Kim Rahn is the managing editor of The Korea Times. Since joining the company in 2003, she has covered various beats including the presidential office, Seoul city government, the Bank of Korea and the tourism industry. In 2014, she won the Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) award for her coverage of the ordeals of migrant women in Korea.
Ex-spy chief sentenced to 3 years
By Kim Rahn
Won Sei-hoon
By Kim Rahn
An appellate court accepted a prosecutorial appeal and sentenced former spy agency chief Won Sei-hoon to three years in prison Monday for ordering his agents to post political comments online to meddle in the 2012 presidential election.
He was put behind bars immediately after the ruling.
The court agreed with the prosecution’s argument that he had violated the Election Law, which bans civil servants from interfering in elections, and the National Intelligence Service Law (NIS) that bans NIS officers from explicit political activities.
In June 2013, Won was indicted for ordering NIS staff to conduct illegal online campaigning.
In September, a lower court found Won guilty of violating the NIS Law but not the Election Law, giving him a 30 month prison term suspended for four years, and three years of suspension of official duty.
The court recognized that the spy agency staffers’ online comments or tweets intervened in politics, but were not aimed at supporting or opposing specific presidential candidates. It said Won ordered the staffers not to meddle in the election at that time of the poll, and the number of such comments or tweets dropped as the poll approached.
The high court said that the NIS’s cyber team started illegal campaigning on Aug. 20 in 2012 when Park Geun-hye was picked as the ruling party’s presidential candidate, saying it was on Won’s orders.
“Their cyber activities were an intervention in the people’s political decision-making, ignoring a civil servant’s duty to remain politically neutral as set by the Constitution,” it said.
“Won and the team used the NIS to oppose specific politicians and political parties. As a state organization spread biased political opinions systematically on the cyber venues of public opinion, people now have to doubt the purity of cyber space.”
The court stated that the NIS staffers used 716 Twitter accounts to tweet some 274,000 tweets.
The new ruling is expected to reignite criticism from opposition parties and progressive civic groups who have claimed that Won and the NIS attempted to support the then-ruling party candidate Park by posting comments critical of opposition candidate Moon Jae-in.
“It is reasonable to say that Won intended to support and oppose specific candidates,” the high court said in its ruling.
“Although he did not know details about the cyber team’s activities, he was an accomplice. We believe the team’s activities came from his order, and he actively approved of their activities.”
This high court ruling was contrary to a related ruling for Kim Yong-pan, the former Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency chief, who was recently cleared of charges by the Supreme Court that he obstructed an investigation into the NIS’s meddling in the election.
He was indicted with Won for violating the Election Law.
A few days before the election, an NIS agent was questioned for posting online comments critical of Moon. Officers at Suseo Police Station announced at that time that they could not find such postings. But after the election, they said they found them.
Kim was indicted for ordering the police station to announce the false probe result to influence the election, but the court concluded this was not true, citing a lack of evidence.