Security heightened even as N. Korea tries to woos tourists

While North Korea is making a strong push to increase the number of tourists who visit the country each year — currently a few thousand come from Western countries and more from neighboring China — it is stepping up its enforcement of a broad set of strict but sometimes ambiguously implemented regulations about what foreign visitors can bring with them or what they can do while in the country.

[...] the pro-tourism policy, like many other business opportunities that involve dealing with and possibly making concessions to the outside world, poses an obvious conundrum for Pyongyang — the potential of economic gains that require change, versus concerns about how that might undermine regime security.

The U.S. State Department recently updated and expanded its already blunt warning against North Korean travel.

"While tourism and the flexibility of travel in the DPRK has expanded, there has been a measurable increase in security at the borders," said Andrea Lee, CEO of New Jersey-based Uri Tours, which has been organizing tours to the North — officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea — for 15 years.

Internet browsing histories and cookies on travelers' computers and other electronic devices are subject to search for banned content, including pornography or material critical of the DPRK government.

[...] they can still land in hot water if they start up conversations with random people on the street, do anything that smacks of politicking or proselytizing, attempt to exchange currency with an unauthorized vendor, take unauthorized photographs, shop at stores not designated for foreigners or in any way show disrespect to the "Great Persons of Mount Paektu" — national founder Kim Il Sung and his son Kim Jong Il and the current dictator, Kim Jong Un.

[...] as the State Department warns, if you take a mobile phone and feel like calling home, "please keep in mind that you have no right to privacy in