A prosecution investigation is uncovering one by one the secrets about electronic eavesdropping by the National Intelligence Service (NIS) during the government of Kim Dae Jung, and the details are uglier than you'd ever imagine. An easy example of the clear "political surveillance" can be seen in how young members of the Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) had their phones tapped in 2000, after they started a campaign to remove party supreme council member Kwon No Kap from his position. A first time National Assembly member says that the NIS directly applied "pressure" of a political nature against him. You feel rage and a sinking sense of frustration to learn that under the Government of the People, which upheld human rights as its highest value, there were the same old-style "political operations" in which politicians had their conversations secretly monitored and found themselves being threatened.
Even more shocking is how that most ugly and dirty of methods, wiretapping, was employed in a considerable amount of state affairs. That can be seen in former deputy NIS director Kim Eun Seong's confession that they "tapped conversations related to the tripartite commission of government, labor, and business, and discussions going on in labor unions, in order to prevent strikes." And since the findings were reported to higher-ups under the classification of "communications intelligence" you even suspect that the activity was organized at just about the top of the government.
It is all too clear what the prosecution needs to uncover next. It must leave not the slightest questions unanswered regarding the full truth about collusion at the time between the NIS and powerful influentials in Kim's government, and about whether there was an official line of communication leading to Cheong Wa Dae. Now that the situation has come to this we believe there is a need for former president Kim Dae Jung himself to come out and give the country a frank explanation.
Lately the collusive relationship between the Agency for National Security Planning and influential insiders in the government of Kim Young Sam has become an issue of hot interest. That is because the deduction generally being made is that if anything, various circumstances suggest that the dirty deals between the intelligence agency and powerful government figures would only have been worse. In order to get rid of the possibility of political misunderstanding, the prosecution needs to speed up its investigation into that area as well.
The Hankyoreh, 11 October 2005.
[Translations by Seoul Selection (PMS)]
