The Control Yuan has made available online the report of an investigation into the implementation of the Communication Security and Surveillance Act (通訊保障及監察法), which points out a number of defects, including an eavesdropping case involving several people that could be decided by just a prosecutor and a judge.
The government has been unable to ensure people’s freedom from being illegally bugged, one of the investigating Control Yuan members, Li Ful-dien (李復甸), told reporters on Tuesday. The other two investigators are Yeh Yao-peng (葉耀鵬) and Lin Chu-liang (林鉅鋃).
Li said that the “Managing and Checking System of Communication Surveillance” set up by the Taiwan High Court is not strict enough and could allow law enforcement personnel to wiretap people who are in contact with targeted individuals or to add other telephone numbers to the list of approved targets without permission.
Taiwanese courts permitted 504,788 cases of eavesdropping from 2007 to last year, while the US had about 1,000 to 2,000 cases per year in the past decade, according to the report.
However, the courts checked up on just 153 of the approved cases during the 2011-2013 period, representing an average of only 2.4 supervisory visits to law enforcement units during the period, the report found.
The report said cases can be assigned to a prosecutor and a judge, who are also responsible for renewing the case or adding targeted telephone numbers.
Taiwan falls short compared with certain other countries such as Germany, where cases are decided by judges who are on duty on a rotational basis, and the US, where cases need to be reviewed along with all previous data and can be subject to review by a different court, according to the report.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching