- NK secret service (or whatever you call it) is more sophisticated than this. They will act as proper company from Turkey, India, China or even EU countries...
- if you actually manage to get some North Korean who escaped to West, they are 10x more dedicated than anyone else. China, or South Korea (usual target countries) do not offer many opportunities, they need money for relatives.
- NK secret services do not attack west infrastructure, or steal info from small fish. They are too small to do that! Most money is from drugs and guns.
- if you hire US only, you eliminate 99.99% of issues. US borders are not ideal, but they do repeal unwanted Asians.
Edit: * stitching, working with cloth, it was textile factory in East Europe
Today there is most likely trade with China (I am not familiar with that). I would go through Russia, there is direct border and regular trade. NK building companies operate in captured parts of Ukraine for example.
Or just use bitcoin. NKs do have access to internet, it is good store of value (better than diamonds) and highly liquid asset!
I am surprised about the request for drug tests. Is this common in the US?
Except for high-security jobs, which are never possible remotely anyway, I have never heard of a client or employer asking for a drug test. If I got a request for a drug test, I would quit immediately. Even if I am sure it is negative, my private life is my business. Any attempt to control my private life I see as a personal attack.
In practice it varies heavily on how it’s implemented, generally a company isn’t really keen to spend the money and time on that shit until after they’ve been burned by incidents.
- Could be once on hiring, then only if you really fuck up. This is what my company does.
- Could be “random” testing that just so happens to “randomly” catch the obvious fuckwit who walked in after driving to work while probably blitzed and now wants to hop in a sprayer.
- Could be genuinely random testing.
I work in Agriculture, and my company provides me a work pickup truck (funny enough, my ATV in the back is my actual “work” vehicle if you consider time spent driving) along with fuel, which I can make reasonable personal use of. The tradeoff is they demand the ability to get notified of tickets/points added on my license, and if I start repeatedly getting speeding tickets and ignore the “hey, stop that shit” talk they give me, they’ll ultimately rescind the free vehicle they’ve provided me. Getting a DUI would very likely result in immediate termination. Which I consider fair enough
If I worked a desk job and don’t have a situation where altered states of mind would present a massive danger to myself, others, and company equipment, then yeah drug tests can fuck right off.
Very much so. An ex-coworker worked for a cardboard factory, attempted to unionize the workforce by providing lunches to workers during talk shops. He was taking liquid cannabis, had a doctors permission, script to get his medical card, only dosed enough for his aliment, and HR was aware.
Management had him take a urine analysis, supposedly workforce wide, of course failed due to the cannabis use, fired him the same day.
Never missed a day he scheduled, good guy.
Working for the city we do routine tests, especially CDL drivers, but from what I understand, they don't look for positive tests for cannabis, so I'm unsure if we're seeing a shift due to the legalization across nearly half the US, or they're specifically looking for opioids.
Just figured I'd share a perspective.
The employer was completely incredulous I would refuse to submit to the background check and thought I had stuff to hide. I was laid off in short order. I do t regret anything, this was invasive and unnecessary. I’ve never had to do a background check again beyond providing an extract of my police file that says I have no convictions.
Some companies have contracts with the Federal Government and even if you won't be working on those projects or won't have to get the security clearance, there are certain clauses in the contracts which requires the company to not have employees drink at work, to drug test employees and other stuff like that.
I once was asked to do a drug test as the offer was contingent on the drug test to clear because of this kind of contract. I rejected the offer from other reasons, but the recruiter told me we can schedule the drug test weeks in advance, to make sure 'everything is out of your system, just in case'. It was a urine test, and I got the feeling that the company was trying to make sure the test was going to clear regardless of my lifestyle outside of work, no questions asked.
Also, the recruiter told me it was a one-time thing for me and other 'general purpose' employees, but persons directly involved in the whole security clearance government stuff were subject to random testing.
The previous company won their case in Colorado Supreme Court to fire someone using medical marijuana even while off-duty.[0]
Additionally, even though we passed a law (constitutional amendment) allowing recreational use in Colorado, employers are still allowed to test and fire you for it.
[0] https://ogletree.com/insights-resources/blog-posts/colorado-...
Does the C-suite also get regular, supervised piss-in-a-cup tests, or do they actually not have as much impact on the success of the firm as they claim to?
Ye that sounds both illegal and pointless.
For software jobs? No, they aren't very common. But they are not unheard of.
