Wombaticus Rex wrote:
Well then here you go:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... -3000.html
"The North has established a team of online trolls at the United Front Department and the Reconnaissance General Bureau," said Ryu Dong-ryul of the Police Policy Institute, according to a report in South Korea's Chosun newspaper.
Just putting that in context, Chosun ilbo is a conservative newspaper that is involved in current South Korean political scandals.
Distorting Democracy: Politics by Public Security in Contemporary South Korea
The civil tone of debate on economic democratisation notwithstanding, perhaps because of a need to more strongly distinguish the conservative party from the liberal opposition, Cold War rhetoric eventually crept into the conservatives’ campaign discourse. The initial target was the UPP's candidate Lee Jung-hee, who directly confronted Park in the televised debates, declaring that “The Saenuri Party and Park Geun-hye are the roots of [pro-Japanese] collaboration and dictatorship and do not have the right to sing the national anthem" (Hankyoreh 05 Dec 2012). Lee in turn was painted as a North Korean sympathizer for her activist past and her vocal attacks on the right, in addition to what was seen as her hesitance to directly criticize North Korea. The insinuation of pro-North politics was not isolated to attacks on Lee Jung-hee. As early as two months before election day, Park’s campaign struck at the Democratic Party (DP) candidate and main contender, Moon Jae-in, with similar rhetoric. Chung Moon-hun, a lawmaker from the ruling Saenuri party with close ties to then-president Lee Myung-bak, began to spread a claim that former president Roh Moo-hyun, for whom Moon had served as chief of staff, had agreed to abandon the de facto western maritime boundary between the two Koreas known as the Northern Limit Line (NLL) during his summit meeting with the North’s leader in 2007. Kim Moo-sung, another Saenuri lawmaker and the chief manager of the ruling party’s campaign, cited a key excerpt from the summit transcript almost verbatim during the campaigning period to reenergise Chung’s accusation, signalling that both he and Chung had somehow illegally accessed the summit transcript, which, under the law, was considered a classified and sealed state document.2
While such attacks against the liberal-left were scathing, the most alarming aspect of last year’s presidential campaign was the expansive use of popular internet forums and social networking sites by state organs, chiefly the NIS, to create and circulate messages intended to discredit key opposition figures as pro-North leftists. At the time of writing, prosecutors have disclosed over 1.2 million Twitter messages and approximately 1900 online posts with political or election-related content produced or circulated by agents of the NIS’s psychological warfare team; the investigation also uncovered posts by private sector supporters hired by the NIS but these have not, as yet, been included in the indictment.3 It was this direct interference that was most alarming to many observers as it represented a clear violation of the Public Official Election Act (Articles 9 and 85). At its most juvenile, the NIS appears to have concocted rather poetic sobriquets for the three most prominent presidential candidates: “Park Geun-hye has a friendly smile, Moon Jae-in has startled rabbit eyes, and Ahn Cheol-soo has an icky snake face” (Hankyoreh 21 Oct 2013, np). Most other messages were more ideologically informed and substantive, calling Moon a 'traitor eager to give the NLL away to North Korea,’ and accusing him of scheming to 'establish an inter-Korean federation and achieve a red reunification' (ibid, np).
The NIS’s psychological warfare had the potential to seriously damage the Park camp. One week before the election, the DP went public with its discovery that the NIS was manipulating public opinion, but the party was only able to implicate one agent, Kim Ah-young, who was caught carrying out her duties inside a studio rental in Seoul. DP staff and reporters surrounded the apartment until the police and staff from the National Election Commission arrived; however, after a quick, controversial investigation, the Seoul Metropolitan Police announced that they had been unable to discover any wrongdoing, effectively exonerating the NIS of any electoral interference, and dealing a blow to Moon Jae-In, who just hours before had accused the NIS agent of doing just that in a televised presidential debate. Furthermore, Moon and his supporters were blamed for forcibly confining an innocent woman who happened to be an NIS employee. It was only later, after Park was inaugurated, that Kim was indeed revealed to have engaged in tweeting and blogging in support of Park under direct orders of her superiors at the NIS.
This revelation of the NIS involvement, and the ensuing indictment of former NIS Chief Won Sei-hoon in June on charges of breaking the national election law, which was then followed by a further indictment on bribery in July, sparked a series of protests and candlelight vigils demanding a thorough investigation throughout the summer and into the fall. The popular call for a new, independent inquiry into the intelligence agency’s activities during the election campaign grew stronger following reports by two liberal media outlets—The Hankyoreh and the Korea Center for Investigative Journalism—that soldiers and employees of the Ministry of National Defense's Cyberwarfare Command had similarly worked to assist Park’s campaign. A National Assembly audit also revealed that the Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs had been engaged in activities that promoted Park in positive terms and denounced the opposition as chongbuk, or pro-North leftists. The ministry had additionally organized a training program for opinion leaders in the months prior to the election, using a curriculum that argued "economic development during the authoritarian military governments of Park Chung-hee (the current president’s father) and Chun Doo-Hwan was the structural condition necessary for sustainable democracy” (Hankyoreh 14 Oct 2013, np); furthermore, The Hankyoreh reported that one such program in the country’s second-largest city of Pusan included a video titled The Truth of the Chongbuk Faction claiming that the democratisation movement against the dictatorship during Park Chung-hee’s Yushin regime had been carried out on the orders of North Korea (ibid, np).
