In recent years, Taiwan has seen a series of incidents in which its undersea cables have been damaged or destroyed, creating damage to critical infrastructure and political tensions. The Control Yuan has approved an investigative report analyzing these events and suggesting improvements.
On the positive side, the government has completed the review of the “Seven Laws on Submarine Cables,” an important first step in addressing the issue with updated regulatory tools.
The first critical issue that emerged concerns maritime surveillance. Technological systems such as AIS on ships, coastal radar, and a cable-based automatic warning system (SAWS) developed by Chunghwa Telecom exist, but in practice, information management is still largely manual. The volume of alerts generated makes it difficult to separate truly dangerous cases from harmless ones.
So-called “shadow fleets” and improvised vessels further complicate matters: they deactivate or falsify AIS signals, change names and identification codes, thus evading surveillance. According to the report, these methods hinder data integration, automated analysis, and comparison between different systems.
A second chapter concerns the application of criminal law. In one specific case, the sabotage of the Hongtai 58 cable, the captain was sentenced to three years in prison because the act was committed in territorial waters and there was clear evidence. This demonstrates that criminal prosecution can be effective, but only under ideal conditions.
If an incident occurs beyond territorial waters, however, questions remain as to which authority should intervene and what legal basis should be applied. The report suggests that it is urgent to clarify these principles and strengthen international cooperation to fill these regulatory gaps.
The third key issue concerns incident response and evidence gathering . According to the audit, current mechanisms focus primarily on post-incident management , once the cable has already been cut. There are still no fully institutionalized procedures for early notification of high-risk vessels or for ensuring effective lateral communication between responsible bodies.
Furthermore, the Coast Guard Administration appears to be suffering from objective limitations: heavy workload, technical difficulties, and insufficient capacity to collect underwater evidence. All of this makes an immediate response and determining responsibility even more difficult.
In summary, Taiwan has made regulatory progress thanks to the Control Yuan report and recent amendments, but three major challenges remain: strengthening automated surveillance, closing legal loopholes in criminal jurisdiction, and strengthening notification and evidence collection systems. Without addressing these issues, protecting undersea cables— the lifeblood of modern communications —remains difficult to achieve effectively.
In this context of analysis and proposals, the importance of initiatives like that of the Epoch Times , which reported the Control Yuan’s detailed report, emerges, helping to make public debate on a topic as technical as it is strategic, more accessible.
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