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“We’re creating windows to the outside world so that North Koreans can make decisions for themselves about what they want to do with their lives.”

He revealed that the appetite for -information within the hermit state has considerably shifted in recent months – from popular films such as Titanic, South Korean soap operas and megastar Psy’s music videos towards news, documentaries and educational material including Wikipedia.

The drives’ content is chosen by defector focus groups, said Gladstein.

The Kim Jong-un regime’s visceral reaction towards them, calling them “scum” and “enemy zero”, shows how much it fears outside news, he said.

The USB-sticks are smuggled at great risk via towns on China’s border with North Korea, where the black market for information is flourishing.

The group’s “Flash drives for Freedom” project has already smuggled in 2 million hours of footage, and 48 million hours of reading material, reaching an estimated 1.1 million North Koreans over the past few years.

It first began its operations in the simplest of ways in 2013, by floating hydrogen balloons packed with DVDs, dollar bills and leaflets across the militarised border.

While the impact of the information campaign is hard to measure, Gladstein said the group hoped to influence North Korea’s business and military elite to foster change that would ultimately help release a quarter of a million prisoners held in labour camps.