Exodus in Cyberspace
August 6, 2009 | News, Opinion | 3 Comments
Since the current administration of South Korea rose to power 18 months ago, several new policies have been put in place that are designed to restrict freedom of speech in cyberspace. Now, savvy internet users are responding by moving their blogs, e-mail accounts, and other online activities to foreign websites — to the chagrin of domestic web portals already burdened by the poor economy.
South Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world. Pretty much every household has access to high-speed internet. And by high-speed I mean really high-speed; fiber optic cables and 100-megabit subscriptions are a commonplace in large metropolitan areas. Toss in those ubiquitous wireless hot spots and flawless cell phone signals from coast to coast, and there’s not a single parcel of land in this small country where you can’t Google or Bing or tweet.
Except that, strange as it might sound, Google and Twitter are considered relative strangers in the South Korean web.
The Hermit Republic – Still
Long known as the “Hermit Kingdom”, the country is no longer a kingdom but remains a hermit in many respects. Perhaps it has to do with the geographical isolation; South Korea is surrounded by seas and (somewhat) hostile neighbors. Perhaps it has to do with ethnic and linguistic isolation; Koreans don’t easily mix with foreigners, and speak a language that is largely unrelated to any other. Whatever the cause, South Korea is a society where interaction with foreign culture is a rarity — despite the last century’s economic growth, an explosion of Korean immigrants in every corner of the planet, and every parent’s obsession with English education.
Many a statesman exploits this relative isolation to his benefit. Taking some purportedly undesirable aspect of domestic life and comparing it with a sketchy, romanticized version of some foreign culture — and of course, promising to realize that foreign ideal at home — has always been and still is a recipe for political success. “Look at Japan, look at America. I’ll make us just like them if you vote for me.” The trick is that few people know what it’s really like elsewhere. In addition, past dictators had inculcated in the Korean society an inferiority complex against Japan and the U.S.A. They are always so much better than us. Well, to be honest, we don’t know what they‘re really like; but hey, this politician has traveled to New York a couple of times, so he sure knows what he’s talking about! This kind of mentality is especially widespread among the previous generations that suffered war and poverty. What a fertile ground for deception and exploitation.
In the contemporary world of Facebook and Wikipedia, this trust-me-when-I-tell-you-about-other-countries logic is still a favorite strategy of shady Korean policymakers. Very few world-class newspapers make it to the average Korean household; television networks are dominated by government-controlled domestic channels; and domestic web portals share among themselves more than three quarters of the Internet search market. Fiber-optic cables link every urban household; yet the entire nation’s overseas Internet connectivity is no better than that of a medium-sized American datacenter.
Here’s a good illustration of the extent to which the Korean society is isolated from the rest of the world. A significant part of the “economic prophet” Minerva’s fame was due to the fact that he could quote Wall Street publications in near real-time. Doesn’t anybody else do it, for heaven’s sake? Or was everyone else content to reproduce the “digests” supplied by government bodies? No wonder people think there’s sense in the current administration’s ridiculous Internet policies, such as:
Laws That Don’t Exist Anywhere Else
1) If you want to post so much as a one-liner in a popular Internet forum, you must provide your government-issued ID number, your cell phone number, and/or other credentials to the operator of the web site, who will then verify that info with the proper authorities. Don’t have a cell phone registered in your name? A foreign national? Too bad, you don’t have the right to speak.
2) You can spend years in prison if someone claims you defamed him/her, even if you can prove that you did not utter a single falsity. (In other words, in South Korea, defamation is a crime rather than a matter of civil suit, and truth is not a defense against a charge of defamation.) In addition, if the “defamation” took place on the Internet, the “victim” does not even need to sue you for you to be prosecuted. Extra convenience for politicians who want to silence their critics but who cannot afford the bad publicity of frivolous lawsuits against taxpayers!
3) If you say something on the Internet that the government says is false, you go to jail. Good luck trying to prove that the government has got the facts wrong. Minerva was tried for this ridiculous “crime”, and so were a number of Internet users who tried to accuse the government of wrongdoing.
4) If you run a large website and somebody repeatedly posts copyright-infringing material on it, the Minister of Culture and Tourism can order your site shut down even if you remove the infringing material as soon as you are notified of it. The Minister does not need to obtain a warrant or a court order in order to do this; and it can take months to appeal the decision. In other words, the government only needs to find a few infringing pages (mostly unavoidable in today’s web) and bang, they can shut down arbitrary web sites.
These policies have the combined effect of silencing dissidents and encouraging Internet service providers to censor their users very heavily. It’s impossible in South Korea for anyone to produce a definitive statement of something like EFF’s “Bloggers’ Rights“, because the extent of such rights, if any, is extremely fluid and unpredictable. Basically, the law leaves room for any public official to have their critics prosecuted without getting his or her hands publicly dirty. And when there’s no way for people to know in advance which of their words will land them in trouble, people tend to shut up.
Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
There’s a word for this dirty trick: FUD. The acronym stands for the three words listed above in bold font. By spreading FUD in South Korea’s vibrant but isolated cyberspace, those who have the power to shape laws can force people to engage in self-censorship. It’s a much subtler trick than the kind of brute-force censorship employed by, for example, the People’s Republic of China. The government doesn’t need to get blood on its hands by actively implementing a censorship apparatus; with just the right amount of FUD, innocent citizens will censor themselves.
