National Internet surveillance is opaque and lacks clear legal regulation, the Taiwan Association for Human Rights said yesterday, announcing the results of its first Taiwan Internet Transparency Report.
“The people have a right to know how cases [of Internet surveillance] occur every year, what the legal foundation is and how the process is run,” Taiwan Association for Human Rights secretary-general Chiu E-ling (邱伊翎) said, citing widespread Internet usage around the nation.
She said that many government agencies had refused to provide statistics on Internet surveillance, making it difficult to near impossible to compile complete figures.
“The current data situation is extremely unrealistic,” association specialist Ho Ming-hsuan (何明諠) said, adding that the number of cases of Internet surveillance statistically provided by government agencies was far lower than the number of requests reported by major Internet companies.
The association said that Google, Yahoo, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft reported that they had received 4,181 Internet surveillance requests from the Taiwanese government in the first half of last year. However, government agencies only acknowledged making 4,908 Internet surveillance requests for the three years spanning 2012 to last year.
“Given the lack of transparency, how can the people trust that the government is not acting arbitrarily?” he said.
Only half of the government agencies with authority to conduct Internet surveillance provided data in response to the association’s Freedom of Government Information Law (政府資訊公開法) request.
The National Security Bureau said that it was not obligated to provide data, while the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau denied that it had conducted any Internet surveillance, he said.
Academia Sinica associate research professor Chiou Wen-tsong (邱文聰) said that interviews with corporations had also revealed that in some cases, government agencies were “acting as they see fit.”
Most Internet surveillance is not subject to warrant requirements under the Communication Security and Surveillance Act (通訊保障及監察法), because the government interprets the act as applying only to intercepted messages, allowing it to treat stored e-mails as ordinary evidence, he said.
Ho said that the Criminal Investigation Bureau of the National Police Agency had declined to cite a specific legal foundation for their Internet surveillance requests, referring the association to the Laws and Regulations Database of the Republic of China maintained by the Ministry of Justice.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) said there were cases in which law enforcement agencies appeared to have misled legislators about the extent of their surveillance.
She cited a case in which the police had contacted numerous users of a smartphone application, despite saying in response to questions that they had only looked up the contact information for the responsible firm’s chief executive officer and corporate board from official registration documents. She said she suspected that they obtained user contact information from banks after tracking the sources of transactions using the application.
The association called on government bureaus to publicize data on Internet surveillance and clearly outline the legal foundation and process used for surveillance they conduct, also calling for the establishment of an independent watchdog.
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