In South Korea the summer of 2024 has been marked by a series of spy scandals, which vividly illustrate a number of the country’s domestic and foreign policy problems. Let us start with the scandal involving a data leak from South Korea’s Defense Intelligence Command (KDIC) in late June, potentially causing very serious damage to its “illegal” agents around the world.

What we know so far

On July 27, 2024, a number of South Korean media outlets reported that “the military is conducting an investigation into a leak of personal information of agents assigned to an intelligence unit tasked with spying on North Korea” and a closed-door meeting of the parliamentary intelligence committee was held on July 30. The results of the meeting, insofar as they have been disclosed, can be summarized as follows.

In June 2024, the National Intelligence Service notified its military counterpart, the KDIC, about a leak of classified information, including the identities of agents stationed overseas. The military counterintelligence service has launched an investigation into the incident.

The source of the leak turned out to be the personal (!!!) non-work related laptop of a civilian employee (a former senior military officer), on which he had saved classified information from a secure computer network. The recipient of the data is an ethnic Korean citizen of the PRC (or Joseonjok). The leak consists of several thousand confidential documents

The owner of the laptop is now in custody. He initially claimed that he had been the victim of hackers, but after a closed session in the National Assembly, two deputies reported that the investigation had refuted this claim. In any case, copying this kind of information to a “civilian” unprotected laptop is at the very minimum culpable negligence, and in fact this kind of data transfer could not be accidental.

This is not the first time South Korea’s military intelligence service has suffered a major data leak. In 2017, the Defense Department’s integrated data center was hacked, and about 15 million pages of classified information were leaked to North Korea, including a plan of an operation plan to disable North Korea’s military leadership and intelligence on North Korea provided by the US. In 2018, authorities discovered that an employee had been selling personal data and other information about South Korean secret agents based in China to “foreign organizations” since 2013.

It should be remembered that the current military........

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