South Korea Censors Its Own Censor 56
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."
pot kettle black!! (Score:1, Funny)
thats all one can really say in such matters
Re:pot kettle black!! (Score:4, Interesting)
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"...
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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 [wikipedia.org]. At least Korea had this free speech advocate standing in the way.
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in other words: Two wrongs don't not, no way, no how, make a right. Infact, it makes it doubly wrong.
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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 o
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I'd bet that censor is on stun right now...
Re:pot kettle black!! (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
For those too lazy to RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
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...
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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.
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The other relevant part is this:
"Earlier, the country’s Telecommunications Business Act (1991), which states that ‘‘a person in use of telecommunications shall not make communications with contents that harm the public peace and order or social morals and good customs"..."
So, basically all it took was one picture of a penis, in a non-sexual context for the purpose of discussing censorship, and that apparently "harmed the public peace and order or social morals and good customs"? Heaven fo
Who Censors the Censors ? (Score:1)
The Censors, apparently...
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Yeah, well REDACTED the censors! They can go REDACTED a REDACTED fat REDACTED!
Yo dawg... (Score:2)
Yo dawg, we heard you like censorship, so we censored your censors, so you can censor while you censor your censored censorship!
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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
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the outright celebration of violence
What do you mean by this?
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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 h
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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 makin
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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)
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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 tr
Pull US financial support (Score:2)
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.
Re:Pull US financial support (Score:4, Funny)
You turn to the US to defend freedom? Where have you been the past decade?
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It's the US that's forcing countries to accept its military bases, not the other way around.
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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.
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It's the US that's forcing countries to accept its military bases, not the other way around.
That's actually very false. US Military bases are huge boons to the native economy, provide training and coordination with allied countries, gives them political leverage both with us and other nations, and strengthens their defense on our dime. The last couple times we've looked at closing some bases the countries have requested we stay and provided benefits in order to convince us. That's not the case across the board of course, but it is when talking about places like SK and Germany for sure.
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It's mutually beneficial, but it's the US that initially chose to do that to keep the countries in control, since they like to believe they're the world saviors and dispensers of justice, and that everyone should try to be more like them.
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That's merely one point of view.
I'm sure muslims would disagree.
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You're sure Muslims would disagree with an opposition to Islamism? You sound very prejudiced and misinformed
islamism/islmizm/
Noun: Islamic militancy or fundamentalism.
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I'm sure a lot would disagree that Americanism compares favourably to it.
A significant portion of muslims are in favour of Islamism.
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Oblig. (Score:2, Offtopic)
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Yo dog, I heard you like internet censorship so I censored your internet censor's internet.
If he really wants to "fight it from the inside" (Score:1)
...he should just leak the block list.