hankyoreh

By Park Tae-woo　

Police have entered and maintained photographs of at least 23 thousand assembly and demonstration participations in a picture decoding system, it has emerged. Police have used the system to quickly determine the identities of the photographed individuals and send written summons to report to them.

According to an examination Monday of parliamentary audit materials submitted to Democratic Party lawmaker Choe Kyoo-sik last year by the Korean National Police Agency (KNPA), the police have been systematically inputting and maintaining photographs of participants photographed at the scene of assemblies of demonstrations since 2001 following the development of a video decoding system.

The number of individuals entered into the system averaged around 4,000 per year for the five years between 2005 and late August 2010, for a total database of some 23 thousand people. Analysts say photographs of thousands more are likely to have been entered this year, given that tens of thousands took part last May in assemblies, ruled illegal by the police, for the halving of tuition rates. KNPA did not disclose the scale of the data entered in the years between 2001 and 2004.

In a video decoding system, photographs of the targets are entered along with information about the name of the assembly, the date, the place, the number of participations, and any illegal actions. The information includes details about haircut, body type, and even clothes. According to the police, the KNPA’s First Intelligence Bureau is in charge of administration for the system.

The police said decoding primarily takes place through individuals. The officers in charge of collecting evidence at the different police stations take photographs at the scene and enter them into the video decoding system, where eighteen individuals with inquiry authority at the KNPA and provincial police agencies and 247 at police stations nationwide read the photographs using the internal police computer network. The primary identification takes place as pictures are then shown to police officers who might recognize the individual. After that, the photograph is compared to the suspected individual’s resident registration certificate and driver’s license photographs for a final identification. At that point, the individual’s address is determined and an order is given to the presiding police station to launch an investigation.

But human rights groups are questioning whether the police are using facial recognition technology to determine identities by cross-linking the photographs with resident registration certificates and driver‘s licenses. They also charged that the police’s mass collection and decoding of photographs of assembly and demonstration participants is a violation of information human rights.

“Without any clear legal basis for the operation of their system, police are gathering personal information for the purpose of investigation and indiscriminately comparing it to identification photographs possessed by the government from the internal investigation stages,” said Korean Progressive Network Secretary Chang Yeo-kyung. “The police have also restricted the means for requesting to read, correct, or delete personal information registered in their system, which is an infringement of the right to agency over one‘s personal information.”

On July 1, the Hankyoreh sent an information disclosure request to police for the number of individuals with information entered in the system, the standards for entry, the procedure, and the current status of indictments. The police refused the request, saying, “It would conspicuously disrupt the execution of [police duties] if they were disclosed.”

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