By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter

Law enforcement officials are conducting sweeping surveillance of e-mail records without notifying users, touching off criticism as to whether they are abusing their powers in more strongly monitoring the Internet.

According to data obtained by Democratic Party (DP) lawmaker Park Young-sun, the police and prosecutors accessed a total of 3,306 e-mail accounts belonging to subscribers of Naver (www.naver.com) and Daum (www.daum.net), the country’s two most popular Internet portals, in the first half of this year alone.

The number is expected to be significantly larger as it didn’t include the tracking of e-mail services provided by other Internet companies like Yahoo! Korea (www.yahoo.co.kr), Paran (www.paran.com), MSN Hotmail (www.msn.co.kr) and Dreamwiz (www.dreamwiz.com).

Investigators needed a search warrant to intercept the data, but didn’t inform a single user after the investigations that their e-mails had been read, Park said.

Under the current law for criminal procedure, investigators are required to notify the operators of the Internet server when searching e-mail transactions, but doesn’t provide rules about informing the owners of the accounts.

Internet companies and telecommunications operators provided the communication data of their customers to the investigators in more than 337,700 cases during the January-June period, Park said.

``The current law fails to protect the liberties of e-mail users, who should have the right to know whether the letters they sent or received have been read by the state,’’ said Park, who believes that the number of Internet users who had their e-mails monitored could be in the tens of thousands.

``The law also doesn’t provide clear boundaries to state powers regarding inspection of e-mails, as there are no limitations to the length of period when communication records can be inspected,’’ she said.

Park’s revelation comes amid increasing concerns over the governments tightening of control over Internet companies.

Since being attacked by bloggers angered over the decision to resume U.S. beef imports earlier this year, the Lee Myung-bak administration has been considering new ways to monitor the Web.

A group of anti-government bloggers, who led a campaign to pressure companies from providing advertisements to conservative newspapers backing the beef deal, are now facing prosecution.

The government is also planning to introduce measures to limit the anonymity of Internet users posting comments, in a claimed attempt to curb ``cyber bullying.’’

And prosecutors searched the headquarters of NHN, the operator of Naver, and Daum last week, seizing a massive amount of content from e-mails, blogs and Web communities.

Prosecutors said the search was part of their investigation on the illegal transaction of copyrighted music files, but not many in the industry took the words at face value, suspecting it another way for the government to flex its muscles against Internet portals.

With law enforcement officials inspecting e-mails with the ease of sticking a hand in a cookie jar, switching to Google’s Gmail, or other e-mail services whose servers are based overseas, is starting to sound more reasonable.

thkim@koreatimes.co.kr