The government has begun considering amending the law behind active cyberdefense — a program that lets police and the Self-Defense Forces break into attackers' servers and stop their programs — so that communications monitoring covers traffic inside Japan, not just traffic involving foreign parties.
The current law covers communications between foreign parties and between foreign and domestic parties. Domestic-to-domestic traffic is not monitored. The ruling party has proposed extending coverage to domestic communications, and the government will weigh that proposal, Mainichi reported.
Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi told a meeting of ministers on cybersecurity on the 6th that the government would "further strengthen our information-gathering capability to grasp cyberattacks." She instructed the meeting to study revising the active cyberdefense law, which sets out the program and related measures.
After the meeting, a Cabinet Office official said of extending monitoring to domestic traffic: "It is something that needs to be considered."
Two items in the instruction
According to government officials, the prime minister's instruction covers two items. One is the expansion to domestic communications. The other is widening the reporting requirement for cyber incidents, which is currently limited to critical infrastructure.
A plan to set up a panel of experts and submit a revised bill to next year's ordinary Diet session has also emerged within the government.
Whether to monitor domestic traffic was already a point of contention when the related legislation was debated in the spring of 2025. To detect attacks in advance, the government needs to collect and analyze communications data. The question is whether doing so would improperly infringe on the secrecy of communications guaranteed by the Constitution.
Emergency package
The ministers' meeting also adopted an emergency package drawn up after a run of cyberattacks. It creates a public-private "cyber rescue team" (provisional name) of specialists who would support organizations that come under attack, dispatched to companies and bodies with the greatest need.
The package also calls for promptly sorting out and studying the legal status of blocking — forcibly cutting off access to specific sites.
“We have no choice but to handle this through the private sector somehow.”a person involved in cyberdefense measures, quoted by Mainichi on the seriousness of the response