Dong Hyun Songdemocracy. However, the optimistic view about the potential for online voices to influence the
political and economic landscape quickly shifted to one of despair. Both during and after the
protest, online users came to feel the impact of a government determined to limit their power.
The Lee administration arrested many online users who uploaded online postings against
the government, subsequently deleting the posts and accusing them of disseminating false infor-
mation in the process. Korean Internet service providers, by law, had to comply with the state’s
request to delete postings and hand over their users’ personal information. One of the mecha-
nisms of power that made this possible was Korea’s ‘real-name system’ that was implemented
in July 2007. This imposed a compulsory procedure whereby users who wrote articles on a
website’s notice board with more than 300,000 visitors a day, had to register their real identity.
A reformed real-name system expanded the range of websites, applying the provision to web-
sites with a mere 100,000 visitors a day, which covered most trafficked sites in Korea (Korean
Communications Commission 2008). In effect, the government was able to easily secure from
website operators the personal data of users who were deemed problematic.
There were many cases in which the Candlelight 2008 protestors were prosecuted by
the government. The Lee administration also routinely placed online users who posted anti-
government postings under surveillance. The most shocking event that inspired social turmoil
was the January 2009 arrest of a famous Internet pundit who was openly critical of the govern-
ment, and who went by the user ID “Minerva” on Agora, within Daum.net. The prosecutors
argued that “he had disseminated allegedly libellous information and had breached the Basic
Telecommunications Act” (Son 2009, cited in Song 2011, 60). Another significant event took
Figure 9a.1 Interaction flow during Candlelight 2008^4