Korean police seek legal power to break into accounts that spread child abuse material

Between January and August, the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family sent 88,726 requests to remove victim material from illegal and harmful sites ^[9]. Of those, 58,626, about 66%, did not end in a takedown ^[13][14]. The failures average roughly 7,300 a month ^[15]. According to the Seoul Economic Daily, the sites either ignore the requests or keep changing their domain addresses, a practice known as domain shuttling ^[8].

The tools police already hold were built to find people. Investigators ran 598 undercover operations in the first eight months of this year, close to 40% of all such operations since the system began in September 2021 ^[5][18]. The paper reports that undercover work tracks offenders and secures evidence but has limited reach over material posted on overseas sites ^[7]. Until now the only ways to get at the file itself have been to track down the offender or to ask the overseas operator to delete it ^[3]. The ministry does not keep a list of sites that habitually refuse removal, or statistics by the country where their servers sit ^[10].

Police also point to rising deepfake cases as a reason for the plan ^[4]. This year's partial count does not continue that trend. Case counts reflect what police booked, and the monthly pattern is unknown. Annualised, the total through August comes to about 1,208 cases, roughly 30% below last year's ^[16][17].

The Seoul Economic Daily reported concerns that an officer inside an account could reach personal data unrelated to the crime, or alter what is stored there ^[11]. We think the power to add new electronic data will draw the hardest questions ^[2]. Police might later present files taken from an account they were also allowed to write into. A defence lawyer can argue those files were put there, and police would need a record of every change to answer.

Police are aiming for legislation next year, and the plan surfaced in materials the agency sent to Rep. Ko Dong-jin of the People Power Party ^[1]. The bill can go three ways. Lawmakers could pass every power on the list; keep search, copy and lock-out while dropping data addition; or stall over authorisation and leave police with undercover work and takedown letters. We'd expect the second outcome. The lock-out deals directly with the sites that refuse takedowns, and data addition is the power police will find hardest to defend. The counter-case is that police may need to write data to cut distribution in ways a lock-out cannot. The reported materials do not say what added data would be for. A bill that keeps data addition, with the approval step police are now reviewing as its only check, would prove us wrong ^[12].

The police plan has to pass its own test. Locking an account stops distribution only until the offender registers another. The tool works only if investigators can get into accounts faster than offenders can open new ones.