Initially, government monitoring was said to have something to do with reducing crime, social instability and pro-North Korean activities. But surveillance has become so commonplace that the government and the public seem to have forgotten its purpose. Policing the Internet, poring over private chats, installing an ever-increasing number of close-circuit television cameras and collecting information on telecommunication users are all part of this government’s tool kit.

Ms. Park’s first year in power was dominated by talk of how the National Intelligence Service, South Korea’s main spy agency, had monitored and participated in Internet discussions ahead of her December 2012 election in order to spread more positive views of the ruling party and Ms. Park, and to discredit the opposition. In the aftermath of the scandal, there was much handwringing about the need to better supervise state agencies and prevent similar abuses in the future.

Some measures took effect, such as the introduction of more checks on the power of the N.I.S. and the conviction the former N.I.S. chief, Won Sei-hoon, who was sentenced to three years in prison for intervening in the election. Yet state encroachment on freedom and privacy is worsening.

It was Ms. Park who remarked last September that insults and online rumors about her had “gone too far,” prompting prosecutors to set up a special team for monitoring the Internet. At that same time, in an alarming case reported in South Korean media, police officials and prosecutors investigated a teacher who demanded the president’s resignation online, and sought to obtain a warrant for her arrest, citing her use of Gmail, which is inaccessible to South Korean law enforcement and therefore indicative of some guilt, in the government’s view.

Then in October, it came to light that the N.I.S. had been obtaining warrants to look at chats on KakaoTalk, the top mobile messaging app, in the name of ferreting out pro-North Korean activists. The following month, a committee in the National Assembly began deliberating a motion from a lawmaker of the ruling Saenuri Party that would amend a law to compel operators to install surveillance equipment that would help the state monitor citizens.