Great Korea Herald Article!

The best article I've seen yet about the censorship is in today's Korea Herald.  It's reproduced below.  I tried to find the Wired article it referred to, but was unsuccessful.  If I do a blockquote it messes up the sidebar, so from here until the end of this post is the newspaper article.

Millions of Web users still affected by government ban 

Exactly a month ago, the Ministry of Information and Communication said it was blocking from viewers some 40 Web sites that could possibly contain footage of the beheading of hostage Kim Sun-il.
 
Now, the ministry says it has no idea how many sites are blocked and Internet viewers say millions of users are affected by the ban, due to a blanket procedure that shut off entire domains.
 
Despite these broad stroke efforts, the execution video still remains accessible to Internet surfers in Korea.
 
The ministry ordered its own ethics committee to handle the situation, in which various internet service providers were asked to close domains that could possibly contain sites with the video, an official said.
 
By casting this wide net, it shut off domains that offer pages to Internet users who want to maintain an online journal, also known as "blogs." Internationally popular sites like blogspot.com, blogger.com, typepad.com and several others have millions of registered authors. The ethics committee was told by the ministry to find and block sites that contain "yeopgi," a Korean word for perverted and gruesome content. The government ordered the ban believing the footage showing Kim's murder would further anger citizens already outraged by the slaying.
 
Kim was kidnapped on May 31 and beheaded on June 22 by Islamic militants who demanded that Seoul scrap its plan to send an additional 3,000 troops to Iraq. He was a translator working for a supplier to the U.S. military.
 
Somehow, many sites which have nothing to do with Kim Sun-il have been blocked.
 
Bloggers wonder why the government did not take more careful measures in blocking the video so they would not suffer because of measures aimed at the voyeuristic few.
 
The ministry admits it did not target these or any other writers on the Internet. But it declined to say whether it made a mistake in its procedure to stop the video.
 
"They took the easy way out." said Charlie Reeder, who writes a blog titled "Budaechigae." He explained that it is possible to block individual Web sites but would take longer to do this procedure.
 
The case caught international attention with a recent article published on the issue by a leading technology magazine, Wired, causing further embarrassment to the ministry, which has not responded to bloggers' emails concerning the subject.
 
A month after Kim's beheading, the ministry does not know when it will remove the ban. However, the banned Web sites can still be accessed through mirror sites, or anonymous Web browsers like www.unipeeek.com.
 
The ministry is facing an increasing heap of criticism for its action.
 
Some bloggers expected better decision-making from a nation that has the highest Internet user rate in the world and proudly professes to be a leader in technology.
 
"By calling Korea an Internet power, the MIC is basically shooting itself in the foot with this ban. This is not going to make a good impression on the rest of the world," said Kevin Kim, who maintains a blog titled the "Big Hominid."
 
Many compare the measure to bans that communist China often uses to block out anti-state information.
 
Weeks before Kim's murder, a young American businessmen living in Iraq was also captured and beheaded. The video tape of Nicholas Berg's death was shown almost in its entirety on Korean TV networks, including MBC. Many feel that the government is being unfair by giving special treatment to a video of a Korean.
 
"It's different when Koreans see another Korean get killed. It's a different feeling than seeing a foreigner die," said a ministry official who did not want to be identified.
 
(apetty@heraldm.com)
By Andrew Petty