South Korean Financial Blogger Faces 18 Months of Prison 177
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.
News from the future (Score:5, Insightful)
Blogger arrested for allowing facts to get in the way of a perfectly good argument.
Re:News from the future (Score:5, Insightful)
Blogger arrested for allowing facts to get in the way of a perfectly good argument.
He was arrested, as you know, for "undermining the South Korean economy" with inaccurate ("false") statements on his blog. But if your country's economy can be undermined by a blog, then there is no hope for it anyway. In fact, barring the human rights component of these charges, S. Korea is doing worse harm to its economy by prosecuting this guy and thereby suggesting a mere blog has any influence whatsoever.
Believe It. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:last time i checked... (Score:1, Insightful)
Because democracies can never do such things as break international laws, undermine their human rights "for greater good", etc... We both know exactly what examples I could give about USA, but I'll go with the "Nazi party got to power through democratic process".
That said, the summary is funny to note that "he is the same guy who predicted...". I don't know how much publicity the mainstream media allowed to it in other countries (I would believe that it had popped up everywhere, seeing how the media loves scandals, threats, etc.) but at least here in Finland there has been constant speculation and talk about the possibility of a depression for many years.
Re:last time i checked... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just kill the messenger (Score:2, Insightful)
Bloggers... (Score:2, Insightful)
He was arrested, as you know, for "undermining the South Korean economy" with inaccurate ("false") statements on his blog. But if your country's economy can be undermined by a blog, then there is no hope for it anyway. In fact, barring the human rights component of these charges, S. Korea is doing worse harm to its economy by prosecuting this guy and thereby suggesting a mere blog has any influence whatsoever.
True enough, and in this situation Minerva probably did very little to cause the "global economic downturn" nobody except a few unreconstructed pessimists such as my self and Minerva were expecting since about 2006 at the latest. This looks like petty revenge by humiliated S-Korean politicians. However, a blog, posted at the critical time during a crisis can have the potential to swing events in a disastrous way. Of course we didn't have the internet back in 1962 but if we had had it; I wonder what would have happened had a conservative right wing blogger swung US public opinion in favour of war with a stirring patriotic blogging campaign about how world democracy had been unjustly attacked by the evil Soviet Union without the slightest provocation. And this just as the JFK administration was on the cusp of resolving that ungodly mess in a peaceful way. I suppose those of us that survived the aftermath would now be discussing the intricacies of flint-knapping spearheads over a roaring fire while the womenfolk argued about leather sewing techniques while that blogger would probably enjoy the same status in that post-appocalyptic society as Judas does in ours.
Re:Summary is inaccurate (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:South Korea is a tribal democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Laws which are not followed in a logical way are not laws. The whole point of following laws is to make people follow them even when that is not the most popular or expedient course - otherwise they would be unneccessary.
You are talking about mob rule. It is an objectively worse and less just way to run a society, and it should be condemned.
Stupidity (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:last time i checked... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd buy you a beer, if you were near! (Score:4, Insightful)
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!!]
Re:Believe It. (Score:3, Insightful)
To me it seems both are at fault; the corporations who lobbied for weaker regulation, and the people in the government who saw that regulation through.
It's tough to point fingers when there's so many people who screwed up. But they all deserve the blame.
Re:News from the future (Score:2, Insightful)
There's nothing as cathartic as shooting the messenger, eh?
Re:South Korea is a tribal democracy (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes and no.
Laws should, if anything, reflect the "moral" code of a society, and they should be supported by the majority. If the Korean people, not just a ruling caste, feels that making someone 'lose face' is something that should be punishable, a law that does just that is quite justified.
Bending a law to fulfill this role is not.
What bothers me is that a law that exists for a completely different reason was bent to make this possible. But it's not like we don't have similar cases, where we can't punish someone for something we feel is 'wrong' but don't dare to make a law about it, so we don't look like we base our laws on emotions and personal 'moral' tastes instead of logic and reason.
Re:South Korea is a tribal democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
The grandparent just offers his analysis. No judgement is expressed if you read carefully. You may disagree, but from your post it seems that it was a good post sparkling an interesting discussion. I'm confused why you think that is "trolling at its worst".
