Premier wants illegal eavesdropping eliminated

Noting that the people's right to keep their communications confidential is constitutionally protected, Wu said during an Executive Yuan meeting that all illegal telephone eavesdropping — often carried out by detective agencies or credit investigation service companies — should be brought to a halt.

He said that if telephone monitoring is needed, for example, monitoring of phone calls by prosecution authorities as part of criminal investigations or by intelligence authorities for national security reasons, the practice should be conducted in accordance with the law and conducted only when absolutely necessary.

According to a Ministry of Justice report, the country's prosecutors authorized 175,834 wiretaps for 25,556 investigations in 2006 and the figures dropped significantly to 79,886 for 22,830 cases in 2009.

The ministry said it has upgraded a system to monitor illegal eavesdropping from a manual, randomly selecting system to an automatic computerized one.

Subscribe to The China Post and save 25%. Click here

SharePrintEmail

Write a Comment

Terms

Enter your comments - 3000 characters max

Type in image code

Submit

 Receive China Post promos
 Respond to this email