Over the past year, Kim has intensified a border crackdown that has attempted to seal the once-porous 1,420-kilometer frontier with China. The infiltration that he fears? It's being waged with televisions rigged to receive foreign broadcasts, and with smuggled mobile phones that — if you can get a Chinese signal along the border — can call the outside world. Very often, it arrives in the form of South Korean soap operas smuggled in on DVDs or USB drives.

In North Korea, a country where televisions and radios must be permanently preset to receive only state broadcasts, it's South Korean TV they crave. "South Korean dramas, that's what everyone wants," noted a Seoul-based missionary who runs a string of safe houses in China for people who have fled North Korea. He spoke on condition of anonymity to protect the safety of his network.

But if this problem seems absurd, the dilemma is deadly serious for Kim, who needs to find a way to modernize his country while holding on to absolute power. Kim's crackdown has been largely aimed at the border with China. Entire border security units have been replaced, fences have been strengthened and punishments ramped up for anyone caught trying to get through. Meanwhile, special security units have been formed to seek out any contraband information or technology.

"There has definitely been a push to roll back the tide of the flow of information," said Nat Kretchun, associate director of international consulting group InterMedia, which released a report earlier this year about information flow into North Korea. His conclusion: North Korea is increasingly anxious to keep information at bay, but has less ability to control it.

People are more willing to watch foreign entertainment, talk on illegal mobile phones and tell family and friends about what they are doing, he said. "And there are intensely entrepreneurial smugglers who are more than willing to fulfill that demand," said Kretchun.

In a country where one family has held absolute control for more than 60 years, a communist enclave that survived the downfall of the Soviet Union and a devastating 1990s famine, the notion of allowing knowledge of the larger world is deeply feared. "Even a hint of submission to the enemy is the shortest road to death and self-destruction," Kim said in his October speech.