통신비밀보호법의 문제점과 개선방향

Issues and Suggestions on the Protection of Communications Secrets Act

The Inspection and Investigation of State Affairs by the Science, Technology, Information and Telecommunications Committee of the National Assembly in 2003 proved significant, in that it led to a confirmed revelation that wiretapping and eavesdropping could be conducted on a copied hand-held terminal, which had been the center of controversy over the years. While the revelation was strictly confined to wiretapping and eaves-dropping on a copied mobile terminal within the same base station and sector, it served as an opportunity to urge the government, which had only repeated its cover-ups and excuses, to finally come up with more funda- mental measures to address the issue from both the privacy protection and national security perspectives. What we learned over the process was that the government's repeated claim that wiretapping and eavesdropping cell phones were impossible due to the complexity of CDMA signals, turned out to be false. We also learned that the prevalence of illegal, expediency-oriented wiretapping kept people from noticing the need for an even legitimate wiretapping practice for the sake of national security. Quite to the contrary, people's reaction to the issue remained mostly emotional. It is indeed problematic that the people are under a vague delusion of persecution that the government authority, including the National Intel-ligence Service, is conducting illegal, expediency-oriented wiretapping and eavesdropping in our daily lives, against all legal framework or due course. Moreover, the unwarranted political disclosures and attacks related to wiretapping only seem to aggravate the sense of insecurity among the people. The bottom line here is the dilemma of neither being able to confine the matter to human rights issues (privacy protection), nor to unilaterally advocate the public interest (national security). Alleviating people's exaggerated sense of damage by wiretapping would require the government to disclose the actual problem of wiretapping based on thorough investigation, and to follow up with concrete measures to formulate a legal framework where both human rights and public interests can legitimately protected. The first section of this paper will be dedicated to exploring the following issues：limiting the phone call content wiretapping and emer-gency eavesdropping；further specifying the Articles and provisions of the Protection of Communications Secrets Act；and incorporating various predictable situations into the legislation process. The second section will incorporate issues that may arise along the implementation process of the law, which includes: the lack of awareness on telecom secret protection among the investigation authority and telecom carriers；regulations with too many loopholes; the increasing demand for telecom-related data；the lack of self-regulation within the National Intel- ligence Service, which leads to wiretapping abuse and the issue of setting the scope of billing call specifications. The third section will shed light on those problems related to the legal framework itself, and ways to address them, including: the abolition of emergency eavesdropping making it an obligation to inform subscriber upon the use of his/her call confirmation data ways to address illegal data usechecking the intelligence and investigation agencies and limiting the scope of call data availability.