Choe Sang-Hun of the New York Times has an article about how some North Koreans are risking death to send information about their notoriously closed off country to South Korea and other Western allies:

The networks are the creation of a handful of North Korean defectors and South Korean human rights activists using cellphones to pierce North Korea’s near-total news blackout. To build the networks, recruiters slip into China to woo the few North Koreans allowed to travel there, provide cellphones to smuggle across the border, then post informers’ phoned and texted reports on Web sites.

The work is risky. Recruiters spend months identifying and coaxing potential informants, all the while evading agents from the North and the Chinese police bent on stopping their work. The North Koreans face even greater danger; exposure could lead to imprisonment — or death.
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Ashton Kutcher became famous for playing pranks on celebrities on the MTV show Punk’d, as a dimwitted slacker in That 70’s Show and for uttering the line, “Dude, where’s my car?” in the cult hit of the same name.

Those aren’t the kinds of roles that would lead you to expect that Kutcher, the person, would be a social activist of sorts, regularly raising awareness about topics like human trafficking and teen homelessness to millions of people on a weekly and sometimes daily basis.

But that’s exactly what he does on Twitter, the social media site where he has 3,807,892 followers and counting. That’s about 280,000 more than the second place Ellen DeGeneres Show, and a few hundred thousand more than Britney Spears.

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