Google's Transparency Report and Government Requests From Korea

I noticed a bump up in traffic to this blog over the past few days and then found that R. Elgin had called this a "neat blog" in a post over at The Marmot's Hole.   Thank you for that!   In the same post he noted a Joongang Ilbo report about the Korean government's requests for information from Google.  I'd seen the same article and this prompted me to look more closely at Google's transparency report.

During the first half of 2010, according to Google's data, the Korean government requested the removal of web content 38 times, involving a total of 8,549 items.  The Google report indicates that 100 percent of the removal requests were "fully or partially complied with."  As reported in The Korea Times, the number of removal requests was the largest in Asia and the sixth highest worldwide.

Why so many removal requests from the Korean government?  The vast majority of such requests, according to Google Korea, are for removal of URLs that contain personal information in the form of Korean resident registration numbers (RRNs), which contain date of birth, gender, registration region, and registration order.

The Korea Times article also noted that Google's transparency report did not disclose similar data for China because, according to Google "Chinese officials consider censorship demands to be state secrets, so we cannot disclose that information at this time."  

Korea Ranks 5th in Google Censorship Requests

As reported widely in the international media, including the Chosun Ilbo, Google has launched a service that tracks government censorship requests directed to Google and YouTube.  The service is called Google Government Requests and can be accessed here.  From July to December of last year, Korea asked the internet search firm to remove 64 items from its services, placing Korea fifth highest in number of requests among the countries measured.  Of the 64 requests by Korea, online advertisements accounted for the largest share with 38 cases, followed by web search results with 18 cases.  Of the Korean government's requests, Google considered 89.1 percent to be justifiable and deleted the materials partially or completely.

Google in China and the Korea Precedent

The news is widely circulating all over the world, except within China where the government is heavily censoring it, that Google may consider withdrawing from the Chinese market.   For example, The New York Times is covering this story. In a second story today it provides interesting detail on how the situation reached its present stage.  Although recent attempts, presumably supported by the Chinese government, to hack into accounts of dissidents in China are one reason the withdrawal is being considered, the broader reason is that Chinese government filtering of the internet runs counter to Google's corporate philosophy and effort to "do no evil."

As last Spring's episode with YouTube in Korea illustrated, the decisions of a particular national government do not necessarily dictate what citizens, these days called "netizens" will do.  Last April, when the Korean government declared that it would legally require real-name information to post comments and videos to YouTube, Korean web surfers did not stop posting such material.  In fact, there was an increase in the use of YouTube, but through sites in other countries. (see my earlier post here) China would no doubt face a similar reaction from its netizens should Google withdraw from the market.

www.jamesflarson.com is accessible again

Just a quick note to readers of this blog.   My personal website, www.jamesflarson.com is now accessible again.  I'm still not sure why it was being blocked, but am glad to see that it can now being accessed from within Korea.

Update on my personal website

My personal website, www.jamesflarson.com is apparently still not accessible from within South Korea. I am informed that it is being blocked by KT, on the advice of the Korea Internet Security Agency (KISA) because the site is generating malware. My ISP is in the United States and I opted years ago for the least expensive plan. Therefore, I suspect that the malware is coming from other websites hosted by my ISP on the same IP adress.

In any event, I apologize to those people in Korea who temporarily cannot access my personal website. I'll work this out and get it back up and running.

www.jamesflarson.com not accessible from Korea

This post relates to my personal website, www.jamesflarson.com, which I have hosted with an ISP in the United States for nearly a decade now.  About three or four days ago, I suddenly noticed that I could not access my own site from my office here in Seoul.  This is the first time I've had any difficulty accessing my personal site, which basically serves as an electronic resume and source of information about my background, including books and other publications.

Our network administrator advised pinging the site and doing a traceroute, which we did a couple of days ago. I then contacted my ISP in the U.S. and verified that there is no server-side problem there.  Another individual independently verified that www.jamesflarson.com can be reached from within the U.S.

Meanwhile, as the owner and the author of the site, my attempts to reach it from here in Seoul seem to drop off the internet at a Kornet router somewhere here in Korea, to the best of our knowledge.  Tomorrow I'll ask another staff member to follow up with Kornet.   This type of network problem is a nuisance, to say the least.  I'll look forward to learning what happened and reporting on it here.