The Mouse That Roared South Koreans Raid ‘Enemy’ Web Site

For a Canadian university student, creating an Internet site on North Korea was simply opening a small library on the reclusive nation. For South Korean authorities, it was a threat to national security.

Last week, South Korea declared David Burgess’ World Wide Web site subversive and ordered 14 local computer networks with Internet links to block public access to it.

The government also said it would punish anyone accessing North Korean web sites, taking its ideological war with its Marxist enemy into cyberspace.

Up to 500,000 South Koreans are believed to be surfing the net, 1-1/2 years after the nation established fullfledged commercial Internet links.

Burgess, a political science major at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, says he has no dealings with North Korea’s government and dismisses suggestions that he acted at Pyongyang’s behest.

Burgess said he created the site with documents he acquired during a recent visit to North Korea, and he simply wanted to give curious outsiders a view inside the secluded state.

North Korean pamphlets found on Burgess’ home page are sprinkled with references to the “Greatest Genius Mankind Has Ever Known, Comrade Kim Jong Il,” “U.S. imperialist warmaniacs” and “South Korean puppet reactionaries.”

They might be laughed off as Cold War classics, but South Korea’s strict national security law has sweeping bans on communist propaganda and about 340 people are in prison for breaking the law, according to human rights groups.

But, “Who will be persuaded by a country which can’t feed its own people?” wrote one critic in a local on-line chat group.

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SEEING RED Burgess’ North Korean Home Page address is: http://duke.usask.ca/ (tilde)burgess/DPRK.html