Remember buying your first USB drive? The wonder of all that data on such a little portable device – no cables, no batteries – magic!
The Korean Peninsula at night. North Korea almost completely dark, the bright spot is Pyongyang Photo: (Public Domain)
Today they're given away at conferences or as corporate gifts, and with more of us using the cloud, millions of these drives get consigned to a drawer – devalued, unused, and unloved. But they still have value to people in some parts of the world.
Alex Gladstein is working for an organisation called flashdrivesforfreedom.org that wants to collect up thousands of old USB drives and then send them to organisations led by North Korean refugees and defectors to be smuggled back into North Korea.
Simon Morton spoke with Alex:
Stack of USB Thumb Drives Photo: (Flickr- Intel Free Press CC BY-SA 2.0)
