`Tis the season to be jolly, but not if you work for the Ministry of Finance or are in any other way associated with the investigation of the alleged financial misdoings of political dead man walking James Soong. For those luckless few, Intel boss Andy Grove's maxim that "only the paranoid survive" has become a creed to live by.
Now government officials involved in the Soong affair are scared even of using their office telephones and seem to be setting up clandestine call box operations in the manner of a John Le Carre spy novel. The reason is that they are fully aware that the security services are packed with Soong loyalists who would just naturally like to tap the phones of finance ministry officials to see how the case against their champion is proceeding.
We cannot but help find amusing the government's being so risibly hoist with its own petard here. After all, the flagrant way that phone tapping is carried out in Taiwan, the way that laws which govern its use and its authorization are flouted with impunity, has long been a scandal. That it should now be working to frustrate the designs of a regime which has had so little compunction about using wiretapping to its own advantage is a delicious irony and a much appreciated Christmas present to the surprisingly large number of journalists on this paper who have at one time or another had their phones tapped.
Yet, however amusing it is to see one highly partisan government agency spying on another, it is also a matter for deep concern. Security services are potential loose cannons in any country, as was shown by the much-publicized waywardness of America's CIA and the British MI5's notorious attempt to destabilize Labour party governments in the 1960s.
But Taiwan has a special, though by no means unique problem, that these long established democracies do not have. It is barely a decade since the lifting of martial law and the rolling back of the national security state. While the island's political institutions have been changed absolutely by democratization, many organs of government remain unchanged. The downside of Taiwan's "bloodless revolution" is that the kind of self-examination, the ceaseless identification of anti-democratic elements in government, has never been carried out.
Many bad habits remain, and they do so because the temporary expediency of maintaining them has always outweighed the idealistic intention of abolishing them. Wiretapping is a symptom of this. According to the Taiwan Association for Human Rights (TAHR,
Many of Taiwan's other human rights black marks cited by TAHR and reported on the front page of this newspaper today, are grounded in the same problem: that while Taiwan has adopted the institutions of democracy, the government has yet to nurture a sense that civil liberties matter and are to be protected, and if this causes problems for the government then so be it. Taiwan's problem is that while its institutions might have been changed, the mindset of too many of its administrators has yet to catch up.
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