A well-known North Korean defector has announced that he will launch 100,000 DVDs and USB sticks with copies of The Interview as part of his regularly scheduled balloon launches into the Hermit Kingdom. Sony Pictures pulled the theatrical release of the film in the wake of hacks against its corporate networks.

In an interview with the Associated Press on Wednesday, Park Sang-hak said that his next launch is planned for late January.

"North Korea's absolute leadership will crumble if the idolization of leader Kim breaks down," Park told the AP, which noted that the dispatched versions will have Korean subtitles.

Park's efforts are in concert with the Human Rights Foundation (HRF), which did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

UPDATE Thursday 11:33am CT: Alex Gladstein, HRF's director of international affairs, sent Ars an e-mail late Wednesday in which he explained that Park's efforts were part of a broader campaign called "Hack Them Back." Over the course of the year, HRF, Park and other related groups intend to distribute 100,000 legal copies of the film.

"Given security concerns and given that the North Korean government has established a task force to prevent The Interview from entering North Korea, we will not be making our distribution efforts public," he noted in a statement. "They will be conducted covertly."

Balloon power

Ars interviewed Park in San Francisco in February 2014, where he said that launching 10 of the long, thin, translucent, 36-foot-long (12-meter) balloons costs $5,000.

Normally, each balloon is laden with USB sticks with Wikipedia entries, DVDs of popular TV shows, anti-government leaflets, and even single American dollar bills. (The last is included so starving North Koreans can buy rice on the black market.) While the balloons typically make it over the border by only a few kilometers or so (often dropping inside the Demilitarized Zone), sometimes they can land as far away as Pyongyang, about 125 miles from the border.

"I believe that if we can get 100 times more balloons, then we will make [North Korean dictator] Kim Jong Un paranoid—sending more and more balloons to North Korea is more effective than sending a bomb on North Korea," Park said at the time. "The thing is that if South Korea or the United States Air Force dropped a bomb, there's a way that [North Korea] would react to it, but the thing is with leaflets there's no way to react."

In August 2014, Park returned to San Francisco with the Human Rights Foundation to serve as a judge for a North Korea-themed hack-a-thon.

Park is well known to both North Korean and South Korean officials. In 2011, South Korean intelligence officials averted an assassination attempt on Park’s life via a poison pen. But South Korean police sometimes arrest Park during his launch attempts, lest he incur the wrath of their nuclear-armed neighbor to the north.

As recently as June 2013, North Korea’s news agency trumpeted: "This reminds one of a puppy knowing no fear of a tiger."