Coast Guard Officer Faces Criminal Charges for Senkaku Video Leak

Police are questioning a 43-year-old Coast Guard officer who has confessed that he was “sengoku38,” the YouTube user that leaked the video footage of the Sept. 7th ramming of two Japanese patrol ships by a Chinese trawler. He will likely be charged with violations of the public servants law and a law prohibiting unauthorized computer access.

The discovery did not come as a result of police investigation. Instead, manmade the confession to his commanding officer:

Sources familiar with the investigation say the 43-year-old officer, who is based at the 5th Regional Coast Guard Headquarters in Kobe, told his commander Wednesday morning that he had leaked the footage. In police questioning, the officer said he had visited an Internet cafe in Kobe where investigators believe the videos were posted online, the sources say. But he reportedly gave only vague answers on how he obtained the videos and his motive for releasing them.

It may seem strange that an officer in Kobe would be able to get his hands on a video that was filmed down in Okinawa. However, it appears that there weren’t many security restrictions in place, and many copies of the video were burned onto discs and passed around within the Coast Guard for purposes of training and education. It would not have been impossible for the video to get into the hands of an officer stationed in Kobe.

Sympathy towards the coast guard officer remains high, and some scholars even doubt that there is a strong case for charging him with a crime:

Although the motive for the leak is unclear, novelist Kaoru Takamura said that if the Kobe coast guard officer was responsible, he likely felt anger at the government’s handling of the Chinese trawler captain’s case.

“Coast guard officers’ duties are to crack down on intrusions into territorial waters. They must have felt considerable anger and stress, caught between their duties and diplomatic problems,” she said.

The Japan Coast Guard arrested the captain after the collisions in September. However, the Naha prosecutors, apparently under government pressure, released the skipper without indictment amid increasing anger from China.

Masao Horibe, a professor emeritus of information law at Hitotsubashi University, also doubted that the leak of the video clips constituted a criminal act because posting them “did not violate the confidentiality obligation.”

He said that even before the clips appeared on YouTube, the public was well aware of the situation surrounding the collisions based on the coast guard’s news conferences. He also noted that the images were already shown to Diet members, who in turn described them to the media.

As the contents of the video had already been described to the public in great detail, it will be difficult to argue that the video clips themselves were a secret that needed to be protected.

According to NTV, one of their reporters had talked to the officer. Here are his comments in Japanese:

　山川記者「（接触したとき）非常に警戒しているという様子はうかがえた。話をする前に、今回のことについては『海上保安庁、あるいは検察庁、周りの職場の人に大変大きな迷惑をかける』と率直に話していた。事件そのものに対する憤り、政治的に現在の内閣にダメージを与える、そういうものは全くないと（海上保安官は）話した。ただ『この映像は国民には見る権利がある』ということを私に話した」

　また、海上保安官は「隠しておいていいのか。闇から闇に葬られ跡形もなくなってしまう。これは国民が知るべきものであって、国民一人一人が判断したらいい。誰もやってくれないなら自分でやるしかない」などと説明し、刑事罰に問われることに関しては「映像を流出させれば、職を失うことは覚悟していた」「本当に私がやったことが国民全体の倫理に反することであれば、これは甘んじて進んで刑にも服します」と語った。

I don’t have time to provide an adequate translation right now, but he basically said that he didn’t want to see the government bury the video and felt that the public had a right to see it He is prepared to accept the consequences, and expects that he’ll lose his job.

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