Letter To The Editor

*UPDATE*: This letter is on the Korea Times’ website! It might even be in the newspaper today, though I won’t get a chance to check until tomorrow…

Here’s the published letter, which is under Thoughts of the Times.

From the BigHominid’s Hairy Chasms a nasty stench was emitted, which was regarding this opinion piece in the Korea Times, by one Choi Tae-hwan, who, as the Hominid describes, “expresses the wish for greater control and surveillance of the Internet”.

I got annoyed enough to actually write a response to Choi’s opinion piece. I’ve sent it to the editor of the Korea Times, in the hopes they’ll give a differing view some airtime, but anyway, the text of my letter is now presented for your gratification.

Censorship, Paternalist Disdain, and Civil Society as an Alternative

Recently an English teacher named Choi Tae-hwan wrote an editorial in this newspaper about Korean Internet culture, in which he called for stricter controls of Web content in Korea. Citing examples of “harmful information”, he calls for the creation of a “filtering system” to ensure that Koreans can enjoy a “healthy internet culture”.

The problem with this (unquestionably well-intentioned) call for stricter controls, for demands of filtering and of responsibility, is, of course, the question of who makes the decision of what gets filtered? Who is responsible for the nation’s freedoms in viewing information? Who decides what is harmful, and according to which agenda? And what happens when a precedent of censorship is introduced?

These questions aren’t unique to Korea, of course. Even in America, the self-declared bastion of freedom of expression, the Bush Administration has taken unprecedented steps in marginalizing public criticism by establishing “Free Speech Zones” far from where Bush’s public appearances occur. This would embarrass Americans if they knew that similar techniques have been used in authoritarian states as reviled as Communist China (for example, in the sanctioning of the Democracy Wall in the late 1970s).

As in China today, many netizens in Korea circumvented the recent (and technically inefficient) ban by using proxies, anonymous redirectors, RSS feeds accessed through various content aggregators (as well as other techniques, I’m sure) to view many completely innocuous English-language webpages abroad