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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...
As long as there's a socially-recognized need to provide for censorship, either for victims' rights like in the case of the exploitation of minors, there will be boards whose jobs are to try to make censorship work.
The only way to make it work truly fairly, in my opinion, is to make it very difficult to censor unless one can provide proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the content to be censored is of a crime yielding a victim, and the presence of the content itself is the cause of victimization. Voyeurism, pornography of minors, the outright celebration of violence, and the real and demonstrable threat of violence are the only major criteria that I would really censor for everyone. For those that are adults, they can choose what to look at and what to avoid, and parents should take the initiative to deal with their childrens' viewing habits.
That being said, people are judged by what they say, and if someone says something implying a possibility of committing a crime, their speech, in whatever form it may come, can be used as proof against them.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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
the outright celebration of violence
What do you mean by this?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I agree; it's better to err on the side of freedom and allow some abuse of free speech, than to err on the side of censorship and open up possibilities for politicians and bureaucrats to censor anyone who threatens their power.
That being said, people are judged by what they say, and if someone says something implying a possibility of committing a crime, their speech, in whatever form it may come, can be used as proof against them.
This is not without its problems either, since anyone can be made to look suspicious if you dig through enough of his or her statements. As Cardinal Richelieu said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." There's a reason lawyers always advice their clients not to talk to the police, no matter how innocent they are.
Most people have also broken the law in some way or other, often without being aware of it. Having access to all private information gives a lot of power to politicians and civil servants to scare or blackmail their enemies - you know that if you criticise the wrong person, they'll find something to pin on you, maybe even something you're guilty of without being aware of it. Especially since the law is a matter of interpretation.
And even if you're eventually found to be not guilty, you may be arrested, tied up in court for a long time, lose your job, etc.
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!
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.
Voyeurism is too hard to really define accurately and unless the person being filmed can identify where it is and prove that the person couldn't be on a public street or something and see them and even then it would be someone's word against someone's word.
As for CP, the laws have done a lot more harm than good. By making it a restricted commodity and by making batshit insane decisions on it, we've got laws that harm, rather than help minors. First off, by making possession of it a crime, we've created an underground economy where rapists and abusers can get money to feed their crimes. Instead of letting it die out with previous images, our current laws encourage people to start paying the rapists rather than getting it for free. Net result is more minors are harmed because of these laws. Next, it is impossible to say what does and doesn't constitute CP, how is it that a drawing can be constituted as CP? Or a photoshop manipulation. Both of them are victimless crimes, no one is getting abused in either of them. Or what about the 19 year old with a 17 year old boy/girlfriend where they might be charged with CP for sending nude pictures, despite the fact that a day later when the 17 year old is 18 it is somehow legal?
As for celebrating violence, that is political speech and should, without a doubt, be protected. For example, in America we have Independence Day which celebrates the armed, violent, attacks against the British in the Revolutionary War. We celebrate soldiers who make a living killing others. The news celebrates violence all day, praising violent cops and violent soldiers. To quote Voltaire
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets
And as for the "real and demonstrable threat of violence" it is again political speech that should not be censored. Not to mention that violence can, and should be used to topple an oppressive regime.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
You are absolutely correct. Therefore the answer to this problem is obvious. (Censorship is a terribly inefficient and ineffective way to prevent the exploitation of minors, incidentally)
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.
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.
As long as there's a socially-recognized need to provide for censorship
There isn't. But there's always some totalitarian twerp willing to stack the discussion by bringing up statistically nonexistent things, or unpleasant things like kiddy porn that are only a symptom of the still unaddressed actual abuse, and try to use peer pressure to make it look like anyone who wants an uncensored net is really a secret freak or naive.
The only way to make [censorship] work truly fairly, in my opinion
Oh yeah, that's what the world needs, the uninformed opinion of someone whose best idea is limiting speech for great justice.
make it very difficult to censor unless one can provide proof
Oh yeah, so you mean make it trivially easy and give the keys to some bureaucrat who will push the button whenever given a properly signed form?
So yeah, let's just re-architect the internet into a centralized thing, require ID for anything, mandate government-key-escrow style crypto for everything (to remove the need for all other crypto), make all other crypto illegal to allow the scan for things needing censoring, and maintain an huge database of links and content hashes we've marked. Not to mention the hacking target that we've created...
And that doesn't even touch on the bureaucracy inherent in the censoring organization, let along in the auditing process require to be able to recognize and ultimately undo mistaken censoring, etc.
Wow.
Because you're easily led, panicky, and morally outraged by the skin of your own species, you want to break the internet almost entirely, enact a trillion-dollar government boondoggle, then funnel all communications and business through that boondoggle. Or had you not thought of any of the consequences of your desires?
...he should just leak the block list.