Kim Seong-min has stopped hiding. Eight months after his Free North Korea Radio station went live on shortwave, the 44-year-old says he no longer worries about assassins being sent from Pyongyang to eliminate him. Nor does he fear the left-wing students and union activists who have assaulted him in the past over his broadcasts.
He does worry, however, about reprisals against the family he left behind in North Korea when he chose to defect. 'When I first arrived in Seoul, I was terrified, but I realised that worrying changes nothing. Anyway, I don't think the North Koreans would send a team over to kill me because it would be too expensive for just one man.
'My parents were both dead by the time I left, but I'm not sure if my five older sisters have been punished for my defection,' he said, looking down at the table. 'I'm not in contact with them.'
Mr Kim and a handful of others work from a basement studio in the South Korean capital, broadcasting interviews with other defectors as well as news and analysis in dialects spoken north of the border.
His story is similar to thousands who fled life in the North for better prospects in South Korea, waiting for a day when the country shakes off the shackles of Kim Jong-il's regime. The latest flood disaster, in which an estimated 10,000 people have perished, underscores their fears for friends and relatives.
Kim Seong-min endured years of famine in the North during a life spent partly in hiding in China after his first escape. That effort ended in arrest and torture before his second escape. Now, seven years after arriving in South Korea, he finds himself criticised by people who he says are wrong to be cosying up to a regime he knows first-hand. But it's the same government that he believes will one day collapse.