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Minister of Communication and Information Technology Tifatul Sembiring pledged on Tuesday to find a “middle ground” on two crucial points in the controversial wiretapping bill that have been criticized by the Corruption Eradication Commission.

Tifatul met privately on Tuesday with Tumpak Hatorangan Panggabean, the interim head of the commission, known as the KPK.

He said the KPK questioned the ministry’s plan to require a court order to tap telephones and to establish the so-called National Interception Agency, which is designed to handle all wiretapping requests from law-enforcement agencies.

Tuesday’s meeting “will not be our last,” Tifatul said. “We still have time until April 2010, when we plan to finish deliberating the bill. We will continue discussing the two points intensively. Hopefully before that we could come up with some sort of a middle ground.”

KPK spokesman Johan Budi said the latest version of the bill wiretapping still contained a number of unclear provisions.

“We want to be clear what the National Interception Agency’s authority is. This has not been explained clearly by the ministry,” he said. “We want the KPK to have the power to conduct wiretapping and not have it handled by an external body.”

Johan said the KPK strongly opposed the ministry’s plan to restrict wiretapping to those who had been already been named a suspect and charged with a corruption-related offense.

“Wiretapping is needed in the probing stage of an investigation. We have arrested many officials and politicians red-handed thanks to our wiretapping capability,” he said.

Hasril Hertanto, a legal analyst from the University of Indonesia, said the requirement that the subject of a wiretap have already been charged would pose a special difficulty for the KPK because it cannot simply drop corruption charges after they have been filed.

“Elsewhere, someone could be named a suspect without carrying any legal implication such as a criminal charge. This poses a problem for the KPK because they cannot drop any charges unlike other law-enforcement agencies,” he said.

Hasril added that Tifatul might have exceeded his authority by pressing forward with the regulation.

“The ministry should have only dealt with the certification of wiretapping equipment to ensure that there won’t be parties outside the law-enforcement agencies that obtain wiretapping powers,” he said. “To regulate wiretapping, the government should issue a law, formulated by the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights and deliberated by the House. It would have a stronger legal basis.”

On Monday, several antigraft activists visited the Constitutional Court to discuss the bill and solicit the support Judge Akil Mochtar, who pledged to nullify the regulation because it contradicted the existing KPK Law.

Antigraft groups have opposed the plan to establish the regulation, saying it would reduce the KPK’s authority and hinder the fight against corruption.

The KPK has had a 100 percent conviction rate, putting away high-ranking corrupt officials, thanks in part to its virtually unrestricted power to conduct wiretapping.