But send your chunk of cheap flash memory into North Korea, and it becomes a powerful, even subversive object—one that a new activist project wants use to help chip away at the intellectual control of the hermit kingdom's fascist government.

Late last week, the New York-based Human Rights Foundation and the Silicon Valley nonprofit Forum 280 launched Flash Drives for Freedom, an initiative to collect USB flash drive donations from Americans and then ship those slices of silicon to North Korean defector groups. The Korean activist organizations, starting with the Seoul-based non-profit North Korean Strategy Center, will then fill the drives with Western and South Korean films and TV shows and smuggle them across the border into North Korea, where their contraband contents can break Kim Jong-un's ban on all foreign media.