Many jobs give you lots of warning. So it isn’t so much “are you doing drugs” as “can you stop doing drugs.”
Not everyone has that privilege.
This is "a sign"? In what company is that not grounds for immediate revocation of all access, termination?
[x] Phone, laptop.
> working odd hours,
[x] Delayed sleep phase insomnia.
> Repeated requests for prepayment followed by “anger or aggression when the request is denied”;
[x] Previously ripped off by shitty employers.
> Evading in-person meetings or requests for drug tests;
[x] Social anxiety, medical cannabis user who is aware that even though legal (in AU) it is stigmatised.
> Having multiple online profiles for the same identity with different pictures, or online profiles with no picture.
[x] Average privacy enthusiast.
I await further instructions from Glorious Leader.
if you're flagged, then here is your plane ticket, come to HQ and let's prove your a real human. showing up, looking more or less like your ID and zoom call, and being able to speak generally about what you're working on is enough.
like even if the job is 100% remote, fly em to the office at least once or twice.
And there's still the "man-in-the-middle" problem.
Why would they evade drug tests and meeting in person? Do the "techies" claim they are not Korean at all? Surely, a North Korean would pass as a South Korean to (at least) any non-Korean colleague?
- North Korean: Uh-oh. I can’t physically do either of those.
- Bay Area: I’m not taking bus-to-BART-to-bus from Berkeley to the city for some meeting that could’ve been a Zoom. Drug test? Is there a minimum level I need to pass? Not doing it.
Drug tests are dehumanizing af. What I do outside my work hours is my own private time.
Perhaps these slaves are being doped up to focus on the work?
It's common all among the working class in Asia and the Asian Diaspora (Bayswater Basic if you've ever been to London). It's dirt cheap and keeps you awake while. doing any monotonous or manual labor.
In this specific case, a drug test for a remote job requires ID verification. It's a simple redundancy to verify that the person you hired is that same person.
If you're a white person on a freelancer website, you may get approached by someone who wants to buy your account.
And why? If they can’t do the job you fire them.
It’s very dumb. Scheduled-in-advance piss tests aren’t great for catching much other than weed. Most other things aren’t detected in urine after 2-3 days. Weed metabolites, which is what they test for, stick around for potentially weeks. The whole exercise will be practically pointless if weed ever gets removed from the set of things they’re testing for.
[edit] what I’d love to see replace this junk is some kind of probably-computerized attention and reaction test, for jobs where it actually matters. Which is only a subset of the ones that currently test, but, when it comes to truck drivers and heavy machinery operators and such, I don’t care if they like to do drugs off hours, but I do care if some straight-edge driver is too tired to drive, and that’d catch those cases, too. Maybe open to cheating, but piss tests are routinely cheated anyway.
Why? Depending on the work, it might be a legal requirement. But for the purposes of these guidelines, it doesn't matter. The point is, if they are evading in-person tasks, it could be because they're misrepresenting their location.
Additionally, drug testing locations examine government IDs all the time, so the NK workers are not likely to actually have one that matches the name they are working under. Otherwise, people who use illegal drugs could hire "clean" family or friends to give the hair/urine/blood required for the tests.
People who have escaped from Scientology report being treated similarly - guarded at all times when they leave their compounds, ID documents seized.
Typically freelancers work from wherever they want, on any random starbucks wifi.
> Back in 1937 Comrade Stalin pointed out that as long as the Soviet Union existed amid capitalist encirclement we would have wreckers, spies, saboteurs and murderers sent to our home front by foreign states. [1]
Just change the names and the years and the professions around, and we'll be good to go. The actual existence, non-existence, or prevalence of spies, saboteurs and wreckers is second fiddle to the perception thereof. :)
[1] https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1947-2/xenophobia/xenophobia-t...
> infiltrate organizations they work for to steal secrets
Do you worry about this as a random company? You are gonna steal source code for 4 out of 12 micro services required to run some random online shopping website, or a video game? what is North Korean gov. Going to do with it?
And if you give random people access to customer data, then it’s already being sold on the dark web.
> suspicious behavior such as working odd hours and inconsistencies in name spellings
every autistic or dyslexic or socially disfynctional techy is a spy now?
A: Insert code for backdoors, then leverage those backdoors to hack defense systems and systems that can track where defense personnel and equipment are. Traffic cameras and delivery services come to mind.
Why would they ask for prepayment?
Stuxnet, e.g.?
