Continued from Tony Perez's Electronic Diary (October 19, 2018 - March 12, 2019) http://tonyperezphilippinescyberspacebook41.blogspot.com/

Photo by JR Dalisay / April 21, 2017

Thursday, May 19, 2022

Watched Korea's 2022 Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror (1:45), a documentary on The Nth Room, a cyberporn chat room that was established in 2007 and victimized Korean women, many of them minors, by promising them jobs as models, pressuring them to send nude photos and videos, and then blackmailing them. The chat room had thousands of male subscribers who paid for membership and enriched two perpetrators--young men with the aliases Baksa and Godgod--by millions of won.  

The documentary was conducted by investigative journalists and TV broadcasters. The unfolding of the narrative during the first half is slow. There are too many screen shots, too much animation, and too much symbolic imagery. The interview sets are drab. The exciting sequences are all toward the end, in which we are shown how Baksa and Godgod are tracked down and finally arrested. We are informed in a postscript that thousands of the chat room members were also eventually arrested, and that at least 200 of them were imprisoned.  

The Philippines is fortunate to have an anti-cyberporn mechanism that easily tracks down perpetrators, but unfortunate that the perpetrators are usually the parents and relatives of the victims themselves, unlike the young men Baksa and Godgod, who were strangers to their victims. While the Philippines' market for cyberporn is typically comprised of foreigners, the patrons of The Nth Room are the perpetrators' and the victims' fellow Koreans.

The lesson, of course, is that, when one uses technology to commit a crime, the same technology leads to one's capture.

P.S. That kinetic toy globe jumping from the left to the right of the table was quite perplexing to me

No comments:

Post a Comment