The transport ministry classifies the flight plans of foreign governmental aircraft as non-confidential information, making it hard to prosecute the air traffic controller who posted images of Air Force One's flight plan on his blog, ministry officials said.
The Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry is trying to determine whether the chief controller at Tokyo's Haneda airport violated confidentiality provisions under the National Public Service Act. However, prosecution may not be possible because the images were posted after the plane carrying U.S. President Barack Obama to Japan arrived in November 2010, the officials said.
In addition, it was found the controller leaked what are believed to be images of the flight plan for the RQ-4 Global Hawk, an unmanned U.S. reconnaissance plane that was deployed to monitor the crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant after the March 11 quake and tsunami.
While the exact timing of the blog posts is unclear, the controller reportedly told ministry officials that he uploaded both sets of images between a day and several days after taking them. He also said his blog site had been up since 2001.
The officials explained that ministry information is classified into three categories based on degree of confidentiality: classified data; information subject to disclosure; and items not deemed confidential but that could disrupt administrative work if leaked.
The flight plans for foreign government aircraft are included in the third group.
Earlier Friday, ministry sources said a proposal has been made to ban air traffic controllers from taking cameras into the control towers. The ban will be discussed by an in-house panel that has been set up to prevent scandals involving air traffic controllers, the sources said.
The ministry has already ordered all air traffic control facilities in the country to ban all photography unrelated to flight control duties, the sources said.
Since air traffic controllers sometimes need camera-equipped mobile phones for work, however, the ministry plans to supply flight control facilities with separate cellphones for work purposes, they said.
The ministry has confirmed that the controller in question posted 12 images on his blog, including internal shots of Haneda's control tower.
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