Google Broke the Law, Say South Korean Police 203
bonch writes "South Korean police say Google was in violation of Internet privacy laws when its Street View service archived private information in more than 30 countries, including email and text messages. The country's Cyber Terror Response Center broke the encryption on hard drives raided from Google last August and confirmed that private information had been gathered, violating South Korea's telecommunications laws. Police are seeking the original author of the program, though they say it is likely to be a US citizen. Google said it stopped collecting the information as soon as it realized what was happening. 40 states in the US are demanding access to the information gathered by the mapping service in order to determine what was archived, which Google refused to hand over. 'We have been cooperating with the Korean Communications Commission and the police, and will continue to do so,' said a Google Korea spokesperson."
Encryption broken? (Score:3, Informative)
“We succeeded in breaking the encryption behind the hard drives, and confirmed that it contained personal e-mails and text messages of people using the Wi-Fi networks,” said a [Korean] police official.
I was however assuming
1. that in such case Google would have been legally forced to provide the encryption key,
2. and anyway, that a HD encrypted by Google wouldn't be so (apparently) easy to break.
Re:I wonder who they forgot to bribe? (Score:5, Informative)
>>>I suppose you find it easier to just let government corruption continue unabated.
Strawman argument. I never said that, but I'd still rather have the protections given to me by the current Law of the Republic (rights to free speech, trial, privacy, etc) then to have a Democracy where my voice would be drowned-out by a 51% majority of uneducated boobs that would lock me up simply because I'm gay. Or black. Or asian. Or atheist. Or anti-War on Terror. Or whatever.
As for the problems we face today, most would disappear if we followed the 9th and 10th Amendments instead of ignoring them. No more bailouts of AIG, or forced purchasing of hospital insurance I don't want, or war on (some) drugs, or giving "stimulus money" to General Motors, and so on. Congress is forbidden, by the tenth, to do those things.
Re:The South Korean Government is no fan of Google (Score:4, Informative)
1. Serious instances of unfounded slandering against various people, especially celebrities.but not restricted to them. The aim is to encourage people to behave responsibly on the internet by tieing what they post or upload back to the individual, beyond that the SK government doesn't give a rat's arse what you do online or which sites you go to.
Case in point being, to continue with your example, that Google (or more specifically Youtube) was required either to have a system to point back to the real-person or alternatively restrict the ability to post or upload potentially slanderous material. Google chose the latter and it's worthy of note that people can do everything else, eg. view videos.
Basically it's the side effect of having the highest rate of internet participation in the world
2. Many government functions that in real-life require authentication are fully online. This is probably beyond the experience of most people on slashdot, but you can do all sorts of personal activities online (eg. taxation, etc) and by definition you can't take people at their word when talking about those. Therefore real-name identification is required there also, particularly as there's rampant attempts at ID theft from china for various reasons.
Ironically your post is a perfect example of scenario 1, ie. malicious slandering by people hiding behind internet anonymity, in the manner in which you deliberately twist the SK's request and google's actions with unsubstantiated additions like:
- It's no secret that the South Korean government isn't overly fond of Google
Hardly, the government has only required that google comply with the laws that were created to address the previously listed comments. Beyond that Google has been free to operate as it sees fit
We're not talking about china and it's so-called golden shield (or shower to be more accurate).
- Google chose to block posts to YouTube from Korea
No, google chose to remove the functionality to post without an account liked to a real person. To quote from the article:
YouTube has decided to restrict its video upload and comment functions in South Korea.” It also stated, “Because there is no upload function, users won’t be required to confirm their identification.”
Note that viewing videos is not restricted at all and uploads/comments to sites that are linked to a real-person are unrestricted beyond the uploader being aware that they should be sociable in their behaviour.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google simply didn't feel it cost effective to create complex functionality that would be country specific (with all the possibilities that different countries would then start asking for their own items) so it was easier to simply remove rather than add.
- while encouraging those users to change their country preference to somewhere else
Where exactly did they say that?
It's fair to say that your post is a perfect example of what the law is designed to address, slanderers hiding behind anonymity to post all sorts of lies and half-truths. We'd all like to think that this type of people don't exist, but unfortunately some people only feel better by putting others down, one only has to look a
Re:I wonder who they forgot to bribe? (Score:2, Informative)
They don't explicitly restrict the ballots to R and D, but most states have laws making it very difficult for third party politicians to get on the ballot. For instance, they will require an obscene number of signatures for parties that did not get a certain percentage of the vote in the previous election. In Pennsylvania, the courts routinely kick third parties off the ballot for "fraudulent signatures." A few years back Nader got kicked off the ballot and *fined* for a few dozen fraudulent signatures... out of thousands. He had three times the legally required number. It didn't matter that he definitely had the required amount of valid signatures. It didn't matter that his opponent only showed a handful were fraudulent. It didn't matter that there is no way to check that every signature out of thousands is legit. He was kicked off and fined. Not that I'm a fan of Nader, but the court really went out of its way to send a message to third parties: don't even try.