Wiretap rustle

High-ranking officials of the U.S. State Department and Defense Department sometimes give a briefing on the premise of “off-the-records.” They are Special Representative for North Korea Policy Glyn Davies from the State Department and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia Michael Schiffer from Pentagon. They brief to Washington-based correspondents from Northeast Asian countries including Korea, Japan and China. The correspondents cannot carry a camera and a voice recorder because it is a background briefing. If one violates it, his or her media outlet will not be invited to the next briefing.

Apple’s iPhone has no voice recording function during phone calls. An interview, a speech, or a lecture can be recorded by iPhone, but not during a phone call. So is Samsung’s Galaxy sold in the U.S. Both recording a phone call without the other party’s consent and installing a function to record phone calls on a smartphone are illegal. Apple founder Steve Jobs was known to hate recording phone conversation. iPhone sold in Korea also has no voice recording function during phone calls.

If a third person wiretaps other person’s conversation or phone conversation, police does not take it as evidence. It is subject to a principle that police cannot investigate the information acquired illegally. The Mirim team, a wiretapping team of the National Safety Planning Department (current National Intelligence Agency) under the Kim Dae-jung administration had some 300 tapes, which they recorded the eavesdropped conversations of bigwigs in politics, businesses, the government, and the media. Prosecutors, however, did not unveil the tapes and put them into Pandora’s box. Samsung’s X-file was not released for the same reason.

A recorded phone conversation has recently created quite a stir. In the conversation, a sales manager at Namyang Dairy Product used severe swear words to a franchisee to push for a certain sales target. As a result of the head office’s excessive push for sales, franchisees got angry and posted phone call files on the Internet, triggering a boycott against the company. In civil lawsuits such as a divorce lawsuit, there are many cases in which one party intentionally calls to the other and records the voice to use it as evidence. The power dynamics between a franchiser and a franchisee can change. Both of them need to be cautious about their words anyway.

Editorial Writer Choi Yeong-hae (yhchoi65@donga.com)