Abstract
South Korean teenagers are online, connected and many have smart phones. A newly amended law requires all telephone companies to install censorship software in all smartphones sold to users under 19
Credit: Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos
A new South Korean law embeds a surveillance tool on teenagers’ phones – just another example of the country’s paternalistic attitudes, reports
This is the current frontline in the South Korean state’s efforts to keep its citizens from content which censors deem objectionable, embodying a paternalism that goes back at least to Korea’s time as a Japanese colony (1910-45). Japan instituted comprehensive censorship, which particularly affected journalists, writers, filmmakers and artists. South Korea’s first post-independence rulers kept these practices largely in place, and the legacy remains.
In April, the Enforcement Decree of the amended Telecommunications Business Act came into effect. The decree requires all South Korean telecommunications companies to install censorship software in all smartphones sold to users under 19. The government provides the app for free, purportedly to block minors from accessing any “harmful” materials – it gets to decide what constitutes “harmful”.
Korean and foreign-language websites that publish overtly violent or sexual material are blocked, as well as sites associated with North Korea or terrorist groups. Some South Koreans use apps, which conceal their IP address, to gain access to blocked websites, but censors tend to catch up and block those, too. Finding and installing these apps is, in any event, beyond the technical know-how of many young people.
In 2015, most censorship takes place online: South Korea has the highest broadband internet penetration in the world. The KCSC employs an army of energetic censors across a number of bureaux, each assigned a different branch of the media or cyberspace, to manage what its people can view – always a moving target.
The South Korean government’s goal has not just been to maintain law and order, but to encourage certain norms and ethics in the populace. “That’s the government’s job, to maintain a nice, clean internet,” an unnamed KCSC official told Wired in 2009.
“In the pre-modern period, the government’s objective was mainly to produce virtuous subjects; nowadays it means economically productive people who will go through school, get jobs, marry and produce children,” said Se-woong Koo, a lecturer at Yonsei University who has written for The New York Times about censorship in South Korea.
Shortly after Korean independence, discord broke out between the south and the north and their allies. Censorship south of the 38th parallel initially focused on preventing the spread of information related to North Korea. Hence the National Security Law of 1948. Its stated objective is “to suppress anti-state acts that endanger national security and to ensure nation’s security, people’s life and freedom” – specifically, to prevent North Korean cells from operating in the south.
Even after the fighting ended in 1953, South Korean governments kept the National Security Law on the books, with critics accusing them of using it to stifle free speech. Indeed cases taken under it have increased in recent years. In May Human Rights Watch called the law a “Cold War relic that criminalizes criticism”, recommending its repeal or revision.
The peak period of censorship was under Park Chung-hee, president from 1961 to 1979, when there were clearer rules as to what kind of cultural content was permitted. Park passed laws that prohibited criticism of his regime, most notably Emergency Ordinance #1, which mandated jail time for government critics. Under him, women were forbidden from wearing miniskirts in public, and police were known to make sure men’s hair didn’t exceed a certain length (the prohibition on miniskirts ended only in 2006 and although long hair for men is now legal it is not common).
The heavy-handed tactics continued through the military regimes of the early- and mid- 1980s, but the democratisation movement later that decade issued in major civic and political changes. Before hosting the 1988 Summer Olympics, the Chun Doo-hwan government relaxed restrictions on the press and agreed to multi-party elections. That was the beginning of a free press in South Korea, and today its media operate free of censorship.
The development of the internet brought censors new concerns, with South Koreans now having access to all kinds of content and the means to post their own criticisms. A 2005 law required all users to use their real names when posting anything online. Its official aim was to prevent the spread of false information online, but critics alleged it was really intended to make users fearful of posting anything that might upset the censors.
This rationale had ample legal precedent in South Korea. “Legislative invocation of a concern for public morals is usually a politically popular justification for government regulation,” wrote Jaewan Moon in a 2003 article in the Washington University Global Studies Law Review. When the law was scrapped in 2012, the Constitutional Court found no evidence that it had stopped the dissemination of false information – only that it had undermined free speech.
After 10 years of liberal rule, in 2008 South Korean politics took a turn to the right with the election of a conservative government, succeeded in 2013 by the administration of Park Geun-hye, daughter of Park Chung-hee. President Park and much of her cabinet are cut from the same cloth as her father, prioritising political and economic security over civil liberties.
The government has stepped up efforts to police cyberspace. In the best known example of this encroachment, the national spy agency was found to have used agents to post comments on online message boards voicing support for Park Geun-hye when she was running for president in 2012. Park Kyungsin, one of South Korea’s most dogged anti-censorship activists and director of Open Net, an NGO which presses for internet freedom in South Korea, estimates that each year 500,000 websites are taken down – though he says this covers only South Korea’s three main portals and that the total is probably much higher.
Seoul continues to invest in the internet as a way of driving economic growth, but nevertheless remains uncomfortable with the freedom the web allows its citizens. “The government puts a lot of effort into building its internet infrastructure, but it doesn’t have a lot of trust in its people to use the internet on their own,” said Geoffrey Cain, South Korea researcher for the Open Government Partnership.
There is far less censorship in South Korea than under the military governments of the 1970s and 80s. Due to the popular movements of the 1980s, the media operate without government control, and the country’s buzzing online sphere provides a forum for free expression. But the current government, staffed with many senior officials who worked in the harsh regimes of decades past, is always looking for ways to use that tool of free expression – the internet – to spy on its critics.
© Steven Borowiec
Are the kids are all right?
In Seoul’s late afternoon, the streets fill with gaggles of high-school students. Out in the brief break between classes and dinner at home, they walk in groups, many half stuck to their smartphones.
Controlling what young people can and cannot gain access to is a priority for South Korean censors: 99.6 per cent of teenagers are online and many have smartphones.
Yet on a recent afternoon in Seoul’s busy Dongdaemun area, none of more than a dozen students queried had ever heard of the decree (see main story). None was aware that their smartphones contained censorship software. When told what kinds of content were blocked by the app, one 16-year-old girl called Park giggled sheepishly: “I wouldn’t go looking for any of that anyway.”
While some activists have decried the decree as an invasion of young people’s privacy, and some parents have called it an intrusion on their rights as parents, there hasn’t been much organised resistance. South Korean adults work extremely long hours, compared with other developed countries, and so don’t have much time to look over their kids’ shoulders.
Most therefore don’t object to government help in keeping young people on the straight and narrow. “Many parents view the government as some sort of omniscient or all-powerful being that should take care of problems, even if that means parents giving away their liberties,” said Park Kyungsin, Open Net’s director.