hankyoreh

not gift givers

By Park Hyun-chul and Kim Jeong-pil, staff reporters

Members of the North Korean propaganda website Uriminzokkiri are up in arms over an internal police investigation to determine the loyalties of people identified on a membership list that was leaked by hackers.

Observers are calling the tactics "McCarthy-esque," noting that the members enrolled when anyone was free to access the site, and that many people did so for research or out of simple curiosity.

Uriminzokkiri was established in April 2003 and South Koreans have been forbidden from accessing it since November 2004. Now some analysts are questioning the legal grounds for punishing membership at the site as a violation of the National Security Act.

The public security division of the National Police Agency announced on Apr. 5 that it planned to investigate whether the people appearing on the membership roll obtained online were as represented and had in fact subscribed to the site.

Around 2,000 of the 9,001 names appearing on the list, which was released on Apr. 4 by the international hackers' group Anonymous, used email addresses from South Korean portal sites such as Daum and Naver. Others had addresses associated with media companies and corporations like Samsung and LG.

Already, some internet users have been searching the email addresses from the list and divulging the real names and affiliations of the people on it, whom they accuse of "aiding the enemy." Among them are reporters and officials with the Korean Teachers' and Education Workers' Union and the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU).

The people on the list are upset about the stigma and the police investigation.

One, an expert on inter-Korean issues, explained, "I don't remember signing up, but I've been researching inter-Korean issues for more than 20 years. Obviously, you need to look at North Korean sites to do that. It's unsettling to see them using it as a political litmus test."

Another member from the labor community said, "In the beginning, anyone could visit the Uriminzokkiri site. You also have to question whether it's good to have the police conducting an investigation using a membership record received from illegal hacking. Shouldn't they be investigating the hacking and the human rights infringement instead?"

A KCTU member said, "Not only do we not know whether the data are genuine, but people also signed up for different purposes. It doesn't mean that they were involved in espionage."

"We're not very worried," the member added.

The police rushed to investigate after securing the list, but it does not look likely to be easy going. Accessing primary data is one problem. The hacked list may provide the police with leads, but its evidentiary strength is unclear, which means that they will have to acquire a list through legal means to conduct a real investigation. In other words, they will need to conduct an additional search on the Uriminzokkiri server and head offices - which are located in China, where they don't have authority to investigate.

The legal grounds are also fuzzy. Membership with and accessing of a propaganda website are not sufficient grounds to conclude that someone violated the National Security Act.

Charges can only be filed once it has been verified what the user’s purpose was - such as downloading information from the site or distributing it to the outside - and whether it constitutes aid to North Korea.

A more fundamental question is whether Uriminzokkiri is an "enemy-aiding" group at all. A prosecutor said this would be a difficult conclusion to reach based on the site's nature at present.

"To charge someone with forming or joining a group to aid the enemy, you would need to see whether they were engaged in 'offline' activities and have their own platform and rules," the prosecutor explained.

Another source with the police's investigation said, "I think it's going to take a long time just to see what the law says.”

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