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."
I believe that a better saying would be:
The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing...
The guy who advocates free speech probably joined the censors to "fight the good fight" from the inside, but of course he will make enemies in there. Who is to say that people on the commission who don't like him or his views don't simply keep dropping his URL into the "super secret box for enemy of the state URLs to verify and block"...
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
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
Yeah, well REDACTED the censors! They can go REDACTED a REDACTED fat REDACTED!
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
You turn to the US to defend freedom? Where have you been the past decade?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Except that's not what happened. One of the members of the board of censors is actually a free speech advocate. He started posting things on his blog which he thought had been wrongly censored. So it's no surprise that republishing of material which was already censored would be flagged up as something to be censored.
The argument the EFF is making is that the censorship itself needs to be open; the blog lets the public know what kinds of things are actually being censored, and they are thus urging the committee to leave it up.
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
It's the US that's forcing countries to accept its military bases, not the other way around.
We had a plan to leave Yongsan. It was requested that we stay.
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.