy Safeguards

In the online world, security leads to privacy, obviously, but the reverse is also true: strong privacy safeguards are often the starting point for keeping cybercriminals out.

That’s according to one expert at ICCS2015 who spoke on a privacy panel moderated by Joel Reidenberg, Ph.D., professor of law and the founding director of  the Fordham Center on Law & Information Policy. In the words of Princeton University professor Edward Felten, Ph.D., “many standard privacy vulnerabilities … are useful to an adversary who wants to understand who we are and what we’re doing in order to target an attack.”

For instance, before attackers can successfully infiltrate a computer system via e-mail, they first have to craft a legitimate-seeming message that is likely to be opened.

“The more the attacker knows about that individual and their life and their schedule, who their associates are … the more accurately they can target that ‘spearfishing’ email” and mount a successful attack, said Felten, Princeton’s Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs and director of the Center on Information Technology Policy.

Felten and two other panelists grappled with how best to ensure privacy online and protect civil liberties while also managing the huge amounts of data that institutions of all types are collecting.

Disciplined data-gathering is another important privacy measure, panelists said. Institutions sometimes feel the need to “get on the Big Data bandwagon” before figuring out what they’ll do with all the data they wind up collecting, said Cameron Kerry, senior counsel at Sidley Austin LLP and former general counsel and acting secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

“A lot of that data is not useful,” he said. “Making rigorous choices is an important part of the process.”

Without good data management, Felten said, “you may have all kinds of data sets that you didn’t know you had, and you may only be reminded of them when they show up in the press.”

Panelist David Medine, chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board in Washington, D.C., noted the potentially chilling effect of this large-scale data gathering by government agencies.

“If I’m a source and I want to call a reporter and be a whistleblower against the government, and then the government now has a phone record between me and a New York Times reporter, I may be less willing to do that,” he said.

—Chris Gosier

Hickton:
Industrial Infiltrations by Chinese Hackers
Leave U.S. Companies Vulnerable

When he started an investigation into trade-secret thefts, David Hickton wasn’t expecting to find a “thirst for industrial organization data.”

But in 2014, the U.S. district attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania brought charges with the justice department against five Chinese Peoples Liberation Army officials for infiltrating the corporate computer systems of big-name companies—U.S. Steel, Westinghouse Electric, Alcoa, and others.

On Day 2 of ICCS 2015, Hickton gave a detailed presentation of his office’s investigation, which resulted in indictments handed down last year.

Much of the information that the Chinese were after seemed obvious, such as research and development, industry analysis, and deliberations of senior management. But some of it surprised Hickton.

“They wanted to know how often the [boards]met, what titles they had, and who reported to who,” he said. “There was also a huge interest in legal strategies.”

Hickton said the reality is that the Chinese don’t have MBA programs on a par with the United States; while they were most critically interested in product development, they also wanted to understand how American companies are run.

Joint ventures with Chinese state-owned businesses often left their American counterparts vulnerable, as was the case with U.S. Steel, he said. Just as the U.S. Steel was transforming from a “flat roll” steel company to one able to produce oil country seamless pipes that are used in fracking, the Chinese military stole proprietary design specifications of the pipes.

“U.S. Steel . . . spent a lot of money on research and design and like any company they need to make a return,” he said. “When they brought the pipe to market, the Chinese had already flooded the market with the same pipe at lower than cost.”

Normally, a complaint would be made against the Chinese hackers at the World Trade Organization. But before U.S. Steel lawyers could bring the case to the WTO, even their legal briefs were already in the possession of the Chinese.

“This is just a flavor of what was taken,” he said. “It is literally impossible to collect and report the total value of what was lost by American companies, but we know that it’s the largest wealth transfer in history.”

—Tom Stoelker

Experts Discuss Role of Language in Ferreting out Internal Threats

Some of the greatest cyberthreats to an organization actually come from within, as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden proved in 2010 and 2012, respectively.

At “Insider Threat,” a panel held Tuesday evening at ICCS2015, Ed Stroz, GSB ‘79, founder and co-president of Stroz Friedberg, detailed how the use of psycholinguistics, which is the study of how humans acquire, use, comprehend and produce language, can help identify employees who might commit cyber crime.

Stroz was joined by Stephen R. Rand, Ph.D., a consultant with Behavioral Intelligence Specialists, LLC; Eric Shaw, Ph.D., a Washington D.C.-based consulting psychologist; and Scott Weber, managing director, Stroz Friedberg.

Stroz said that in addition to monitoring an organization’s network for suspicious activity —for example, downloading inordinate amounts of data at odd hours—administrators can get a sense of an employee’s state of mind from the language they use. When he worked at the FBI, Stroz said it wasn’t hard to tell when someone on his team was experiencing stress in their personal lives—after all, they spent so much physical time together during a workday.

“In today’s environment, we often don’t have the same kind of personal interaction with each other, but we do get tons of communications through computers,” he said.

Moderating the panel, Stroz asked whether there was some way to “bring about that same sort kind of care that you would have with your co-workers” back when you were sitting next to them.

Shaw said he once helped a client sift through 10,000 e-mails that had been sent to prohibited countries, and isolated three concepts in particular within the language that indicated a potential violator. They are negative sentiment, feeling victimized, and having someone to blame.

Panelists said that a key blind spot for employers is “maladaptive organization response,” which occurs when an organization realizes an employee has engaged in improper behavior and moves to terminate them. Shaw noted that 80 percent of people who used computers to sabotage a company or steal from it did so after they’d been fired.

