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South Korean Financial Blogger Faces 18 Months of Prison
eldavojohn writes "A South Korean blogger named Park Dae-sung has been arrested and charged with destabilizing foreign markets by blogging about declining companies. This is the same blogger who predicted the economic downturn that has been experienced the world over. The Korean Times offers more information on the community college graduate and the accusations levied against him."
Several readers have also sent in news that Omidreza Mirsayafi, an Iranian blogger arrested and imprisoned for his writings earlier this year, has now died in custody.
Blogger arrested for allowing facts to get in the way of a perfectly good argument.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
It's not managers driving their companies to the ground, it's not politics failing to watch over the markets. It's a blogger that warned people about it.
Glad we found someone nobody misses when he disappears. Though, personally, I'd have missed a few managers and politicians less.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Expect it.
Expect more of it. Even in the west.
Its something I dont understand. Blaming companies when you should be blaming the central bank and the government, for creating artifical credit bubbles and the resulting mania thereafter.
I mean really, they caused the last one, they'll be causing the next.
Would you give the keys to your new car after your friend rode your last one into the ground, and you couldn't drive for 15 years?
I think not.
It is not the same legal process as one would find in the West, where technicalities and Habeas Corpus rein supreme. Someone made a joke about the goverment detaining this particular blogger because he was more intelligent and resourceful than the government, which made the government jealous. That is more true than you know.
Additionally, Korea is the most Confucian country in the world which might add some understanding into why laws aren't always followed in a logical way. This blogger made the government "lose face", to be blunt.
Maybe I shouldn't blog about how bad the popcorn had gotten at the local movie theater since the economy went into the crapper. The movie theater could go out of business. Actors could be laid off. Hollywood could demand a federal bailout. Then I could be arrested for causing chaos in the marketplace of recycled ideas.
Then again, the popcorn really does suck. Maybe I should call a food inspector instead.
From the Washington Post article:
Je ne parle pas francais.
Oh, is it so?
Then how come these moronic South Korean courts don't punish Samsung or Hyundai by imprisoning their execs when they played the markets?
Just because they are HUGE corporates? Just because their leaders bowed deeply and said sorry to everyone?
This is just because the blogger is a poor guy who has no money to defend himself with high powered lawyers against a corrupt system.
While we are at that why don't we throw out democracy? After all the rule of Kings was much better: genetic intelligence versus mob rule.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I am a South Korean, and I'll clarify.
The blogger (Minerva) claimed that South Korean government issued an "official order" for Korean banks not to purchase USD for a certain (short) period. IIRC, the average exchange rate during that particular day was going to be used in a lot of financial charts, so by gaming the system, many companies would look financially better in documents and the government will boast it to the people.
Turns out that there was no official order. Why create an official document when a phone call would suffice?
And, ladies and gentlemen, in South Korea, this is a felony that will ensure 18 months in prison. Only if he had correctly said "phone calls"! (Well, of course the government would've found yet another even more ridiculous excuse to punish him, so it won't matter much in the end. They are immune to logic. Why follow logic, when you can just throw one bullshit argument and another and still have half of the nation vote for you?)
Anyone remember the UA debacle last September? If the markets are sufficiently hysterical, you can make them plunge with a single headline, regardless whether it's correct or not. The wrong reporting about UA was corrected immediately, yet it sent the markets into a nose dive from which they haven't recovered yet. Regardless of whether the blogger is correct with his statements or not, I would call the reaction of the south korean gov't alarming and telling of the economic troubles soon to emerge there.
So what this incident with the south korean blogger tells me:
Accurate or not, the arrest of this blogger does more damage than bloggers will ever do. It undermines the judicial code and transparency, I really wonder how foreign investor will feel when a country's judicial and political system acts like this.
The USA is a democracy, and we've got this little thing called (ironically enough) the Patriot Act that can be used to make people disappear.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
That's the problem with basing the economy on IP, it's all smoke and mirrors, nothing tangible to base it on...when it's all just 'numbers' somewhere, those numbers can be easily manipulated.[as per your post]
Then you have to license thoughts and ideas...How soon before your kid's DNA/genome/*sequence is violating some MegaCorp.'s IP?(do some research here, it's scary already)
[Not a bash on the U.K., it's arguably far worse here in the U.S.A.]
You can only trade /sell/buy speculations and play numbers for so long until it all has to be backed by something material.(collateral)
No one should be surprised by all of this. It was set up decades ago...added onto, and added onto- never looked at head on and fixed.
White-washing a mud fence only works for fair weather...what could you realistically expect otherwise?
The rains have come....[get your hip-waders!!]
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Hehehe, get it? Misfiring missile. I kill myself.
Kim Jong Il might just do the same if he keeps up with the missile antics.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Imprisonment and death in Iran are more or less common things, Iran's theocracy is one of the harshest regimes in the world, but South Korea is considered a democracy, therefore someone being in prison for publishing a blog in South Korea is more newsworthy than someone dying in prison in Iran.
I am a native South Korean who live in Seoul, and maybe I can (sort of) explain a bit about the law.
Yes, the websites hate the law pretty much (because it requires the companies to add 'ID authentication system', which isn't cheap in a market with razor-thin profits), and many Koreans who do care about privacy also hate it, too. I also feel sort of sad when that law passed.
Well, the reason behind this law was something like this. In slashdot, if you see a troll, you simply moderate that reply a '-1, troll', and move along. In Korea, people start 'feeding' the troll in more cruel ways, e.g. track down the real-world identy of that guy, bomb his personal website with hate spams, bomb his e-mail, and in some occasions, even e-mails of people close to him. Yup, the replies on that troll became the real-world identy of that guy, rather than another troll, or any reasonable reply.
The horrifying thing was that this phenomenom wasn't limited to real-world celeberities. It could be you, or me, or anybody on the net. Yes, being a troll, or saying something stupid isn't a good thing to do, but we all do make mistakes. I've seen people ranging from teenage girls to senior citizens getting horribly bullied by anonymous mobs. Occasionally, there were news reports on people commiting suicide because of the mental horror they had to undergo. It got so serious that people needed to stay completely anonymous on all occasions, or having some way to stop this maddness.
Yes, I feel that many of the Korean people don't think political freedom is such an important thing compared to things such as security or wealth. This may be because their history of democracy has been so short, and they have been living a hard life for many years suffering from poverty, hunger, and North Korea. Republic of Korea is merely some 60-years old, and approximately half of that period was under the rule of dictators. In such a society, it is difficult to teach why political freedom is important and dictatorship is bad, because those people who benefited a lot from the dictatorship still exists in many core positions of the society. I believe it may take some time, patience, education, and continuous struggling.