Flash Drives for Freedom

North Korea is sealed off from the rest of the world. Its people have no internet, no foreign mail and no way to call abroad, and the only news they hear comes from the state. The Kim regime depends on that silence.

There was a crack in the wall. Defector groups were already loading USB drives with films, soap operas, books and Wikipedia and moving them in through smuggling networks on the Chinese border. A drive is small, easy to hide and easy to pass from hand to hand.

The limit was supply. The groups bought every drive at retail, which held them to a few thousand a year. Meanwhile most of us have an old drive or two sitting forgotten in a drawer.

With the Human Rights Foundation we asked people to give up the drives they no longer used. HRF and defector groups would wipe them, fill them with outside content and send them north. To make giving feel like defiance, we gave it a target.

We built a wall of hundreds of Kim Jong-un faces with USB ports for mouths. A loop of his real propaganda speech played until someone plugged in a drive, and then it went quiet. It opened at the Oslo Freedom Forum on May 24, 2016.

From Oslo it toured SXSW, RightsCon, MozFest and freedom forums in San Francisco and Guatemala City, with stops from New York and Los Angeles to London, Seoul and Copenhagen. Posters, USB stickers and an online drive kept donations coming between events.

In August 2017 John Oliver gave the campaign a segment on Last Week Tonight, with no pitch or partnership behind it. It has been viewed more than 16 million times on broadcast and YouTube. TIME, BBC News, CNN, WIRED, MSNBC and The Guardian covered it too.

In August 2018 a photo of the installation at DEF CON reached Reddit's front page, voted up by more than 65,000 people. That same month, encryption company Mainframe picked Flash Drives for Freedom as one of seven causes to share its $1.4M Proof of Heart grant.

Then the regime answered. In September 2018 Minju Choson, the paper North Korean officials read every day, denounced the campaign by name and said its "ill design can never work." HRF took it as proof the drives were getting through.

The campaign earned 1.23 billion media impressions and an estimated $10.5M in earned media without buying a single ad. More than 18,000 articles were written about it.

The drives kept moving. By September 2018 HRF had sent more than 70,000 USB sticks into North Korea, and the campaign's count now stands at 125,000 drives donated and an estimated 1.2 million North Koreans reached.

We made it with Leo Burnett Chicago. It won a D&AD Impact Pencil in 2017 and a One Show Silver Pencil in PR in 2018, and in 2020 it took the Webby People's Voice award for best cause-related campaign, out of nearly 13,000 entries.