Seoul activists create ‘Smart Balloons’ to send to North Korea

The balloon feud over the Korean Peninsula is back. South Korea's military says it detected a new round of about 350 waste balloons sent by North Korea. Pyongyang insists its retaliation for South Korean activists sending their own balloons into the North carrying leaflets critical of Kim Jong UN's regime. Meanwhile, a group of activists in South Korea is developing a smart balloon capable of automated drops. Let's go to CNN's Mike Valero. He's live in Seoul and joins us now. So Mike, the North Korean defector you met actually let you borrow part of his smart balloon. What was that like? Well, Rosemary, you know, it's pretty extraordinary to be holding this piece of hardware. This is not a rainbow Technicolor camping Lantern. This would actually be the payload of a smart balloon. So what we have here, this is a speaker, Rosemary. We got the yellow speaker right here. It is attached to this rainbow parachute. So it's detaches from the balloon, falls to the ground, hits the ground with this cushion and it begins to play an anti Kim Jong Un anthem, letting whoever finds this in North Korea know, hey, there is freedom. Outside of North Korea, we're trying to send this message to you that you gotta rise up. That's essentially the message that comes from here. But Rosemary, what is different? What is the news peg here is that for years people in South Korea and you know, we actually had a chance to go to the workshop of this activist who is making these new smart balloons. And they're different in this way. For years, activists in South Korea have been sending balloons N filled with flash drives, K pop albums, scenes of freedom in the South. But what you see happening right here on the right hand side of your screen. These are smart balloons being manufactured to control their altitude, to be tracked with GPS, to send out fires like these every couple 100 meters or every couple dozen kilometers or so. Because a lot of these low tech balloons, they pop, they can crash. It's unclear where their stuff is dispersed. This is much more controlled. So listen to the co-founder of this group in his own words. Listen to what he told us. Our smart balloons are preset to start distributing the leaflets at a specific point. After calculating wind speed and direction this way, the leaflets will be distributed within the planned area. We can cover 300 to 400 kilometres this way. So, Rosemary, we bring you this story to let everybody know that this is not going anywhere. This storyline, this tit for tat between North Korea and South Korea. The man we talked to, Mr. Tay, he says he hears the criticism that the tit for tat has to stop, but he thinks that this is certainly striking a nerve and he's not going to stop sending these anytime soon, Rosemary.