Spy Agency’s Eavesdropping Rose Last Year
By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Repoter
The Broadcasting and Communications Commission (BCC) said Thursday that the number of eavesdropping requests from the spy agency and police last year was the highest since 2004, while the number of cases of e-mail monitoring and caller identification also rose.
Telephone companies allowed the National Intelligence Service (NIS), police officials and prosecutors to tap 1,142 phone calls last year, up from 1,062 cases in 2006. Most of the requests were from the NIS, the spy agency.
The number of caller identification requests from investigation authorities also increased by more than 20 percent to 183,659 cases from 150,743, the BCC said. E-mail monitoring rose 28.9 percent to 326 cases.
Furthermore, the actual number of eavesdropping cases can be higher than the released figure since multiple requests on a single case are counted as one, the BCC said.
``We believe that the increase in the identification requests is in line with the recent surge of violent crime cases,'' said Lee Hang-jae, an official of the BCC. He did not give further details.
Investigators are allowed to eavesdrop on private calls once the prosecution grants permission. The NIS, however, had been criticized for tapping phone calls without such permission being granted until a few years ago.
The increasing trend in eavesdropping is also apparent in the United States. The U.S. Justice Department said last month that the nation's spy court has approved a record number of eavesdropping requests. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved 2,370 warrants last year aimed at people in the United States believed to have ties with terror organizations, the Associated Press reported.
The BCC said that the statistics were filed from 158 telecommunication service operators in South Korea.