A senior Maritime Self-Defense Forces official has admitted that the MSDF's central investigative team systematically collected data on 141 individuals who requested information from the Defense Agency under the information disclosure law, agency sources said May 29.
The statement by the lieutenant commander in charge of information disclosure at the Maritime Staff Office contradicts the agency's in-house report, released May 28, which claimed he compiled personal data on such people "for his own use."
The officer, who was transferred to the information-disclosure division in April from the intelligence department, began collecting the data on orders from his supervisors, the sources said.
Meanwhile, according to internal agency documents, the lieutenant commander also gave the list to the commander of the intelligence department's information preservation office, for a reason unrelated to information-disclosure work. This occurred five months before he passed it on to the information-disclosure division
The officer gathered data with the assistance of the central investigative team in the intelligence department, the sources said.