Internet Censorship in South Korea

Internet Censorship in South Korea is known to be fairly restrictive since it censors any type of pro-North Korea materials online and actively regulates the production / distribution of pornography. Due to these reasons, it represents Republic of Korea's (a.k.a. South Korea) unique traits of Internet environment. While freedom of expression is guaranteed like any other developed countries in the world, certain aspects are still considered to be conservative or oppressed.

Basic censorship

Politics

Since 1948, Republic of Korea had the National Security Act (NSA) that can imprison those who show empathy or favoritism for pro-North Korean materials. This was based on the fact that the government of Republic of Korea was established under the ideology of liberalism in 1948, which strongly opposed to what North Koreans were pursuing: communism. The 1990 Act on Exchanges and Collaboration depicts that citizens of R.O.K. should report to the government if there were any type of interaction with North Koreans or was in contact of materials that were somehow related to them. This was an enforced action made by the government in order to secure South Koreans from the spread of massive amount of communism ideology by North Korea. Information and Communications Network Act (ICNA) also acts as a barrier in the Internet environment by promoting website hosts to censor illegal or problematic materials as soon as they detect them. In addition, Information and Communications Network Act (ICNA) significantly contributed in founding legislative bills that protect politicians and effectively censor people who started to produce and distribute fake information about politicians while presidential election. Legal protection is provided in the court to those who conformed to this law, whenever there is a dispute about posting inappropriate contents online.

Website of Woori-minjok-kkiri - North Korean Propaganda

Discussion about North Korean Websites

South Korea has been actively blocking websites that are either pro-North Korea or those that are directly hosted by the North Korean government. Since the advent of Internet technology, the North Korean government has been continuously putting effort to propagandize their ideology by publishing articles and announcements made in their country. As a result, the South Korean cyber security police effectively censored / discovered 43 pro-North Korean websites in 2004. Considering the fact that most of the North Korean websites that promote propaganda and other related information have their host servers outside the country, the South Korean cyber security police tracked down the IP addresses which North Korean developers use. After investigation, the websites - Joseon Inforbank, Korea Book Center, Choseon Travel, Woori-minjok-kkiri (meaning: getting together between our race), Silli Bank (silli meaning benefits), Choseon Lottery Cooperation, Jupesite, Goryeo Baduk (Baduk is Korean checkers), Joseon Stamps, and Joseon Publishing - were found that they were based in Japan host servers. . Joseon Tongsin (Tongsin means correspondence) and Guk-jeonseon (meaning channels between nations) in Japan, Unification Arirang (Arirang is a traditional Korean folk song) in China, Minjok Tongsin (Minjok means race) in the U.S., and Korea Network were websites that had their hosts in other foreign countries .

Pornography

Republic of Korea has been actively censoring pornography since the early 1980s when political censorship started to pick up speed. Republic of Korea defines pornography as any type of material that may contain homosexual, asexual concepts including child pornography. When Internet technology was not widely provided, the government enthusiastically censored those materials by confiscating seditious books or banning adult video production. As Internet technology flourished, regulations have changed in forms of banning websites that contained keywords government set, such as porn, child, gay, and lesbian. In the early 2000s, the government adopted a new technology that censored pornography websites by tracking http host servers. Once pornography or inappropriate contents where detected from a website, http censorship quickly identified where the host server was and provided information to the cyber security police.

Korea Communications Committee

The Korea Communications Committee, KCC, was created in February of 2008 and it works to regulate all media in Korea. The Korea Communications Standards Committee, KCSC, replaced the Information and Communication Ethics Committee. This committee works within the KCC to regulate the Internet specifically. One of the main aspects of the KCSC is that it required the citizens of Korea to enter an identification number that has been issued by the government in order to post political comments online. There has been a lot of criticism against the KCSC because people do not think that it is ethical that their social media networks and personal mobile apps can be monitored and watched. The KCC and the KCSC work closely together as the KCC identifies and monitors content and then if something must be taken down, the KCSC takes care of that .

SNI filtering

Recently, in February 2019, the Korean government announced that they will reinforce their Internet censorship by adopting a new technology called SNI filtering. The purpose of this act is to enhance cyber network security levels by censoring materials that are classified as 'inappropriate' - very subjective - and to protect citizens from exposure to any type of fraud or hacking.

