Is It Freedom of Speech or an Illegal Activity？

The joint committee reopened the closed bulletin board without deleting the controversial postings. The committee is composed of 55 groups including Korea Confederation of Trade Unions, People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, Lawyers for a Democratic Society and Korea Progressive Network.

The committee argued that this controversy was sparked by the police’s taking issue with a posting about North Korea even though everyone nowadays can have an easy access to materials about North Korea on the Internet. The committee said that conservative media and the police were trying to suppress them by blowing the issue out of all proportion on the ground of safeguarding security.

“Information Communication Ethics Committee recently required us to delete hundreds of postings on the homepages of Korea Confederation of Trade Unions, Democratic Labor Party, Korea Progressive Network. But we will not delete them.” said the committee.

An insider with the Information Communication Ethics Committee said that it required seven organizations including the KCTU to delete 2600 postings on their homepages which expressed support and praise for the North Korean regime after the committee has inspected 3600 reported cases of suspicious postings since February. “These organization, however, ignore this kind of demand in most of the times”, said the insider.

Professor Choi Byeong-il with Ewha women’s University, who is the director general for Citizens United for a Better Society, said, “Even though North Korea is still our enemy technically, some people think of the Internet as a place to freely express their support for the North and they are engaged in a political activity using the unique characteristic the Internet has. They even look like trying to find out to what extent the reform-minded current administration would allow their activities.”

The controversy was triggered when a three-minute long streaming video titled “ The dear leader of North Korea stays with us forever” was posted on the bulletin board of KCTU’s homepage. The streaming video is about the life of the late North Korea leader Kim Il-seong. The KCTU did not delete the streaming video for three days arguing that their principle for operating the bulletin board has been that even controversial postings should not be deleted, thereby promoting free discussions and criticism. But they temporarily closed down the bulletin board after the police said to KCTU on July 15th that a person in charge of the bulletin board would be arrested.

Sun-Woo Kim sublime@donga.com