The world's most wired country is raiding cyberspace's red-light district in a campaign pitting Confucian morals against modern technology.
Since January, the main prosecutor's office in Seoul has issued arrest warrants for about 100 people charged with spreading obscene material under South Korea's telecommunications law, a crime carrying penalties of up to a year in jail or a nearly US$10,000 fine.
In a highly publicized case last month, police in the southern city of Busan arrested the operator of a Web site that offers a forum to arrange swaps of sex partners. The 36-year-old man, whose name hasn't been released, is charged with spreading obscene material and remains jailed while the investigation continues, said Busan police officer Lee Nam-sik, who is heading the probe. The campaign comes amid a wider moral crackdown starting last year, when penalties for prostitution-related crimes were also doubled.
Korea has an active sex trade -- both online and off.
According to the Korean Institute of Criminology, the amount spent on prostitution alone amounted to US$23.6 billion in 2002, the last year for which figures were available.
At a recent Cabinet meeting, where the campaign against prostitution was discussed, President Roh Moo-hyun stressed the need for establishing a "healthy consumption culture," implying money should be spent on things other than the sex trade.
In a country where more than 70 percent of homes have high-speed Internet connections, access to cyberporn is easy.
That means traditional taboos in Korea's conservative, Confucian-based society have quickly shattered, said Lee Mee-sook, a sociology professor at Paichai University in the central city of Daejeon.
"The code of ethics became weak, and people started satisfying their sexual desires through the Internet -- anonymously," she said.
On a busy street in the center of the South Korean capital Seoul, "adult" Internet cafes aren't hard to find, where customers can surf the Web in private booths as opposed to the open rows of computers found in typical cybercafes.
Authorities "can't really control it because it's the Internet, it's impossible," said Lee, 28, a worker at the Red Box adult Internet cafe, who gave only his last name. "We should have the freedom to see whatever we want."
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