Dennis J. Kucinich Become a fan 

Fmr. 16-year member of US Congress; Two-time US presidential candidate

Open Letter to the Korean President: 61 Years After Armistice, Democracy Is More Vital Than Ever

Posted: 07/27/2014 2:46 pm EDT Updated: 07/27/2014 2:59 pm EDT

Open Letter To Her Excellency Park Geun-hye, President, Republic of Korea

Dear Madame President,

As someone who, during 16 years in the United States Congress, has celebrated the US-South Korean friendship and who maintains deep ties with the Korean community in the United States, I respectfully write to express my concern about the policies of your government, which are anti-democratic and which discredit the sacrifices that American soldiers made so many years ago in Korea's defense.

The arrest and imprisonment of an elected member of your Congress, Lee Seok-ki, on charges of sedition, will be noted by members of the United States Congress who are painfully aware of the personal and political risks which can attend challenging an administration whose politics greatly differ. Your attempt to outlaw an opposing political party, your use of your National Intelligence Service (NIS) for political purposes, your cabinet's obstruction of justice in attempts to investigate the NIS, your attempt to cast as disloyal to South Korea all who disagree with your administration, your use of illegal surveillance of civilians, your use of Cold War rhetoric to attack those who legitimately question your policies, and your use of official resources, including state social media resources, to influence the result of elections, raise legitimate questions about whether or not you have any commitment to democratic values.

Today, Sunday July 27th, I join others in Washington DC, and people around the country and around the world, to observe the 61st anniversary of the Korean War Armistice. It is my hope that the 33,686 US soldiers who gave their lives in Korea, together with another 8,176 US soldiers who were missing in action, did not make the ultimate sacrifice in defense of your freedom to enable freedom's destruction under your government.

In today's world, there is always an intersection of intere

Kakao to launch mobile news service

Kakao Corp., the operator of Korea’s most-used mobile messenger Kakao Talk, is scheduled to launch a news content service later this year.

“We plan to start offering news content that collects and shows information from news, blogs and social networking services. For this, the company is in talks with media outlets to open the new mobile service in the second half of this year,” Kakao’s spokesperson said Friday. The service will reportedly be launched in September. 

Kakao’s move to launch a news service is aimed at eating into the market share of Naver, the nation’s largest portal company, in the mobile domain, industry watchers said. 

If Kakao’s news service is successful, Kakao could become a threat to Naver as it has the largest number of users among mobile messenger services in Korea.

“The success of the news service, however, depends on the quality of the news content and the coverage of media partnerships,” said Hwang Seung-taek, an analyst at Hana Daetoo Securities. 

It is too early to tell whether Kakao will adopt Naver’s news supply and distribution methods. Naver selects news items and posts them on its homepage, which gives the portal site the role of a media outlet with great influence over its readers.

Unlike foreign portal services, through which users read articles from the media outlets they subscribe to, local users tend to see articles distributed by the portals.

“Kakao, which dominates the local mobile messenger service market, seems to be Naver’s one and only competitor in the mobile news service market, armed with Daum Communications’ abundant content and media partnerships,” said Jung Jae-woo, an analyst at Woori Investment & Securities. 

Kakao acquired Daum in May through an equity swap, creating an Internet giant with a 3.4 trillion won ($2.9 billion) market capitalization. The combined company is expected to be listed in October.

By Shin Ji-hye (shinjh@heraldcorp.com)

[Weekender] End of privacy Pervasive social media, online services threaten personal information security

Shortly after the Sewol ferry sank in April, South Korean authorities hurriedly combed the messages and photos stored in the victims’ Kakao Talk chats to learn more about the tragic sinking.

One might wonder how such a probe was made possible, given that the victims were still missing. The fact was that Kakao Talk stores users’ private messages for about a week on its own server. Through a search warrant, the police could scrutinize private messages. 

The implication is, if anything, unnerving. More than 90 percent of smartphone users here have installed Kakao Talk and continually share texts, photos and videos with their friends and family members, generating a massive amount of data vulnerable to being accessed by the authorities. 

Uninstalling the app would not sufficiently protect one’s online privacy in this increasingly interconnected digital era. 

(Illustration By Park Gee-young)

People around the world continue to share their personal information via social media, and there is no sign of the trend reversing its course despite the growing concerns about online privacy.

One concern is that industry giants like Google and Facebook could use their huge databases for commercial and other purposes, while users have little clue about how their personal profiles and digital footprints are stored, handled and traded.

A prime example is the latest scandal that hit Facebook. The social media behemoth toyed with users’ emotions through an experiment without notifying its members. The company apologized, but its corporate image regarding its privacy policy suffered a setback, offering a glimpse of what could go wrong when big data is exploited. 

But social media networks are only a part of the digital spectrum in which people share their own information willingly or unwittingly. Online marketers and data brokers gather a huge amount of personal data by tracking digital footprints, which are left behind as a result of Web browsing and stored in the form of cookies. 

How much user information is being handled by data brokers and trackers? A ballpark figure was offered by investigative journalist Julia Angwin, who said in a feature in CBS’ “60 Minutes” news magazine that she tracked down 200-plus data brokers that held information on her and asked that it be deleted.

Worried about sneaky tracking tools hidden in websites, more online users are choosing specially designed Web browsers such as Tor, which offer online anonymity by bouncing Internet traffic around.

Offering a small relief to those concerned about online privacy, a European court recently ruled in favor of what it called “a digital right to be forgotten,” ordering Google to stop displaying links to certain personal information. 

But this is not a simple issue, as critics argue the ruling would likely undermine the freedom of expression on the Internet and encourage censorship. 

For tech-savvy South Koreans, the issue of online privacy is all the more vexing since much of their personal data has already been leaked to data brokers multiple times due to lax regulations, poor online security and rampant cyberattacks.

The pace of information sharing is expected to accelerate further as more life-changing services move online and more devices are interconnected through the Internet of Things. Data theft and personal information leaks might spin out of control as more people connect to the global digital repository.

Despite concerns, not many people would unplug their computers and throw out their smartphones. But it’s time to ponder what it means to share information on the Internet, and make a choice. 

By Yang Sung-jin (insight@heraldcorp.com)