Unfortunately, the tactic is working like a charm, at least when it comes to domestic web portals which dominate the Korean web. Daum Agora, once the Mecca of online debates on sensitive political issues, is now nothing but a faint shadow of its June 2008 glory. Even as “netizens” double-check their writing (either consciously or not) for anything that might put them at the mercy of a powerful politician’s whim, the administrators of the popular site — apparently under tremendous pressure from the powers that be — are even more actively policing the forums, putting the scissor to the wrists of their own loyal customers in the feeble hope of avoiding liability.
Google, YouTube, Twitter, etc.
And then the Exodus began. At first, the movement to abandon domestic web portals consisted of little more than a few tech-savvy users’ attempts to explore the World-Wide, as opposed to the Only-in-Korea, Web. But then, the advantages became clearer. Young internet users — many of whom are deeply antagonistic to President Lee’s feeble attempts to imitate past dictators — quickly rose to the challenge of self-protection. Domestic sites were no longer safe; an alternative had to be found.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that Daum Communications, Inc., the company behind Daum Agora as well as the immensely popular free webmail service Hanmail, had turned over to government investigators the entire contents of a particular user’s mailbox — all 7 years’ worth of personal and professional e-mail correspondences. That was outrageously overkill for the case for which the troubled user was under investigation. Previously loyal users of Hanmail were left aghast by Daum’s unabashed disregard for privacy. Thousands chose to leave Hanmail for good, moving on to non-Korean e-mail service providers such as Google.
To be sure, Google doesn’t have a particularly stellar privacy policy, either. It is often criticized for invasion of privacy and cooperation with oppressive regimes. For thousands of South Koreans who had never used foreign web sites before, however, even the boring process of creating a Gmail account was full of pleasant surprises. “They don’t need my government ID and phone number? How is that even possible?” What frogs in stupid wells we had been! Google-owned services such as YouTube quickly gained traction among South Koreans as well. For the first time since Yahoo set foot in Seoul, YouTube became prominent enough to draw the regulators’ attention. Then, when the Korean government tried to apply their ridiculous policies to YouTube, Google presented a nice gift to Korean Internet users by refusing to comply.
Facebook and Twitter, neither of which would have been in the vocabulary of the average Korean youngster as recently as a few months ago, are also becoming very popular. Both are estimated to have at least 100,000 Korean users, the threshold for subjection to the notorious give-me-your-ID law. Neither seems to give a damn about the Korean government’s idiosyncratic requirements. After all, both Facebook and Twitter are American companies, without so much as a cubicle of physical foothold within Korean borders. If they refuse to comply with dictatorial Korean laws, the Korean government has nobody to hold responsible.
And of course, if you really wanted to protect your online activities from unjust interference from dictatorial governments, you could host your blog with somebody like nearlyfreespeech.net (where this blog is also hosted) and entrust your email to somebody like lavabit.com. Such possibilities — which, in fact, should have been guaranteed to us in the first place as a matter of human rights — are only now beginning to dawn upon the weary citizens of our hermit republic. Long live the founders of the Internet!
Exporting Agora, Importing Freedom
This little Exodus from the idiosyncrasies of South Korean cyberspace helped introduce some fresh ideas to Internet users who had previously known no other way of life. A lot of people now know that the Korean government’s policies regarding the Internet is an exception in the global marketplace rather than the norm — that the government had been trying to take advantage of the average citizen’s ignorance of foreign practices in trying to sell those self-serving policies. So arrived the logical next step: how do we bring the real international rules of the web to bear upon familiar, domestic web sites?
Hence the rather grandiosely-named World Forum for Agora Justice was founded, with the stated goal of creating an alternative to Daum Agora — as I noted a thousand times already, the legendary forum where no government action escapes scrutiny — that is not subject to all the stupidities of dictatorial public policy. Started by a few well-known members of Agora, the group now has a membership of seven thousand. Ideas and expertise are freely exchanged, all converging towards the establishment of an offshore non-profit web portal with a distinctively Korean touch.
How realistic this plan might be, remains to be seen. Nonetheless, one thing is clear. The Korean government’s usual tricks — be it FUD or an appeal to inferiority complex — is beginning to lose its strength. These contemptible strategies only work when the society in question is culturally and technologically isolated from the rest of the world. As more people become informed of genuine alternatives, the citizenry as a whole begins to adopt real improvements from real foreign countries — not the fabricated, self-serving postcard images imposed upon the unwary by a select few.
Although the printed press and television networks in South Korea are tightly controlled by the government, the Internet keeps escaping the would-be dictatorship’s grip. And therein lies the hope of many who love freedom and equality. The Internet’s power to bring uncensored information to the masses was exactly what scared the current administration to hell during the beef-import crisis last year; it is the very reason, in the eyes of many, why the Korean government is so intent on regulating the web as much as possible.
Democracy’s true power comes from the fact that the People can scrutinize and, if necessary, replace their leaders. Where the traditional press fails to perform this role of vigilance, another channel of communication needs to be brought to service. In contemporary South Korea, the Internet seems to be that other channel. That is why the web is currently under so much oppression, and that is also why I truly hope for the success of those — including myself, just to put a little disclaimer here — who have taken it upon themselves to smuggle freedom into the Korean cyberspace.
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