디지털 독재 의심받는韓..."北비판 차단 목적?" Is South Korea Sliding Toward Digital Dictatorship?
Is South Korea Sliding Toward Digital Dictatorship?
David Volodzko
A South Korean protester holds a defaced North Korean flag during a rally against North Korea in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Feb. 25, 2019. With North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on an armored train barreling through China toward Vietnam's capital, and U.S. President Donald Trump about to board a jet for Hanoi, Vietnamese officials scrambled Monday to finish preparation for a rushed summit that will capture global attention. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)ASSOCIATED PRESS
디지털 독재 의심받는韓..."北비판 차단 목적?" “한국은 디지털 독재 체제로 향하나?” 미국의 경제 전문지 포브스가 지난달 25일 낸 기사의 제목입니다. 지난달 11일 정부가 “해외 성인ㆍ도박 사이트 접속을 차단하겠다”며 https 차단 정책을 편 데 대한 비판입니다.
포브스는 ‘검열’이 나타난 배경으로 북한을 주목했습니다. 합의가 무산된 2차 북미정상회담(2월 28일) 3일 전에 쓰여진 이 글에서 포브스는 “전문가들과 심지어 트럼프 미 대통령 측근마저 2차 북미정상회담을 부정적으로 보고 있는데, 문재인 대통령은 희망을 갖고 있다”고 말합니다. 그러면서 지난해 북한 전문매체 ‘38 노스’를 운영하다 한국 정부의 예산 지원 중단으로 문 닫은 미 존스홉킨스대 국제관계대학원(SAIS) 산하 한미연구소(USKI), 지난해 국정원에서 돌연 사퇴해 여러 추측을 낳은 태영호 전 영국주재 북한공사 사례를 거론합니다. 태 전 공사는 “북한은 비핵화 의사가 없다”, “영변 외에도 핵 시설이 더 있다” 등 비판 발언을 이어왔죠.
슬그머니 열리는 야동 사이트 중국과 같은 국가로 분류돼야
지난달 25일자 포브스 기사. '한국은 디지털 독재 체제로 향하나'라는 제목이 달렸다. [포브스 홈페이지 캡처] 이번 조치에 대해 포브스는 이렇게 추론합니다. “한국 정부가 하는 일은 당신이 무엇을 하려는지 살펴보려는 것이다. 북한 비판에 대한 자유를 침식하려는 ‘큰 틀’의 일부일지도 모른다.” 청와대 청원 사이트에서 ‘https 차단 반대’가 일주일 만에 20만명을 넘길 정도로 거센 반발에 부닥친 정부는, 이역만리 떨어진 해외 언론에도 무차별 폭격을 당하고 있습니다.
슬그머니 열리는 야동 사이트 그런데 이런 와중 수상한 현상이 나타났습니다. 이효성 방통위원장이 “국민과의 소통이 부족했다”(지난달 21일)며 사과한 지 얼마 안 돼 차단됐던 불법 사이트들이 하나둘씩 열리기 시작한 거죠. 인터넷 커뮤니티에선 다시 열린 사이트들의 주소를 공유하는 풍경도 벌어졌습니다. “비판이 거세지자 정부가 눈치를 보면서 발을 뺀 것 아니냐”는 얘기도 나왔죠.
지난달 11일 접속이 차단됐다가 다시 해제된 해외 성인 사이트 화면. [홈페이지 캡처] 방통위에 직접 물어봤습니다. 차단됐던 사이트가 일부 해제된 사실을 인정하면서도 “오류일 뿐 정책의 변화는 없다”는 입장이 나왔습니다. 구체적으론 “방송통신심의위원회가 정책 시행 이후 ISP 업체(KTㆍSKT 등)에 차단 사이트 목록 895건을 새로 보냈는데, 이 업체들이 새 차단 방식으로 전환하다 실수로 이전에 보낸 목록까지 차단했다”는 겁니다. 다시 말해 차단됐으면 안 될 사이트가 실수로 차단됐고, 이번 해제는 실수를 바로잡은 거라는 설명입니다.
여기서 모순이 생깁니다. “이전에 보낸 목록까지 실수로 차단돼 바로잡았다”는 부분입니다. 기존의 URL 차단방식이든 새로 적용한 https 차단 방식이든, 방심위는 불법ㆍ유해 사이트 목록을 ISP 업체에 보내는 게 고유 업무입니다. 즉 이전에 보낸 사이트 목록도 전부 유해하다는 심의는 받았던 것이란 얘기죠. 그런데 이를 다시 허용했다? 앞뒤가 안 맞는 말입니다.