The insinuation of pro-North politics aims to delegitimise the democratic movement by claiming that it sought guidance from North Korea, negating the movement’s attempts to expand equality and liberty in South Korea and work towards engagement with North Korea. The use of anti-communist rhetoric is nothing new in South Korean politics; South Korean conservatives have long utilized their own ‘paranoid style’ (Hofstadler 1964) for political leverage against their opponents. What is most distressing for liberal and progressive politicians and social movements is not the use of this rhetoric per se, but the degree to which state institutions have participated in such politics by directly intervening in South Korean elections and defending their actions as justified acts of psychological warfare against, in Won Sei-hoon’s words, “leftist followers of North Korea [who] are trying to regain power through being in contact with North Korea” (Associated Press 14 June 2013; cf. New York Times, 14 June 2013).
[...]
What is taking place in South Korea is part of a broader attempt since 2008 at erasing the gains made by the country’s liberal administrations and democracy movement. While the Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun governments were by no means progressive in terms of their main economic and foreign policies (which included expansive labour market deregulation, multiple free trade agreements, and participation in the Iraq war), both Kim and Roh did seek engagement and detente with North Korea through the Sunshine Policy (cf. Choi, 2005). They also sought to reform the coercive apparatus of the Korean state: establishing the National Human Rights Commission and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission; promoting women’s rights through the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family; and attempting to reform the NIS and other disciplinary institutions.8 Prominent activists, intellectuals and public figures from the democracy movements of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s participated in this process and many of them held key positions in the administrations of both Presidents Kim and Roh.
Under President Lee Myung-bak, these new institutions were restructured, disbanded, or largely subordinated to the administration. In general, Lee's tenure was also animated by the continuation of anti-communist rhetoric and undermining of Korean democratisation. The role of new-right intellectuals in the revision of history textbooks, the defunding of civic groups that participated in the "Candlelight Protest" against Lee's policies in the first months of his administration, as well as the actions of conservative civic groups such as the Korea Parent Federation, Korea Agent Orange Veterans’ Association, and the Alliance for Patriotism against liberal-left opposition groups are noteworthy examples of the politics of the era.
What is interesting about the current moment, however, is the extent of intervention by disciplinary institutions in national political life. These include independent initiatives of various ministries as well as efforts coordinated at a more central level to strengthen conservative power and obstruct the work of liberals and progressives. It is also noteworthy that these institutions took to social media to generate support for the conservative candidate and to slander the opposition. While governments often surveil social media to monitor opposition activities, the NIS electoral interference case may be one of the first examples of widespread use of social media by state agencies to influence an electoral outcome.
Furthemore, the charges against Lee Seok-ki and his associates—NSL violation, sedition, and plotting an armed rebellion—evoke uncomfortable memories of the exaggerated national security threats during the Cold War era. While political activists from South Korea's student, labour and grassroots movements have often been targeted under the NSL, even under the liberal governments of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, charges of this severity have been unheard of since the end of the military dictatorship in 1987. The only exception was when former dictators Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo were belatedly prosecuted and convicted in 1995 for mutiny and treason. The resurrection of charges synonymous with the bygone era brings to mind previous travesties like the trial of political dissident and later president and Nobel Peace Laureate Kim Dae-jung in 1980, and the fabricated People's Revolutionary Party case of the mid-1970s, which led to the arrest without warrant of over one thousand dissidents and ended in the swift execution of eight innocent people who were posthumously exonerated in the late 2000s. In both of these cases the NIS, then called the Korea Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), played a central role, as it does today in the investigation and prosecution of Lee Seok-ki.
I haven't copied the entire above article here, but Chosun is involved in disseminating destructive propaganda and disinformation.
http://english.chosun.com/site/data/htm ... 00891.html
South Korea's cyber security capabilities are paltry in comparison. The regime teaches young computer whiz kids about basic hacking technologies at a couple of elite middle schools in Pyongyang. The best then go on to Kim Il-sung Military University, Mirim University or Kim Chaek University of Technology to train as cyber agents for about 10 years.
Lim Jong-in of Korea University said altogether some 30,000 North Koreans are engaged in cyber and psychological warfare against South Korea, and every year another 300 personnel are trained in the dark arts, compared to a mere 30 in South Korea.
Statistics: Posted by cptmarginal — Mon Dec 09, 2013 5:58 pm