Mechanism

SNI filtering (Server Name Indication) is a new technology that is based on tracking https websites. 10 years ago, website addresses all started with http://, where http stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Hypertext Transfer Protocol is a technology that precedes the actual presentation of assigned webpage. Once a user requests data, HTTP technology is applied prior to loading. The "protocol" you made in order to call data from the server, is governed by this http technology first, and then sends back the information you requested. As numerous activities became available in the Internet, professionals felt the necessity to effectively secure sensitive data such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, personal medical records, etc. And that is when the https technology was developed - the extra S stands for secured, where all of your selected sensitive data is encrypted whenever the protocol is requested and sent to the host server. That way, not only people could protect invaders from hacking sensitive information, but also prevented random leaks that contained unexpected, raw data. Now, SNI filtering technology enforces the surveillance - it only allows connection to websites that are enrolled in the certificate. If the server is not certified by the government, SNI filtering will 'filter out' those inappropriate information and automatically send you to a alternate website that warns the user.

Technical Challenge

Although Server Name Indication technology seems like a beauty overall, considering its power in ensuring cyber-security, there still is a challenge for Sever Name Indication faces. The SNI technology is only applicable to legacy browsers or operating systems and well-known ones among them are Google Chrome, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, which most of the people use in the world in their daily lives. This, however, means that those who do not use these type of legacy browsers are incompatible with this technology and are vulnerable to highly developed cyber attacks. Common non-legacy browsers currently used are Internet Explorer (a.k.a. the IE) on Windows XP (or older), Android 2.3 version or older. It is known these browsers may result in a cyber-fallacy during the certifying process, known as the handshaking, and end up with a common name mismatch error. A solution for this issue is to use a multi-domain TLS as a default certificate in order to avoid the name mismatch error since it lists all the domains when the IP addresses are shared .

Ethical Issues

Concerns about no privacy

Surveillance and Voyeurism by government

Newly adopted technology in South Korea - Server Name Indication filtering - is apparently hosted and conducted by the South Korean government. Users in South Korea will inevitably be restricted their range of freedom whether it is politics or pornography. But the technology itself has a backdoor which allows the host, or to make it more easy to understand, the boss to gain access to sensitive information. The host is able to read 1) where the protocol was made and 2) where the protocol is headed to. The location of where the protocol is headed to means, what users are looking up for. This technically infers continuous surveillance, and in this case the South Korean government is the one who is watching all of the users. On top of that, there is no way for the general public to figure out whether your searching history is being kept eyes on or might not even know that they are actually being watched until they learn this information. From a wider point of view, it can be a perfect surveillance which completely counters cyber ethics. The Internet environment was known to be a free space with anonymity, privacy and no surveillance but with this new censorship policy, users are in stake of turning into a bunch of fish in a fishbowl kept in guard. There is not problem and no one really puts attention to fish that 'behave' in the fishbowl, but once it makes 'trouble', the boss outside immediately catches them - the bowl is transparent. Same thing is applied to SNI technology in South Korea - users will not know until the voyeur gains intention and acts upon them (Doyle, T., 2009. Privacy and Perfect Voyeurism. Ethics Inf Technol, 11, 181–189). As Doyle argued, perfect voyeurism cannot be justified in any case even though there was no bad voyeur's preference or intentional spying on the victim because the voyeur is already violating the victim's right to privacy which is intrinsically wrong.

Invasion of privacy

SNI filtering technology was meant to be programmed in such a way that it only polices inappropriate websites. But the problem with using SNI filtering technology is that it gives too much authority to the person who is in control. The essence of this technology is that the programmer can obtain information about what kind of information users are trying to reach out to. The technology does not precisely track down every single step of access, but it does give data about keywords that were browsed or at least attempted to be used. The Korean government acknowledged the concerns that professionals raised and announced that they will not be using in such a way where every single person is censored of what they are doing. People in South Korea are very concerned they will lose their freedom of expression, which seemed to be well preserved for at least the last 20 years, and show anxiety of being watched all the time by the government. One citizen illustrated this situation as a disaster by comparing to the People's Republic of China, where the government actively censors materials that are posted in the Internet and banning global search engines such as Google and Youtube.

See Also For Comparison and Reference

• Censorship
• Internet Censorship in Hong Kong
• Censorship in China