The “1922” short message service (SMS) is only used for contact tracing to curb the spread of COVID-19 and has never been used in criminal investigations, the National Communications Commission (NCC) said on Sunday.
The commission issued the statement after the Legislative Yuan on Friday reduced the subsidies that the commission budgeted to partially fund telecoms in maintaining their messaging service systems from NT$800 million (US$28.623 million) to NT$300 million.
On Saturday, the Chinese-language United Daily News published a letter written by Taichung District Court Judge Chang Yuan-sen (張淵森), who accused the Criminal Investigation Bureau of using the 1922 service to track suspects, citing an application for a search warrant he had reviewed.
Photo courtesy of the Taipei City Government via CNA
The commission said in the statement that information gathered through the 1922 service is only used for “disease prevention purposes,” meaning that only the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) can request access to the data.
The bureau has never requested the center’s permission to access the data, it said.
“Except for the CECC, telecoms have never offered such data to other third parties. The government has been keeping its word about how data should be used,” it added.
The Communication Security and Surveillance Act (通訊保障及監察法) stipulates that a district judge may issue an interception warrant if there is sufficient evidence that an accused or a suspect has been involved in criminal activity, and that it is reasonable to assume that the content of their communications is relevant to the case being investigated.
The warrant allows police to view or listen to communication records of suspects, including text messages sent to the 1922 hotline, the commission said.
“The communication surveillance system is regulated by the Communication Security and Surveillance Act, whereas data collected by 1922 messaging service are used by CECC to track the spread of coronavirus. The two systems are established using different regulations, setting different purposes and scopes for data gathering,” it said.
“It is regrettable that the judge made a commentary without first discerning different regulations governing access to the two systems,” it said.
Deputy Minister of the Interior Chen Tsung-yen (陳宗彥), who is a deputy head of the center, said that they have reminded police stations nationwide that they should exclude 1922 messages from criminal investigations.
The service activates the text-messaging function for the 1922 hotline, which was established by the Centers for Disease Control for people to ask questions about COVID-19 or other communicable diseases.
Regarding the budget cut for messaging services, the commission said text messages are delivered to the 1922 hotline free of charge.
As of Monday last week, more than 390 million messages had been sent to 1922, the commission said.
The subsidies would be used to help telecoms expand the capacity of their text-messaging systems to store messages and process the CECC’s contact tracing requests, the commission said.
The money spent by telecoms to maintain the systems is much more than the subsidies.
The Executive Yuan launched 1922’s messaging service on May 19, when the government issued a nationwide level 3 COVID-19 alert. Under the alert, businesses and restaurants must record customers’ names and telephone numbers, as well as the number of accompanying visitors, for contact tracing.
Businesses and restaurants need to obtain a QR code by registering on the e-Mask pre-order system (emask.taiwan.gov.tw/real) and place the code in their venues.
When entering a store or a restaurant, people need to scan the code using a smartphone and follow a prompt that appears on the screen to send a message to the 1922 hotline.
Telecoms must delete the messages from their systems after 28 days.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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