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Today's Korea Times reported the following:

US-based website on NK blocked

NK News, a Washington, D.C.-based website focused on North Korea...

...has been partially blocked in South Korea for violating the National Security Law (NSL), authorities confirmed Monday.

“We’ve received some complaints saying, ‘Can we have our money back? Half the website isn’t working.’ That puts us in a difficult situation, all because of this archaic law from the 1940s,” Chad O’ Carroll, managing editor of NK News told The Korea Times from London.

The restriction by the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC), enforced since October, reignites a long-running debate over the controversial law.

Officials here say that accessing material from North Korea is not problematic; however, spreading such material violates the NSL and has resulted in arrests.

The block affects a feature on the website called “KCNA Watch,” which extracts content from Pyongyang’s state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) website in Korean, English and Chinese and turns it into data such as graphs. It provides access to KCNA articles dating back to 1997.

According to the KCSC, the block came after a “substantial part of the content” was filed for review by the National Police Agency (NPA). Upon examination of the website, the commission found the content violated the NSL, a KCSC official said on condition of anonymity..

Bernhard Seliger, resident representative of the Hanns-Seidel-Foundation(*) Korea, a German group with engagement projects in North Korea, suggested that the South has outgrown the law. “South Korea is a very successful economic and political (democratic) model and has nothing to fear from some (admittedly often bizarre) ‘information’ from the North,” he said...

* The Hans-Seidel-Foundation is associated with the German ultra conservative "Christian 'Social' Union"(the sister party of the ruling "Christian 'Democratic' Union")...