Further more, you write about the statements being "unqualified" and "cannot be substantiated in ANY way", while you offer no arguments to back this up other than "no justice system can operate on such a weak foundation" and "is also simply wrong".
I'm reading: parent is so clearly wrong that I won't bother to give arguments, and because he is wrong he must be trolling.
I'd like to see grandparents claims substantiated or refuted. Modding grandparent down will lead to less readers, and therefore the chances of someone offering more information, or refuting the claims will go down.
South Korea looks more like North Korea every year (Score:3, Insightful)
Korean Internet users now have to submit their resident registration codes, the Korean equivalent of social security numbers, and names, before posting files or commenting on Web sites with more than 100,000 daily visitors [blogspot.com]
Have they become what they hate?
Re:last time i checked... (Score:3, Insightful)
News is what isn't expected (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:News from the future (Score:3, Insightful)
The Wired article author deserves 18 months in jail for that particular piece of writing. I had to follow through to the AP article to find out if the blogger had actually been found guilty or not (he hasn't).
Free markets the world over are based as much on confidence and rumour as actual assets. Why do you think we're in an economic crisis at the moment? It's because of a lack of confidence in the world market. Confidence can be undermined for legitimate reasons, but it can also be undermined maliciously by people spreading rumours that can be flat-out untrue, or can be self-fulfilling prophecies. Spread rumours that the stock of a company is going to tank, and investors will flee, forcing the stock to tank.
And if you think that a blog can't possibly have that much effect, consider that a senior government advisor in the UK was forced to resign recently by a blog, and the media is awash with stories about how powerful blogs are becoming.
It's important to note that nobody has been found guilty yet, and the 18 months sentence is merely an item on the prosecution's wish-list. Hopefully the judge will base the verdict on the following points:
I would hope that they take the fourth point into account, but it's probable that the first three would be enough for a conviction.
Re:Summary is inaccurate (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Short Selling + Reverse Pump N' Dump..... (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the problem is that he didn't have any stocks or any assets. He was merely a jobless man on his early thirties who didn't have any formal education on economy. That's why the DA is not convicting him for some kind of law on securities or market arbitration, which is far more severe than publishing false information. what he claims is that the DA is charging him because he was merely grumbling that the government is a stupid big liar, though some of the information was not throughoutly fact-checked.
Of course, there are conspiracy theories that there are other people behind him, since they was shocked that his real-world identy was a jobless man who merely graduated community college, and still could post articles with in-depth analysis on the current financial situation. However, that's another story.
Re:News from the future (Score:5, Insightful)
the problem lies not with the journalist but with the way the markets work. If the traders are so dumb that they cannot think for themselves and cannot decide what to buy or sell on its own merits rather than hearsay, then they are clearly unfit for the job and should be fired.
You may choose to think of it as a problem, but markets are mostly fashion. Movement in the price of a stock is 80% fashion statement, 20% fundmentals. That's just th nature of the stock market. Geeks often have a very hard time undersanding this, given all the numbers that seem relevent, but facts about a company only dominate stock price over a 15+ year time horizon.
Inside that timeframe, stock price is mostly about the popularity of companies, industries, and sectors. A good trader is focused on popularity, hearsay, rumors, malicious gossip, and all the other herd behaviours that affect popularity. Trying to determine what to buy on its own merits will *ruin* you in the stock market (if your tradiung with less than that 15-year outlook). Figuring out which way the herd is going and getting there first, completely unencumbered by reality, will make you rich.
Re:I'd buy you a beer, if you were near! (Score:3, Insightful)
That's the problem with basing the economy on IP, it's all smoke and mirrors, nothing tangible to base it on...
I don't think it's really because the economy is based on intellectual property, but because the stock market and financial businesses operate entirely on speculation that comes from invented numbers (the smoke and mirrors part). There were no copyrights, patents (unless someone has patented a method for building up a fake economic system and profiting from the collapse, which sadly wouldn't really surprise me), or trademarks directly involved in the failure of stupidity in the banking industry.