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Opinion on the Amendment to the Communications Confidentiality Protection Act [2007] KRNHRC 13 (1 January 2007)

In relation to the Amendment to the Communications Confidentiality Protection Act,
the Commission presented the following opinions:
(1) inclusion of location information (GPS) in communications certification data might lead
to exposure of excessive personal information, violate privacy of individuals, and misuse
by investigators;
(2) imposing communications service providers obligations to provide communications information to
investigators and punishing communications service providers for failure to do so is
discrimination against communications service providers without reasonable causes, and it
conflicts with the principles of definiteness, warrant requirement, benefit comparison, and
may be declared unconstitutional for investigators have to seize or search places to find
evidence and those who retain communications information but do not provide such
information to investigators are not punished in usual cases;
(3) clauses to force communications service providers to acquire devices needed for enforcement of
communications restriction actions do not take into account social implications and
potential misuse of cell phone wiretapping, which has been prevented based on the public
consensus, and communications service providers might violate privacy of individuals,
because they can wiretap cell phone communications not only in exceptional cases allowed
by the law but also whenever they want, once they acquire wiretapping devices;
(4) institutional measures to prevent reckless collection and disclosure of personal information
and swiftly delete personal information retained by communications service providers
should be developed, and storing communications data for a certain period of time
conflicts with the protection of personal information.

Therefore, the Commission noted that the Amendment to the Communication
Confidentiality Act should be changed or deleted, because the Amendment goes against the
purposes of the Communication Confidentiality Act, and might violate freedom of
communications, privacy, and the warrant requirement principle.