Digital Prison Resumes 2nd Phase Operation... Police "Under Internal Investigation"
Content Transmission Service Also Replaced to Prevent Police Tracking
[Asia Economy Reporter Song Seung-yoon] The website 'Digital Prison,' which arbitrarily discloses personal information of criminals and others, has resumed operations as originally announced, and the police have also begun an internal investigation into the second-term operators.
According to the police on the 19th, the Cyber Investigation Unit of the Daegu Metropolitan Police Agency, which is investigating this case, is conducting an internal investigation, considering the second-term operators who took over the activities of the first-term Digital Prison operators as 'successive accomplices.' A successive accomplice refers to someone who did not start the crime together but joined in during the commission of the crime.
The police have identified some of the first-term Digital Prison operators and, based on their access records, have requested cooperation from Interpol in a foreign country. A red notice has been issued against them. Along with the Interpol notice, the police are narrowing the investigation by requesting the invalidation of passports of those whose identities have been confirmed.
The police are conducting a multifaceted investigation, believing that a person who previously operated several personal information disclosure accounts on social networking services (SNS) such as Instagram's 'nbunbang' is the same individual as the Digital Prison operators. However, compared to the first-term operators whose identities have already been partially confirmed, information about the second-term operators remains shrouded in mystery, making tracking more difficult. The newly reopened Digital Prison posted a notice stating, “To protect users, the CDN service has been changed. We judged that using Cloudflare is risky and have switched to the Russian CDN service DDOS-GUARD.” This appears to be a measure to evade police tracking.
Digital Prison originally had its site access suddenly blocked on the 8th. Then, on the 11th, a statement was posted on the homepage main screen by a person claiming to be the second-term operator.
In the statement, they promised, “From now on, we will only disclose personal information when there is clear evidence visible to anyone, such as court rulings or media press releases,” and added, “Among the posts uploaded so far, those judged to lack sufficient evidence were ruthlessly deleted, and some posts will be re-uploaded after supplementing evidence,” signaling their intention to continue operating the site.
Until the operation resumed, only this statement was visible on the homepage, but they reopened the website and resumed operations the very next day, on the 12th. It is understood that some of the previously disclosed personal information was erased.
Meanwhile, on the 14th, the Korea Communications Standards Commission held a Telecommunications Deliberation Subcommittee meeting and decided not to block the Digital Prison site. Instead, they decided to request correction (access blocking) for 17 posts containing potentially defamatory or privacy-infringing content. The decision was based on concerns that blocking the entire site due to some legally violating information (17 out of 89 cases) would be excessive regulation.
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