We chose to ignore this inflammatory rhetoric, which is typical of the regime, and pressed on. The morning of the launch, however, the North Korean government issued a second warning, this time from the Command of the Korean People’s Army, saying the launch "reminds one of a puppy knowing no fear of a tiger." This threat was taken so seriously by the South Korean government that its security forces mobilized to stop us.

On the day of the launch, 300 uniformed South Korean policemen swarmed the site, preventing us from achieving our goal. Park attempted to drive to another launch site, but he was stopped and taken to a nearby police station, where he was detained for six hours and then released. The episode underlined how many South Koreans regard the human rights struggle in the North as merely a distraction and an annoyance.

So what do these balloons carry that is dangerous enough to the North Korean government to warrant an attempted assassination and multiple public death threats to an international NGO? All of the goods carried by the balloons are illegal inside North Korea, but the regime consistently names one item in their threats to Park and his group: the pro-democracy leaflets.

The North Korean government dreads subversive information. For decades, the regime has controlled all information entering the country. While the government still has a monopoly over information dissemination within North Korea, cracks are beginning to show. Many North Koreans now have access to smuggled DVDs and USBs loaded with videos. They are seeing the world outside the North, and it doesn’t match up to the dictatorship’s lies and propaganda. Shows such as Desperate Housewives and The Mentalist, and films like Bad Boys, all of which defectors tell us are very popular in the North, provide a wildly different alternative to their daily lives.

Slowly, piercing the information blockade is helping to expose the fallibility of the North Korean state. Kim Jong Un’s government, just like the governments of his father and grandfather before him, is engineered to make North Korean citizens dependent on the state for everything. However, the famine of the 1990s, in which over a million North Koreans starved to death, forced people to depend less on the state for survival. The black market, fueled by smuggling, began to gain momentum.

Smuggling is the only way to bring information and technology to the North Korean people, and it is punishable by death. DVDs, USBs, and even laptops are making their way over the Chinese border into the hands of North Koreans, helped along by NGOs based in South Korea. Some groups engage directly in smuggling activities to provide information and equipment, others use short- and medium-wave radio broadcasts, and Park Sang Hak uses balloons and other creative methods of sending help over the border.

These groups, however, are in the midst of a crisis. Finding support, especially for the more aggressive methods, is difficult within South Korea, as South Koreans fear antagonizing their distant relatives in the North. Until this year, the U.S. government provided support for these groups through the National Endowment for Democracy and the State Department’s DRL programs. The majority of this funding however, has been cut in the last year. A remarkable opportunity now exists, given the funding gap, to build peer-to-peer networks between Korean defectors and worldwide allies willing to stand against despotism. Radio transmission is especially costly, and one group we visited in Seoul won’t be able to afford to produce its programming after March of this year.