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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Colleen Graffy has an article, The Rise of Public Diplomacy 2.0, in the Fall issue of The Journal of International Security Affairs. Graffy is a professor at Pepperdine University’s law school and director of global programs. She recently served as the first deputy assistant secretary for Public Diplomacy to be appointed to the State Department, serving in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs. According to her Pepperdine bio, “Professor Graffy was the first high level US government official to actively advance ‘Public Diplomacy 2.0’ using Twitter and other social media platforms to further U.S. communications.”

Traditionally, the State Department has been risk averse when it comes to getting its message out, Graffy says, with off-the-record, print-centric roundtables the primary means that U.S. embassies used to communicate. But audiences in those countries were increasingly shaping their views from watching television and listening to radio.

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