Last month, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) announced that surveillance cameras are to be employed to crack down on illegal parking at Taipei’s 10 most notorious hotspots. This measure would seriously infringe on individuals’ right to privacy, while it offers limited protection and promotion of the public interest and clearly violates the legal proportionality principle.
If this policy is allowed to set a precedent, in the future the government would be able to request the use of surveillance cameras at any time it wishes, using the excuse that there is not enough personnel on the ground to clamp down on violations. The right to privacy would then be nonexistent and we would become participants in the Truman Show.
Ko said that using surveillance cameras to report illegal parking is legitimate since monitors have been used for years to help enforce traffic laws in cases such as running through red lights and speeding. Council of Grand Justices member Lin Tzu-i (林子儀) stated in Constitutional Interpretation No. 603 that law and order and efficiency are major public interests that the state should pursue, but that there is ultimately a limit to how that is done and that these values must not be pursued at all costs. Before restricting basic human rights, the necessity of these measures and the benefits that they might bring must be evaluated to determine whether they abide by the legal proportionality principle.
Whether looked at from the perspective of statistics or real cases, running red lights and speeding can be seriously damaging to the lives, property and safety of road users. If the police do not clamp down on these offenses, major traffic accidents are likely. To catch violators on the spot can be highly dangerous and it is impossible to carry out due to a lack of personnel. This is why surveillance cameras are used.
In terms of the legal proportionality principle, it is justifiable to employ a means that violates the right to privacy to prevent clear and present dangers such as these.
However, compared with running a red light and speeding, illegal parking only infringes on the right of way. There is no immediate and clear danger to the lives or property of road users. To violate the public’s right to privacy only for the purpose of maintaining the right of way does not seem to conform to the proportionality principle.
Even more worrying, if this practice becomes a precedent, it would be akin to opening Pandora’s box. In the future the government could claim insufficient personnel as an excuse to employ surveillance cameras to crack down on all sorts of offenses, such as illegal parking, littering, open defecation and urination — similar to the superstate Oceania in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which everything is under the omnipresent surveillance of Big Brother in the name of the state.
To crack down on illegal parking with surveillance cameras is not just a question of what is in the minds of policymakers, but more a question of how many individuals’ rights should be sacrificed for the sake of public order.
Perhaps Ko does have an IQ of 157 and a strong sense of civic duty and mission, which is why his supporters strongly back this policy, but if this practice is allowed to set a precedent, it might become a tool that administrators at all levels use to maintain public order.
In four or eight years, when Ko’s mayorship comes to an end, a new mayor will be elected. Will the people who support Ko’s policy still have the same confidence when their privacy is put on display before the next Big Brother?
Alex Chang is an assistant research fellow of the Institute of Political Science at Academia Sinica.
Translated by Ethan Zhan
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