South Korea may imprison blogger over views; Google caves to regime

The "democracy" in South Korea doesn't sound democratic at all.

Last year, South Korea ushered in what is probably the most right-wing government the country has seen in years.

Now, a South Korean blogger may face 18 months in prison just for criticizing the government's economic policy. He's supposed to learn the verdict on Monday after being indicted for posting articles the government claimed were inaccurate.

To give you an idea of what this is like, that's like if I was prosecuted for estimating yesterday's Cincinnati Tea Party crowd at a few hundred instead of the 7,000 that WLW absurdly claimed. (Incidentally, it was only a few hundred. Estimates by the city and the media have vastly overstated the crowd.)

The prosecution in South Korea occurred just after the country became one of the first in the world to pass a law to ban folks from the Internet if record companies accuse them of copying music.

Meanwhile, South Korea has a new law requiring people who comment on websites to use their real names and (here's a real freedom-loving phrase) national ID number. Google has caved by disabling uploads and comments on the Korean version of YouTube.

Luckily, there's a workaround: You can avoid this censorship by setting your preference setting to a country other than South Korea.

The government claims the new law is necessary to fight online harassment. No, it is not necessary. As a victim of Internet harassment myself, I know that all that's necessary is to look at the damn logs and trace the culprits. I know America is full of ISP's that are too stupid and self-righteous to take this simple step, but I guarantee that outlawing anonymous posting won't solve a thing.

At least there's no reports of Google ratting out journalists to authoritarian foreign regimes like Yahoo! did.

(Source: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/blogger-critica.html;
http://www.pcworld.com/article/162989/google_disables_uploads_comments_on_youtube_korea.html)