Small, Elite Group of North Korean Students Experiment With Internet

PYONGYANG, North Korea, Feb. 25, 2008— -- At Pyongyang's foreign language university today in North Korea, we had the opportunity to watch students practicing English, and to ask them about their impressions of the United States. "Our impression of the United States is not so good," one student told us, explaining that the negative feelings stem from the belief that the the United States caused the Korean War.

"But actually, this time the relationship between the United States and our country … it's developing now," he said, pointing to the New York Philharmonic's arrival in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea as a turning point in the relationship between the two nations.

The hope here is that tomorrow's concert will help bring the United States and North Korea closer. The students we met have few opportunities to connect with Americans -- most have never met or seen an American before -- and getting on the Internet is illegal. When we asked them about popular American Web sites such as Facebook, the students had never heard of them.

But across town at Kim Chaek University, we found a remarkable experiment that has been in place for just five months. A small, elite group of students have been given limited access to the Internet. The goal is to give students the ability to conduct research without giving them total access to the Internet -- they remain under the watchful eye of the state.

For example, we were able to log on to abcnews.com, but all our reports on North Korea were blocked. "We have strict restrictions," explained an official involved with the project.

Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan told us the Internet is "dangerous if allowed into the minds of the young. We need to be cautious," he said, "because we think they might get corrupted."

Yet the young people we spoke with hope that this mind-set will change. When asked if she anticipated a day when she would be able to use the Internet to send messages to people outside North Korea, a young woman at the university told us she hoped so. "Why not?" she asked. "All the big countries are using it."