A month after a South Korean swingers' website operator was busted, South Korea's main prosecutor's office is continuing a countrywide crackdown on Internet porn.
Published reports April 14 indicate the office has issued at least 100 arrest warrants since early January with more likely to come, all of which involve charges of spreading obscene material under the country's telecommunications law and possible $10,000 fines and sentences up to a year behind bars for each suspect if convicted.
Police in the southern city of Busan arrested the swingers' site owner – whose name has yet to be disclosed – for spreading obscene material in March, and he remains behind bars pending the completion of a full investigation. Within a week, the main prosecutor's office reported 26 suspects booked on similar charges, including three Web administrators running adult-use sections of major Korean Internet portals.
The three administrators still face fines of $7,000–$10,000, while a reported 50 adult Internet companies were ordered to turn over material to regional prosecutors for more investigation, according to Korean press reports.
Korea may be pondering an offline porn and prostitution crackdown as well, with reports indicating that President Roh Moo-hyun has emphasized a need to set a "healthy consumption culture" with money spent on things other than sex or sexual materials. But officials and observers alike fear that with more than 70 percent of Korean homes online – the country has an image as the world's most wired country—finding Internet porn is only too easy.
"The code of ethics became weak," said Paichai University sociologist Lee Mee-sook to Korean reporters, "and people started satisfying their sexual desires through the Internet—anonymously."
Seoul is said to be home to dozens of adult-oriented cyber cafes, where patrons surf in private booths, and where the authorities, as one cyber cafe worker identified only as Lee told a reporter, "can't really control it because it's the Internet; it's impossible. We should have the freedom to see whatever we want."
Others like Kinternet spokesman Lee Yeun-woo, whose group represents Yahoo Korea, Daum, Naver, and other Korean portals, fear a continuing crackdown might cause trouble for people like the swingers' site owner who think they're being charged with what they thought was actually legal, since it involved consenting adults as Korean law defines them.
"The fine actually isn't that much," Lee said. "But we want to prove what those sites did wasn't illegal and want the prosecutors to prove what was wrong."
