| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 政治學研究所 === 93 === While former US Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson said in 1929, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail”, he also said in 1939 when he served as Secretary of War under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, “Intelligence (monitoring) is a necessary evil”. Advanced countries such as the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and Japan all have formulated specific laws and established responsible institutions to perform the task of intelligence collection by means of communications monitoring.
While cross-border monitoring is one of the necessary intelligence measures for national security and an important link in counter-intelligence tasks, it is often questioned by the public opinion and manipulated to become an issue by the media. The reason for this is that communications monitoring is a matter that significantly affects the rights and interests of the public so it needs to be handled carefully and should not be overdone. In other words, this task is a controversial issue between the maintenance of national security and respect of the basic human rights of the public.
Macroscopically speaking, while cross-border monitoring is necessary and important for national security, the issue of human rights is a global trend that is taken seriously by the whole world and the core value of our country in our pursuing to become a law-based state. Therefore, we have to adopt a working principle of “looking after both sides” to give equal weight to national security and human rights. According to the examining criteria for basic human rights adopted in the U.S., communications monitoring is classified into a category that needs strict examination. The purpose of communications monitoring has to be for pursuing important national interests and the methods used have to ensure the minimum impact on human rights. Therefore, strategically, the implementation of communications monitoring has to meet the principles of legal reservation and proportion, the identification of the elements for the issuance of monitoring permit has to be deliberate and specific, and other supporting measures such as post notification have to be well-established, in order to keep the range of implementation under control and minimize its impact on human rights.
Under the command of the Ministry of National Defense, the Military Intelligence Bureau has established a mechanism to execute cross-border monitoring by operation of law. The execution of cross-border monitoring is under strict control in various aspects at different stages so there should be no room for abuses. What matters is there exist no elements for domestic monitoring. However, in accordance with theory analysis of policy implementation, in order to achieve the expected goals, all matters that significantly affect the rights and interests of the public should be executed by the original organization that formulated the related policy.
It is grateful for the legislative agencies to pay attention to the execution of cross-border monitoring for national security because this clearly indicates that our country is marching toward the core value of a human rights state and is not exclude itself out of the global trend of human rights emphasis. We sincerely hope that the legislative agencies will care for the legality and constitutionality of the development of cross-border monitoring to ensure the national security under the premise that human rights are respected at the same time.
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