To control the COVID-19 pandemic during the New Year holiday, the Ministry of Health and Welfare launched Skynet — a smartphone-based GPS tracking system to enforce quarantine or health management restrictions — and used it to catch people who breached the guidelines by going to a year-end concert by rock band Mayday.
As the system shares its name with China’s massive surveillance network, people are worried whether it monitors everyone in Taiwan. In reaction, the ministry immediately changed the name to Electronic Fence 2.0 and insisted that its implementation is legally sound.
However, the question is if the ministry’s authorization based on the Communicable Disease Control Act (傳染病防治法) is clear enough. According to Article 44, the ministry may order mandatory treatment, isolation or other necessary means to curb the spread of an infectious disease.
The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) implemented five measures based on the article: health surveying, tracking, self-management and self-observation, as well as home isolation.
However, as the number of people under restrictions increases, the conventional ways of monitoring — visiting people at home or calling them by telephone — have become inadequate to meet the needs of the developing situation and must be assisted by technology.
According to the law, those who are subject to electronic surveillance can be divided into two categories. The first category is regulated in the Sexual Assault Crime Prevention Act (性侵害犯罪防治法), which allows monitoring of an offender on parole or probation in the implementation of their sentence after obtaining permission by a prosecutor. The second category is regulated in the Code of Criminal Procedure (刑事訴訟法), which allows monitoring to prevent a defendant from fleeing after being granted suspension of detention, and requires permission by a court.
These types of monitoring are based on nonstop GPS tracking.
However, the intensive monitoring applied in criminal law cannot be used for the prevention and control of a pandemic, as people under quarantine are neither defendants nor prisoners. Therefore, only base stations operated by Taiwan’s telecoms can be used to track smartphone signals to monitor if a person contravenes the guidelines.
This kind of tracking provides only information about whether the monitored person is moving about without permission, but it does not allow for an immediate, accurate localization of the phone’s owner.
The new system marks a change from passive to active monitoring, as it obtains data from base stations around the nation and monitors whether a person under quarantine or self-health management enters a specific area, for example where Mayday holds a concert.
Although it does not provide continuous monitoring, it allows for accurate tracking similar to a GPS-based system, raising doubts as to whether it contravenes the principle of proportionality.
Even though the ministry and the CECC are authorized to adopt pandemic prevention measures, electronic monitoring is not regulated by the Communicable Disease Control Act, or the Special Act for Prevention, Relief and Revitalization Measures for Severe Pneumonia with Novel Pathogens (嚴重特殊傳染性肺炎防治及紓困振興特別條例).
This could lead to arbitrary interpretation and decisions that could contravene human rights.
Therefore, legislators must introduce legal amendments, stipulating that data obtained for pandemic prevention cannot be used for other purposes, as well as the data retention period.
Wu Ching-chin is an associate law professor at Aletheia University and the director of the university’s Research Center for Criminal Law.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai
US President Donald Trump has gotten off to a head-spinning start in his foreign policy. He has pressured Denmark to cede Greenland to the United States, threatened to take over the Panama Canal, urged Canada to become the 51st US state, unilaterally renamed the Gulf of Mexico to “the Gulf of America” and announced plans for the United States to annex and administer Gaza. He has imposed and then suspended 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico for their roles in the flow of fentanyl into the United States, while at the same time increasing tariffs on China by 10
As an American living in Taiwan, I have to confess how impressed I have been over the years by the Chinese Communist Party’s wholehearted embrace of high-speed rail and electric vehicles, and this at a time when my own democratic country has chosen a leader openly committed to doing everything in his power to put obstacles in the way of sustainable energy across the board — and democracy to boot. It really does make me wonder: “Are those of us right who hold that democracy is the right way to go?” Has Taiwan made the wrong choice? Many in China obviously
US President Donald Trump last week announced plans to impose reciprocal tariffs on eight countries. As Taiwan, a key hub for semiconductor manufacturing, is among them, the policy would significantly affect the country. In response, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) dispatched two officials to the US for negotiations, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC) board of directors convened its first-ever meeting in the US. Those developments highlight how the US’ unstable trade policies are posing a growing threat to Taiwan. Can the US truly gain an advantage in chip manufacturing by reversing trade liberalization? Is it realistic to
Last week, 24 Republican representatives in the US Congress proposed a resolution calling for US President Donald Trump’s administration to abandon the US’ “one China” policy, calling it outdated, counterproductive and not reflective of reality, and to restore official diplomatic relations with Taiwan, enter bilateral free-trade agreement negotiations and support its entry into international organizations. That is an exciting and inspiring development. To help the US government and other nations further understand that Taiwan is not a part of China, that those “one China” policies are contrary to the fact that the two countries across the Taiwan Strait are independent and
RSS