Posted on : Aug.24,2018 16:06 KST
National Police Agency also initiated internet campaign to manipulate public opinion
During the administration of ex-president Lee Myung-bak, the police illegally monitored email without warrants and tracked the IP addresses of people who had written posts on the message boards of civic groups, investigators have learned. In effect, the police were “hacking” civilians who weren’t under any specific criminal charges. Evidence has also emerged that tens of thousands of politically charged comments were written by the National Police Agency’s security and intelligence bureaus.
The special team of investigators at the National Police Agency (NPA) that is currently investigating the police comment case announced on Aug. 23 that it had requested arrest warrants for a total of four individuals, including one current senior official and three former senior officials who had served as director generals of the NPA’s security and intelligence bureaus between 2010 and 2012. These officials are being charged with illegal wiretapping and a campaign to manipulate political opinion online.
The team of investigators is charging a police superintendent surnamed Min, who was the head of the security and cyber investigation team for the NPA’s security bureau in 2010, with violating the Protection of Communications Secrets Act. The investigators have confirmed that Min acquired hacking equipment and illegally read the emails of subjects of an internal investigation without a warrant.
As for the police’s online comment operations, the team of investigators listed overstepping authority and preventing the exercise of lawful rights on the arrest warrant for a former NPA security bureau director general surnamed Hwang, the former NPA intelligence bureau director general surnamed Kim and a former NPA intelligence bureau vice director surnamed Jeong. These figures are being charged with orchestrating operations to post tens of thousands of comments about political and social issues, including an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement and the Hope Bus at Hanjin Heavy Industries.
Illegal wiretapping using hacker’s toolkit
The shocking part of the special team’s findings is that the police – the very people supposed to be preventing crime – were using illegal means to commit illegal wiretapping. The police reportedly learned in their investigation that Min had been intercepting the emails of subjects of an internal investigation through a method similar to packet monitoring, in which data is intercepted in transit on an internet line being used by the person being monitored. The police also reportedly were using similar methods for real-time identification of IP addresses that could identify the people posting on the websites of a number of civic groups that were under surveillance.
The system used by Min in the illegal wiretapping is reported to be one that the NPA purchased from a company identified as “O.” According to material that Rep. Lee Jae-jeong, a lawmaker with the Democratic Party’s Public Administration and Security Committee, received from the NPA, the second security department in the NPA’s security bureau purchased a client computer system called “B.F.S. Matrix SW” from “O” on Dec. 29, 2009, for the price of 78 million won (US$69,434). The second security department was in charge of security and cyber investigations at the time and later became the independent security and cyber investigation team, with Min serving as the first head of this team.
The client computer system purchased by the NPA reportedly made it possible to infiltrate servers and websites under surveillance and ascertain in real time the IP addresses of people posting on message boards and emails being sent and received – in order words, a hacker’s toolkit. The special team of investigators concluded that Min had resorted to such hacking techniques at his discretion without waiting for a search warrant from the courts and used them to scrutinize civic groups’ message boards and the emails of people subject to an internal investigation. Based on this conclusion, the investigators have called Min and people connected with “O” in for questioning on several occasions.
It’s equally shocking that not one but two chief superintendent generals have been implicated in the police comment scandal. Hwang, former security bureau director general, is being charged with leading an operation to manipulate public opinion online by ordering more than 90 agents on the security and cyber investigation team to use false names and overseas IP addresses to post comments defending the police and the government in connection with an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease and other controversies.
Over 40,000 politically charged comments dispersed under Hwang’s orders
A police investigation has found that more than 40,000 comments altogether were composed on Hwang’s orders. The team of investigators said that it had directly verified more than 750 of these comments.
Separately from the NPA’s security bureau, the NPA’s intelligence bureau also got involved in writing comments, with a former NPA intelligence bureau director general, surnamed Kim and a former NPA intelligence vice director surnamed Jeong charged with having over a hundred employees at the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency and at intelligence departments in smaller police departments around the country to use their own accounts or the accounts or family members to write more than 14,000 comments siding with the government in incidents including the Hope Bus and the South Korea-US Free Trade Agreement. The special team of investigators has been able to find more than 7,000 of a total of 14,000 comments. But since a substantial number of the comments composed by the police have been deleted, this operation could have been even larger in scale.
The special team of investigators also turned up evidence that the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency had set up a team called SPOL (Seoul Police Opinion Leader) that was separate from the existing security and intelligence bureaus and dedicated to posting comments. The former senior police officials whose names appear on the warrant request are reportedly denying the charges against them.
“We’re learning that the police illegally monitored emails in addition to an elaborate comment-posting campaign. We need to figure out which senior officials gave the orders to carry out what was effectively surveillance,” Rep. Lee Jae-jeong said.
“We’ll soon be calling in former commissioner general Cho Hyeon-o for questioning,” a police spokesperson said. Cho was the immediate superior of the current and former police officials whose warrants have been requested.
By Jung Hwan-bong, staff reporter
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