The controversy over the secret National Security Bureau (NSB) accounts, triggered by the alleged embezzlement of funds by former NSB chief cashier Liu Kuan-chun (
It is true that the matter centers around whether the law has been broken. Any legal issues of course have to be clarified, and there is absolutely no need for the DPP to cover up any legal mistakes.
Some legislators have entered into a selfish game with the media, leaking confidential documents and possibly harming national security.
The whole incident has exposed the lack of a system for monitoring intelligence budgets. The root cause of this is that, even after the NSB's existence was acknowledged and formalized, budget allocation and management continued to follow the procedures established during the authoritarian era, making legislative supervision difficult.
There are two ways to strengthen the supervision of intelligence activities. One way is to strengthen external supervision, and the other is to improve internal control and management procedures. A strengthening of external supervision by means of laws regulating the protection of state secrets and the oversight of state intelligence is being widely discussed, as are both the setting up of a group for supervising classified budgets under the auspices of the National Defense and the Foreign and Overseas Chinese Affairs Committees, and the establishment of an intelligence supervisory committee. This committee would have the powers to review allocations for each classified budget item. Legislators will be given further supervisory responsibilities, and once a leak of classified information occurs, they will be accountable under criminal law.
Members of the National Defense Committee, however, already review the NSB budget annually at a confidential meeting, but it is still difficult to get a full picture of classified parts of the budget. Difficulties in monitoring secret intelligence budgets have much to do with legislators' lack of expertise. If the legislature establishes an intelligence committee, it will still be fumbling in the dark, just as it does annually in the current confidential meetings. The consequence of this is that it ends up simply providing legal protection for inappropriate classified budgets. Furthermore, legislators have no interest in reviewing the budget-closing process. They have not done so for over a decade and it is therefore impossible to monitor budget execution. If the expertise of legislators is not improved, and if the habit of not reviewing the budget-closing process persists, an intelligence committee will have about as much success rooting out budgetary malpractices as it would trying to squeeze blood from a stone.
Classified intelligence budgets must remain classified because there are parts that cannot be exposed. The intelligence agencies will try to avoid making them public if they can, try to hide them from the legislature if they can, and generally try to deceive if they can. External supervision will only have a limited effect. In the US for example, which may have the world's healthiest supervision of intelligence activities, weapons could still be secretly sold to Iran without congressional approval and profits used to assist the Contras in Nicaragua. A legislative supervisory intelligence committee will still have only limited effects if the NSB and other intelligence agencies deliberately conceal information. The only possible way to reduce malpractice is therefore to strengthen internal control and management procedures. The DPP should show the public its determination for reform.
Article 24 of the Organization Law governing the NSB states, "Budgets for the National Security Bureau shall be treated as confidential. They shall be reviewed in secret by the Legislative Yuan and incorporated into the budgets of other government agencies. The agencies concerned are to compile and execute these budgets and audit the closing accounts in a confidential manner."
The NSB budget is divided into several items hidden in the confidential budget of the Ministry of National Defense (MND). It is difficult for outsiders to find out the budget total, let alone other details. It is also difficult to obtain receipts or other evidence before expenditure items have been written off in confidential intelligence budgets. In their examination of NSB budget management, the Ministry of Audit (MOA) also adopts the loosest of standards. If budget allocation procedures are not changed, it will still be possible for the NSB to set up secret accounts with surplus funds instead of returning them to the treasury. For fundamental reform, procedures for the allocation of budgets to the NSB must be amended. They must continue to be allocated in a confidential manner, but not by being incorporated into the MND budget. Apart from facilitating supervision by the legislature, this would also facilitate an Ministry of Audit review of the budget-closing process.
The national security services cannot be allowed to operate unchecked, but politicians must not seek publicity by exposing classified information that may be harmful to state security. At best, the formalization of the NSB's status in 1993 only gave the agency a legal foundation on which to stand. Due to its continuous adherence to past methods of operating in the dark, many shortcomings still exist in the procedures for the allocation, execution and closing of budget accounts.
As for the Liu embezzlement case, the most urgent issues are still to repair the damaged intelligence system and to institutionalize the supervision of intelligence activities in order to facilitate a successful transformation of the NSB.
Shen Fu-hsiung is director of the DPP's policy committee and a legislator.
Translated by Perry Svensson
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
RSS