Even North Korea has Gmail, and this is getting ridiculous

Whenever new censorship measures come into place in China, we can always comfort ourselves by saying, "Well, at least it's not North Korea." No more! If Gmail is your top concern (and you are pretty open-minded about prison camps) then the DPRK may be the place for you.

James Kim, president of the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology was in the Mainland this week when he said that it's possible to both receive and send Gmail in the Democratic People's Republic. We don't have the context of his remarks, but it was presumably after he tried to check his messages and realized that the Mainland is - in some regards - even stricter than his homeland.

While the reasons that Gmail is blocked in China are complex, one of those is certainly the fact that Gmail messages can't be read by prying Chinese state security eyes, and it could theoretically be used by dissidents and those unfriendly to the CCP.

But the DPRK doesn't need to worry about that. Firstly "North Korea has Gmail" would be better rephrased as "A microscopic elite in Pyongyang who have access to internet, have Gmail."

And secondly, according to Kim, there won't be any threats to the North Korean leadership because "politics do not exist in the North."

Well isn't that nice.