그래서 방심위에도 물어봤습니다. 관계자는 “우리는 심의해서 통보하는 업무만 하지, 왜 해제가 된 건지는 잘 모른다. 확실한 건 저희가 차단을 해제해달라고 요청한 적이 없다는 것”이라고 대답했습니다. ‘빅 브러더 정책’이라 불릴 정도로 국민 반발이 심한 정책을 수행하면서 어느 기관도 명쾌한 대답은 내놓지 못했습니다.
지난달 11일 청와대 청원 사이트에 등록된 'https 차단 반대' 청원. 등록 1주일만에 답변 조건인 서명인 20만명을 넘겼다. [청와대 청원 사이트 캡처] 불법 사이트 차단은 명분일 뿐? 성인 사이트 ‘차단→해제’ 혼선이 나타나면서, “불법 성인ㆍ도박 사이트를 막겠다는 건, 애초부터 관심 없었던 것 아닌가”라는 의심이 제기되는 겁니다.
국회에선 이효성 방통위원장을 불러내 엄중히 따져야 한다는 목소리도 나왔습니다. 과학기술정보방송통신위원회 소속 박대출 자유한국당 의원은 “이런 엄청난 일을 벌이면서, 우왕좌왕 혼선을 빚는 게 말이 되나. 애초부터 불법 성인 사이트 차단엔 관심 없고 다른 ‘큰 그림’이 있던 것 아닌가. 과방위 회의에 이효성 방통위원장을 불러내 따져봐야 할 엄중한 사안”이라고 말했습니다. 박 의원이 말한 ‘큰 그림’에 포브스가 지적한 ‘큰 틀’이 오버랩되는 게 기분 탓이기를, 그런 지적이 제발 기우이기를 바라봅니다. 김준영 기자 kim.junyoung@joongang.co.kr 중앙일보 |
edited by kcontents
The North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un is headed for Hanoi this week on a train reportedly "bulletproof, slow and full of wine" to meet with President Trump, who claims they both "fell in love" after Kim sent him "beautiful letters." Analysts and even Trump's own aides are worried about the second North Korea-U.S. summit, set to begin this Wednesday.
He added, "We are the masters of our own fate on the Korean Peninsula."
This self-reliance language is eerily similar to accepted definitions of juche, the North Korean regime's central philosophy. Calls for inter-Korean trade are therefore worrying, especially since the South has been echoing more than just the North's philosophical rhetoric, but some of its oppressive practices too.
South Korea now has a higher per capita GDP than Italy, and will soon surpass New Zealand. This is thanks to education and R&D spending, and a heavy emphasis on international trade. From 1970 to 2002, the nation's trade volume grew 17.2% annually. Export-oriented industrialization paid off, and Korea has come to its kingdom. But there’s a worm in the apple.
The cylinders of South Korea's economic engine — education, R&D and trade — depend on the free flow of information. Seoul restricts that, and wants to apply an even stronger filter. The South Korean government plans to block the country's 895 banned websites (mostly related to North Korea, gambling or pornography) by eavesdropping on Server Name Indication (SNI) data, giving censors considerably more power in a country with a long history of corruption.
Putting aside the decades of brutal dictatorship that ended with Chun Doo-hwan stepping down in 1988, every South Korean presidency since has been rocked by corruption scandals. Roh Tae-woo collected $10 million per month in slush funds while in office, Kim Young-sam stunned the nation with his pay-for-play Hanbo scandal, Roh Moo-hyun jumped off a cliff while under investigation for bribery, Lee Myung-bak is serving 15 years for corruption, Park Geun-hye is serving 24 years and then there's President Moon Jae-in.
Last April, the Moon administration faced controversy over allegedly cutting funding for the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies because the institute's director was too conservative. The week before, allegations surfaced that the administration was silencing academics for criticizing its policy toward the North, including former State Department official David Straub, who was dismissed from the Sejong Institute. Also in April, North Korean defector Thae Yong-ho was silenced by National Intelligence Service agents from making critical remarks about the North.
