SAN FRANCISCO—For years, Park Sang Hak has fought the North Korean government with balloons.

The long, thin, translucent, 36-foot-long (12-meter) balloons are loaded up 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.

Speaking in a local South of Market coffee shop, the North Korean defector explained Monday morning to Ars through an interpreter that he’s currently on a tour of Northern California, looking for tech-savvy benefactors to help improve his air-dropped messages. Park’s group, the Freedom Fighters of North Korea, claims to have sent 52 million leaflets in recent years. But with hardly any original information getting out of North Korea, it’s almost impossible to know what impact, if any, they’re having.

“This particular visit has a lot of meaning. Not only do we get support from the people, but we find out practical ways to increase effectiveness of the balloon, and I believe that this visit will give me more and more impact in terms of sending more messages,” Park said.

According to Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation, who helped organize the trip, Park wants to add improved GPS capability so that his group can better understand exactly where the balloons are going and where they end up.

“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 added. “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.”

Given that launching 10 balloons costs $5,000—Park hopes that he can tap into a sympathetic network of Silicon Valley financial benefactors. Perhaps, he hopes, even a large company like Google would pitch in. After all, in 2013 Google began testing Project Loon, a way to broadcast high-speed Internet via balloons. Google did not respond to Ars’ request for comment as to whether its technology could be helpful to Park’s efforts.

“The problem is that we don't know [these companies],” he said.

Gladstein said that his organization wants to organize a hackathon that could help improve balloon design and cost-effectiveness. He helped set up Park to give a talk at Stanford University on Monday evening.

“What I want to do is to tell them how many lies that the North Korean regime has been making,” Park added. “It’s not that they have to rise up, but it's their choice to rise up. But at least they have to know and understand, and that's the thing that I aim for. You might consider the balloons as a letter to their loved ones telling them what they have experienced under the freedom of democracy. It's more making them understand. The North Korean government propagandizes about defectors, saying that they betrayed their homeland, they are living under dire conditions, they're living in poverty. But by sending a letter to show them how developed and how luxurious it is, and how free it is, we are giving a strong signal to [regular people] to see the difference.”

"Human scum"

Park is something of a celebrity in many circles on both sides of the 38th Parallel, the line that continues to divide the Korean peninsula. In the North, since his defection in 1999, he has been dubbed as a “vicious deserter” and “human scum” by the Korean Central News Agency, the international propaganda wing of the Hermit Kingdom.

Park says his father was a senior official in the North Korean government, and he was tasked with importing computers into the country. As a Japanese-born ethnic Korean engineer, the elder Park was enticed to “return” to the peninsula from his native Japan in the 1960s. Japan invaded and occupied Korea from 1910 until 1945, and many Koreans moved to Japan to seek better economic opportunities.

“Once [my father] smuggled eight NEC computers and for that they gave him a gold Omega watch, which was signed by Kim Il Sung,” the younger Park said. “Someone once offered me $200,000 to buy the watch, but it's currently in the National Intelligence Service offices. With that money from selling the watch, I would launch more balloons.”

Park says his father, who now lives in Tokyo, paid for his children and wife to bribe border guards across the North Korea-China border and falsified documents. With a fake South Korean passport, Park was able to fly from Dailan, China, to Seoul, where he promptly declared himself as a defector. He says that when he arrived he was surprised to find out that around 1,000 defectors had made it across. According to the South Korean Ministry of Unification, by the end of 2012, nearly 25,000 defectors had made it across.

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 KCNA trumpeted: “This reminds one of a puppy knowing no fear of a tiger.”

The KCNA continued:

The planned leaflet-scattering operation is part of its premeditated and deliberate confrontation racket against the DPRK aimed to escalate such provocation. The US and the present puppet authorities of South Korea should not forget even a moment that the Rimjin Pavilion is within the range of direct sighting strike of the units under the above-said command of the [Korean People’s Army]. . . . Given that these human scum have rushed of their own accord to become targets of strikes to be made by the KPA ready to mete out physical punishment, it is our stand to show these provocateurs what miserable fate they will face. In case the projected leaflet scattering operation will push the present situation to a grave phase, the US and Park group will be held wholly accountable for it as they have hurled these human scum into such provocation.

"The responsible thing to do is to be prudent"

While it may be easy for those of us far away on the other side of the Pacific to dismiss these threats as mere bluster, some experts wonder what might happen should Pyongyang actually launch a strike as a result of the balloons.

“It's dangerous because at some point North Korea might actually really lob some artillery shells across the border again and kill people,” David Straub, the associate director of the Korean Studies Program at Stanford University, told Ars.

“If North Korea is threatening to do that because South Koreans say something in South Korea they don't like, you ignore it, or rather you tell them it's none of their business and you bolster your defenses. If the North Koreans tell you they are going to attack you if you launch some physical objects into their territory again, especially if it's not clear that the physical objects are effective, then the responsible thing to do is to be prudent.”

But Park remains undeterred. When he arrived in South Korea, that was the beginning of the so-called “Sunshine Policy” (1998-2008) of relatively more openness between the two Koreas. For that, South Korean President Kim Daejun received the Nobel Peace Prize.

“It's like giving a Peace Prize to Neville Chamberlain who is having peace talks with Adolf Hitler,” Park observed.

“It's better to entice or evoke any movement inside. It would be the best, and that's the ultimate goal to sending the balloons, so people can rise up by themselves, that would be the best way. If it's not possible and if we have to see this suffering prolonged so many years, then we might think about other ways. All of this thought is based on the trust of the people of North Korea, they are the loving ones that we left behind in our homeland.

“We know that they have that will and that ability to fight for freedom, and what they don’t have is a tool to see the reality, and that's why we keep sending the balloons, which will be the key and the energy to keep on with that work. The problem with North Korea right now is that they are too used to this oppression; they consider it as their fate, and we have to tell them that it's not. They have basic human rights like other people in the world; they're too brainwashed. There has been no one to tell them that they have to rise up against the dictatorship, and we can give them this idea of freedom.”

The next balloon launch is planned for March 2014, when the winter wind shifts to blowing northward again.