Rear Window | Authority report

Severo Portela

To make good use of the accurate Monday morning quarterback predictions we would say it was an easy guess to foresee that Wong Sio Chak’s day in the Legislative Assembly would become the highlight of the sectorial policy presentations. This is not exactly because the areas and issues covered by the Security portfolio are in themselves a source of immediate controversy, both here and anywhere else, but because Secretary Wong proved himself to be prepared to go and play in order to stand his ground – to uphold the government guidelines – although one has to wonder at what point the policy brief ends and the Secretary for Security reading of the zeitgeist begins.

Anyway, just to figure out the weight of this portfolio, take Sulu Sou’s alleged aggravated disobedience, surveillance cameras, cybersecurity law, security law, border control policy and so on. All directly relate to the rights, freedoms and guarantees in the MSAR. All in a way addressed directly by Wong regardless of the discomfort in challenging pro-democracy legislators on their turf of ideas first among all the freedoms of speech.

Sulu Sou and Ng Kuok Cheong confronted the Secretary for Security with alleged episodes of noise on the Internet, and with the prosecution of two senior citizens on the grounds of, we believe, sharing messages about Typhoon Hato which were deemed rumors. The “cyber security law did not go through a public consultation; nobody has seen the contents of the bill”, pointed out Sulu Sou. Wong reformulated the question to the technical level of telecoms, and had no problem to assume that freedom of speech is not absolute (to finish with the recurrent mantra of according with the law, according with the law). “All speech needs to be controlled within the law…it is not absolutely free, including speech online. We are supervising according with…”, you know. There seems to be no reason for solid optimism chez Macau’s pro-democracy clubs!

Beyond worries regarding the generic freedom of speech, Ng managed to indirectly question the Secretary for Security about the ordeal of fellow democrat Sulu Sou, who’s soon to be prosecuted. Referring to “democratic movements”, the veteran lawmaker asked timidly if Macau is abusing its power by prosecuting mostly peaceful demonstrators. Indeed, Sulu Sou who was accused of walking on the road instead of the sidewalk without permission is one such case. The Legislative Assembly will vote today to suspend – or otherwise – the legislator in order to facilitate him standing trial now or at a later date for aggravated disobedience.

Wong Sio Chak countered the arguments by the mantra “the police are enforcing the law according with its rules” and with an argument of numbers, or bilan, in which there were 58 individuals prosecuted who had taken part in two demonstrations for a total of 147 demonstrations and, 1882 meetings. It gives one shudders.

Spooky: if there is no cooling-off factor under consideration, we have, borrowing from Zizek trilemma, to fear the incompatibility of certain virtues in an utterly constraining ideological environment. Put the CCTV surveillance cameras system that Wong Sio Chak guarantees will not compromise democratic movements together with its rationale, and we have the stuff of nightmares; perhaps unjustified considering what Wong says preemptively.

P.S.: A final note related to the virtues of camera surveillance system that allows police to save precious time on investigation…from days to seconds. This is fact; fiction based upon it is something like Philip K Dick’s short-story  ”Minority Report” of which we have the synopsis: in a future where a special police unit is able to arrest murderers before they commit their crimes, an officer from that unit is himself accused of a future murder.