Thae Yong-ho, a former deputy at the North Korean embassy in London, right, speaks during a news conference at the Seoul Foreign Correspondents' Club in Seoul, South Korea, on Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019. U.S. President Donald Trump is making a mistake of seeking peace first and denuclearization later, Thae said, ahead of Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un planned for Feb. 27-28 in Hanoi. Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg© 2019 BLOOMBERG FINANCE LP
There are also instances of members of the administration labeling conservative viewpoints on North Korea as being fake news. As one op-ed writer put it:
Critics of Pyongyang and defectors from North Korea are said to be receiving disadvantages or even being removed from office under the liberal government known for its détente policy towards Pyongyang. The case raises concerns for balanced views on North Korea and the freedom of expression."
Discussing these events in the context of Korea’s long history of censorship, research analyst Geoffrey Fattig wrote:
Until now, the idea of a unified Korea was largely conceptualized to be one in which a collapsing North would be incorporated by a free and democratic South. Yet it is looking far more likely that a new, confederated Korea will be one in which neither side shares the values of a traditional liberal democracy, at least when it comes to the issues of media and academic freedom."
Now consider Korea's internet environment — where feminism is censored, the country's own intelligence agency puts out fake news to rig elections and administrations maintain cultural blacklists — and it's clear why critics worry the government might abuse its newfound censorship powers. According to Freedom House's 2018 Freedom on the Net report on the country:
Individual citizens have also been subject [to] defamation and libel criminal cases for their online activity...survivors of sexual violence and harassment came forward to speak out but ended up facing retaliation. Indeed, women who had as little as liked, followed, or shared feminist content online were targeted in both their personal and professional lives."
So what does it mean to say the government plans to eavesdrop on SNI data? Before you started reading this article, your browser submitted a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request to the server hosting this site. HTTP governs the protocol for transferring hypertext web pages back to you. If you're going to exchange sensitive data such as credit card info, you'll want to encrypt your communication with the server using HTTPS (the S stands for "secure"). But some IP addresses host multiple servers, so SNI was created to indicate which server name you want. What Seoul aims to do is look at what you're indicating, so even if your exchange is encrypted, censors can see which sites you're trying to access.
Already about 230,000 South Korean citizens have signed a petition protesting the measure.
Some may say there's nothing to worry about, so long as you aren't trying to visit banned sites. But as computer security expert Bruce Schneier wrote, "Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance."
There are more immediate concerns too, such as the impact this might have on Korean trade or the changing structure of the internet itself.
Regarding trade, a 2009 paper by the European Centre for International Political Economy described the internet as “a global marketplace,” arguing that censorship warrants World Trade Organization sanctions. Seven years later, the U.S. declared Chinese internet censorship a trade barrier. But whether the U.S. or any other nation will see Korean censorship that way depends on how far Korea ventures down this path. SNI snooping might simply be intended to censor specific, harmful sites — something plenty of other democracies already do. Or it may be part of a larger pattern of eroding freedoms, especially with respect to criticizing North Korea as the two countries move closer together.
As for changes to the internet's architecture, we are already witnessing some of this, as it is broken into various parts with one being led by China, structured according to Chinese sensibilities about what adults should be allowed to view. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently had this to say:
If you think of China as like 'Oh yeah, they're good with the Internet,' you're missing the point. Globalization means that they get to play too. I think you're going to see fantastic leadership in products and services from China. There's a real danger that along with those products and services comes a different leadership regime from government, with censorship, controls, etc."
He added that the roughly 60 countries involved in China’s Belt and Road initiative might also assume China’s digital infrastructure, meaning a great loss of online freedom. South Korea appears to already be moving in that direction.
"In effect, this is the turning point for grafting national boundaries back on to the internet,” Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist and director of the Internet Architecture project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, told Forbes. "While there has been a lot of information control and network censorship in closed, authoritarian societies in recent years, we are starting to see it unfortunately more in open, democratic societies such as the UK, EU and this madness."
The problem, he added, is that once we start "messing around with the guts and pipes between endpoints on the internet, bad things happen.” Censorship regimes inevitably block far more than their targeted sites because, Hall says, "no one ever gets in trouble for censoring too much information.” The casualties may include LGTBQ content, information about non-mainstream religions or really anything that isn't normative.
Content control is therefore best handled at the endpoints. This is especially true since sophisticated users who want to share banned content will still be able to do so, making measures like SNI snooping ineffective at best. Hall added that because of the risks, filtering (user control) is a wiser choice than censorship (state control), if only because the latter necessarily requires such high levels of surveillance and alteration of information that it "necessarily pushes up against core human rights values."
