Financial blogger arrested in South Korea

Brush up on your Korean stocktrder, sounds like a job might be opening up for you over there. With your incessant unrelenting bullish posts (and I only see what people quote! ) you are the one man propaganda machine that S Korea is looking for!
 
Internet censorship is not a new concept in this small nation with the highest Internet penetration rate in the world. It's only gotten worse since the popular uprising, mainly fueled by the active bloggers, against the US beef import that led to many weeks of street protests. Even before this infamous incident, which caught many conservative politicians off guard, the government was already clamping down on individual's freedom of speech by forcing every damn website to collect personal identification number (similar to the Social Security Number here in the US) from their users at the time of registeration. Those numbers would then be checked against the government database for authenticity. As such, once you register you can't say shit like "this fucked up government is run by a buch of thugs!" or you might find the big brother standing at your front porch.

Here's a couple articles you might find interesting:
Korean Internet Censorship
Korea wants to gag the noisy internet
 
a blogger commenting on forex has absolutely no effect on the forex market.

it's unwarranted censorship. as for gloom and doom gossip, he is just telling it like it is.

layoffs there layoffs there etc and the biggest gloom is corporate america ceos





Quote from lrm21:

YES this is South Korea, not North. The one with 50,000 American Troops stationed there. The one thats a pinncale of American Sponsored Democracy.

I guess we all better watch what we type.


South Korea said on Thursday it had arrested an elusive blogger accused of undermining the country’s financial markets with his doom-mongering, ending a case that has illustrated government unease with the growing influence of online _gossip in the world’s most-wired economy.

The case comes amid government efforts to combat negative comments on South Korea’s ailing economy in the media and from private sector economists. The export-dependent economy has been among the hardest hit in Asia by the global financial crisis.

The arrest and possible imprisonment of a web commentator will raise profound questions about freedom of speech in Korea, where bills that would crack down on civil rights are stirring tensions between lawmakers.

“Minerva”, who was arrested on Wednesday, has become a celebrated online guru in South Korea during the crisis. He gained instant kudos for what were seen as uncannily accurate utterances on the fall of Lehman Brothers and the crash of the Korean won, which plunged 26 per cent against the dollar last year.

Although some had speculated he might be a civil servant or even a market insider, authorities said Minerva was an unemployed university graduate without any substantial expertise in economics. Prosecutors declined to disclose his name, saying only that his surname was Park, the Korean equivalent of “Jones”.

Government officials were incensed by an incorrect article Minerva wrote claiming they had ordered financial institutions to stop buying dollars. Authorities have said they are considering charging him with spreading false information.

The court will decide on Friday what formal charges he could face. If found guilty of contravening Korea’s communications law, which bans the spreading of false information online, he could face seven years in jail.

The Korean government’s panic over Minerva and other web-based rumour-mongers reflects a greater concern about the political role of the internet in South Korea, the country with the world’s greatest per capita access to cyberspace.

An adviser to President Lee Myung-bak, a conservative former businessman, admitted to the Financial Times last month the government was trying to determine how to counter the influence of internet chat-rooms in Korean society, famed for its fiery temper.

Mr Lee was shaken last year by street protests over imports of US beef. The government had been unprepared for the degree to which passions could be inflamed in chat-rooms and mass demonstrations orchestrated online within hours.




Additional reporting by Song Jung-a
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/092a99ca-ddab-11dd-87dc-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1
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