Slashdot Mirror
South Korea Censors Its Own Censor
decora writes "The EFF reports on an internet censorship case in South Korea. The blog of Professor K.S. Park was recently brought up for consideration by the Korean Communication Standards Commission, which presides over South Korea's online censorship scheme, blocking about 10,000 URLs per month. The unusual thing about this case is that Park himself is a member of the commission; he was appointed to it by the opposition party as a well known free-speech advocate. The other members of the committee allowed him to make changes to his blog for now, but have vowed to 'take action' against it in the future."
thats all one can really say in such matters
We substituted the coffee Slashdot normally drinks with "Sandoz Crystals", Lets see if they notice the difference
The Korean Constitutional Court struck down the Telecommunications Business Act provision for being too vague, warning about the risk of censorship associated with the ICEC regime.
However, unabashed, the South Korean government has merely replaced ICEC with another administrative body whose job it is to apply new, vague legal standards to the Internet. Made up of nine members appointed by the president, the Korean Communications Standards Commission (KCSC) was created to regulate Internet content.
Professor K.S. Park is a member of KCSC, one of three members suggested by the opposition party. Prof. Park is a scholar with a long history of defending online freedom of expression, and he organized the constitutional challenge against the rule abolishing online anonymity...
...
In July, Prof. Park decided to begin exploring the nuances of these censorship choices in his blog. Believing that a censorship regime is terrible but a secret censorship regime is even worse, he used his blog to educate people about the types of content that were being removed from the Internet in South Korea. He would publish a sample of the type of content that had been removed and include a legal discussion of the removal choice. For example, Prof. Park posted non-sexual pictures of human male anatomy, such as those found in sex education books, along with the argument that such images are not obscene and that even by the conservative Korean standards it's enough to just place age-restrictions on access. Six of his fellow commissioners rejected the argument.
As a result, in August, Prof. Park found his own blog on the roster of sites to be considered by the KCSC board.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Irregardless of the differences between what is censored between the different nations, there is one huge difference between nothing ever censored at all and something censored: infrastructure. The infrastructure is a drag on businesses and individuals alike. For example, if I am responsible if someone posts something "bad" in a comment on a blog I run, then that makes it much harder for me to run my own blog. If I am a common carrier, then that makes it a lot easier to do.
Responsibility is an addiction
Virtue is a temptation
Community is a cartel
My name is Inigo Montoya von Totengrammatik. You said "irregardless." Prepare to die.
But besides that, there's something more than the cost of the infrastructure that needs to be considered: the fact that the infrastructure is already in place. Governments tend to like hiding the list of censored sites, and invariably it seems they are prone to overstepping, secretly using the blacklist to a remarkable range of corrupt ends. At least Korea had this free speech advocate standing in the way.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The Censors, apparently...
From the OP: "...The EFF is deeply troubled by the rise of administrative boards to censor the Internet—now extant in Turkey, Australia, India and South Korea..."
You can add the UK to that list - they have the "Internet Watch Foundation"....
Why should I have to pay to fund their evil? Maybe having the north cross the DMZ will give them a reason to support freedom.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
No wonder some people confuse north and south sometimes...
Hm? This was the board member who was opposed to censorship, and tried to make the board's work more transparent. Of course the more censorship-friendly board members don't like him posting about it on his blog.
In Soviet Korea, censor censors censor!
It is!
Yes it is the same thing.
The right to post a YouTube video (copyright stuff is an entirely different issue, same with Google being a private company, both things I won't address in this post), to wear a Swastika and to protest the government are all parts of the exact same right which all people have by virtue of being born. Anytime you attempt to censor anything you are infringing a natural right which has the end result: tyranny. The right to free, uncensored speech, aside from being a natural right of all people is very much needed in any country with any sort of voting or democratic process, because without information from all sides, people won't be able to make the best decisions at the polling booths.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Yo dog, I heard you like internet censorship so I censored your internet censor's internet.
At first glance, I just said "Oh, North Korea!" Then I looked again and said, "Wait, South?"
in other words: Two wrongs don't not, no way, no how, make a right. Infact, it makes it doubly wrong.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Maybe you could make a movie about idiot zombies. That would be great.
Yo dawg, we heard you like censorship, so we censored your censors, so you can censor while you censor your censored censorship!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
...he should just leak the block list.