The National Police Administration has launched an internal survey on police access to the household registration and military service online system following reports of multiple instances of police abuse of their powers to look into household registration data.
As a result of police infractions over access to household registration data for civilians — which included leaks of such data to third parties — the Control Yuan and the Ministry of the Interior investigated the matter.
To prevent further abuse, the household registration and -military service data were converted to a digital platform.
One of the most serious infractions involved a case in which police officers leaked personal information on civilians to private investigators in February last year. Another case involved officers who were tricked into accessing personal information by fraudsters who pretended to be from the Criminal Investigation Bureau in March last year.
However, the measures that the administration has taken do not seem to have fully addressed the problem, the administration said, as infractions continue to occur, prompting -administration officials to conduct an inquiry.
The inquiry will consider four options: retracting all powers of access; requiring that officers send official documents to request data; allowing access only to the household registration section of the police department, meaning that officers needing data would have to go through the household registration section to obtain it. The fourth option is to reinforce current measures.
Police officers who handle day-to-day operations said the current measures were strict enough, adding that if any changes were made, “resulting delays in the investigation of cases would not be the responsibility of police departments.”
One police officer said: -“Everyone has their own account and password, and it can quickly be seen who was accessing the data.”
As an example, he mentioned the case of a police officer who accessed the personal data of Taiwanese model Lin Chi-ling (林志玲).
His infraction was discovered immediately and he was severely punished, the police officer said.
If officers’ powers to search the data were rescinded, it would throw police back to the day when they had to wait for data before looking into a case, the police officer said, adding that it would seriously affect investigations.
“I think everyone would choose to keep it [police powers to search for data] as it is, so case procedures won’t be dragged out,” the police officer said.
Translated by Jake Chung, staff writer
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