“The first thing we have to do in a lot of situations is convince corporate leaders and government sponsors to keep their friends close, but [keep]their enemies closer in some way, he said.

—Patrick Verel

Read coverage of Day 1 of ICCS 2015 here.

Read coverage of Day 3 of ICCS 2015 here.

As part of an assignment for The Two Koreas, a course taught by Yufeng Mao, Ph.D., assistant visting professor of history, DiTanna, a junior majoring in computer science at Fordham College at Rose Hill, was asked to analyze the content of North Korean official media.

He chose to examine the reclusive nations’ official English language website, where his interest was piqued by a familiar piece of code.

“Immediately after visiting the site I noticed the website used some common open source web elements — specifically the main image banner,” DiTanna told Wired Magazine’s Danger Room blog. Noticing the “envatowebdesign” marker “gave away the template’s source,” he said.

DiTanna was able to locate the correct template and note its price, a rather unimpressive $15.

“I had to present on this in class and everyone was pretty shocked,” he told the magazine.

The blog noted that a keyword search for “envatowebdesign” brings a prompt from the seller of the theme —Ignite Themes—on how to customize it, but whoever designed it in Pyongyang didn’t even bother.

“It’s a bit like leaving the plastic overlay on your fancy new TV telling you about the screen size,” they note.

Since the Danger Room blog was posted on April 18, DiTanna has been bombarded by requests for comment from, by his estimate, 10-15 reporters and bloggers daily. The World and the BBC even visited campus to interview him for stories.

“I wasn’t surprised it got some attention from tech circles, but I was surprised when mainstream media picked it up,” he said.

“It was tied in only because of how much North Korea was in the news lately and the article was related to North Korean budgeting and “other blunders.”

Alas, DiTanna said he’s received no word from North Korea on its choice of Ignite Themes’ Blender style web page theme.

—Patrick Verel

Question: Why did you go to North Korea?

Excerpts From Two Americans in Pyongyang

The Colonel looked us in the eye and said: “Aren’t you afraid to be here? We are enemies!” When someone is your sworn “enemy” meeting them means something. We shook that colonel’s hand and told him “we’re not afraid.” He smiled at that.

So began our tour of the demilitarized zone-from the North Korean side, and of Korea from the North Korean perspective. For a brief three-day period this October, Americans were allowed for the first time since 2002 to enter North Korea. Visitor diplomacy, the North Koreans called it.

Our visit was timed to coincide with the Arirang-or mass performances. Thousands of performers all dance, march, tumble, soar, chant and sing around the stadium, while in the background thousands more in perfect unison flip large placards to form a seamless-almost digital-background, all to a cadence of loud snaps. Idyllic background images include depictions of heroic military battles, beautiful scenery, the Great Leader, and Eternal President, Kim Il Sung, and his son, the “ Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il, who today carries on his father’s work. Different scenes follow one another forming a living, human, backdrop of revolutionary and national symbols, one part Nuremberg Rally, reminiscent of Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, one part George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, and a final part industrial strength Busby Bekeley1930 Hollywood spectacle. Having said that, the performance was truly spectacular.

Everything about the trip was very tightly controlled. We were not allowed to leave the hotel on our own, or to talk to any North Koreans, or to change our itinerary in even the smallest way. We had to ask permission to take each photo, and we were forbidden from taking photos from the windows of our mini-van. Once, while our van was stopped not far from an outside ice-cream vendor, we engaged in a 20-minute negotiation with our guide/minders, trying to convince them to let us go buy an ice cream cone. The result: they would go buy us one, but we had to stay put.

They couldn’t forbid us from looking, however, or sneaking the occasional photo (and getting the occasional tap on the back as rebuke). Cars were sparse. The roads were eerily deserted. Lighting was poor and usually non-existent and one of us tumbled down some considerable steps near a popular restaurant just outside the city. They snapped out the rest of the lights as we left. The restaurants were only open and closed for us.

Everyone we saw in North Korea-everyone-wore a Kim Il Sung pin with his portrait on his or her lapel.

Trips like this one are completely orchestrated by the Korean official tour company with official tour guides and minders, and minders of the minders. Strain though we did, we were not to be shown anything not on an approved master itinerary. Spontaneity was virtually impossible. We even tried to contact a “fellow academic” in Pyongyang, whose name we had gotten from our travel agent in Beijing. Our guides said they tried to contact him for us (and they may well have). But alas, they regretted to inform us, he was out in the countryside, out of Pyongyang.

It may have been controlled and surreal, but getting your feet in North Korean soil we believe is worth something. You get a feel for things. You sense possibilities, or you smell despair. North Koreans’ ignorance of the outside world and of history is not complete, but nearly so. Still, we sensed possibilities, but stuck within a near hopeless morass of obfuscation, incompetence, poverty, all tied together with this very peculiar kind of enervating oppression.

What happens if and when they do open up? More tourists, businesspeople, academics, and officials come. More questions are raised. Tourism, increased East-West interaction, and finally reform changed everything in the former Soviet bloc. It is changing the face of China.

Maybe it will do the same in North Korea.

We sat back in our seats in the old Ilyushin Russian jet (with the bus-style open overhead compartments) for the one-and-a-half hour flight from Pyongyangto Beijing, where we would be free. The stewardess’ voice came over the intercom.  We fumbled our effort to record her words, but they went something like this: “We are pleased to serve you tea, or coffee, or soft drinks, or very special mineral water, guaranteed to help your body and improve your health, discovered for our benefit by the great leader Kim II Sung, when he found the wellspring of this healthful water after he bravely crossed the great river.” 

Change can come, but it isn’t going to be easy.