The Proposal
On September 2, 2026, an expert study panel convened by Japan's National Police Agency published the outline of a recommendation that would give police a power they do not now have: to reach into a smartphone belonging to the person giving the orders, and read what is on it, before the crime it is being used to plan takes place.
The panel calls the technique "remote analysis" — enkaku kaiseki. The target is what Japanese law enforcement and press call tokuryu, short for tokumei ryūdō-gata hanzai gurūpu: anonymous, fluid criminal groups whose core figures stay hidden while disposable recruits are hired through social media for each job.
The outline was reported the same day by Kyodo News, Jiji Press, the Sankei Shimbun and the TV Asahi network, and their accounts agree on the structure. It is an outline, not a finished report — the panel intends to compile full recommendations at subsequent meetings, and the National Police Agency says it hopes to receive them as early as this month.
How It Would Work
Under the scheme as described by Kyodo and Sankei, a prefectural police force that believes someone is being targeted — in a tokushu sagi telephone fraud, a robbery, or a comparable serious offense — would refer the case to a designated officer with specialist technical knowledge.
That officer, not the investigators on the ground, would assess whether remote analysis is necessary and define exactly what information is to be taken. The officer would then apply to a judge for a permit. Only if the permit is granted would the analysis proceed.
What comes back is meant to be narrow. Kyodo reports that the material is limited to serious-crime information — the date and time of a planned offense, the number of people expected to carry it out. Sankei's account adds call lists used in fraud operations, the division of roles within a group, meeting points and named targets. Anything obtained outside the scope of the permit is to be deleted, and, per TV Asahi, is not to be passed to the officers working the case.
The person whose device was opened is to be told afterward. Notification would come once the risk of further harm has passed or the investigation has closed. Every case would go to the relevant Public Safety Commission — the civilian body that sits above each police force — for a post-hoc check that the procedure was properly followed.
Jiji Press reports that the panel modeled these controls on the rules that already govern the seizure of mail and the interception of communications under Japan's wiretapping statute.
The Line the Panel Drew
The most consequential sentence in the outline is not about technology. It is about purpose.
The stated aim is prevention and protection, not prosecution. If police learn from an opened phone that an attack is imminent, the intended response is to patrol the target's neighborhood or warn them — not to make an arrest. The outline states plainly, in Kyodo's rendering, that "exercising the authority for investigative purposes is not permitted."
That framing is why the National Police Agency intends to seek an amendment to the Police Duties Execution Act (keisatsukan shokumu shikkō-hō), the 1948 statute governing what officers may do to prevent harm — questioning, protective custody, stopping a crime in progress — rather than to the Code of Criminal Procedure, which governs investigation. It is a preventive administrative power, placed in a preventive administrative law.
The agency also told reporters that where the analysis turns up evidence of a crime, the material "may be used in an investigation as necessary." Both statements are in the record. How far apart they can be held is a question the final report will have to answer.
Why This Is a Sex-Industry Story
Tokuryu is not a category police invented for fraud alone.
The 2024 edition of the National Police Agency's white paper devoted its special feature to these groups, and the diagram it used to explain their structure lists, among the units that hang off an anonymized core, "groups involved in entertainment businesses, sex establishments and scouting."
The definition is not incidental. The white paper's own footnote defining a tokuryu "fund-acquisition crime" — a crime that may finance the group — runs through telephone fraud, robbery, stimulant trafficking, protection money collected from bars and restaurants in entertainment districts, extortion, theft and benefit fraud, and then adds offenses "disguised as ordinary commercial dealings: unlicensed moneylending, the operation of sex establishments, and labor-supply businesses such as scouting for adult video."
A later section is more direct still. Tokuryu groups, it says, are involved directly or indirectly in running entertainment venues, sex establishments and gambling parlors and in scouting, and treat that activity in the nightlife districts as a leading source of funds. In the same passage, the white paper notes that these groups are pushing their operations and their money flows further out of sight through the internet, social media and communications tools with a high degree of anonymity.
That is the loop this proposal sits inside. The agency's own analysis says the sex trade is a principal revenue stream for tokuryu, and that the evidence of it is disappearing into encrypted messaging. The new power is aimed squarely at that encryption.
The white paper also documents what the scouting side looks like when police get inside it. It describes a group whose members beat and confined one of their own for breaking internal rules — twenty-one people arrested by February 2024 on confinement and related charges — and whose subsequent investigation revealed organized illegal scouting. The group had more than 1,000 members, operated across the Tokyo region and in Miyagi, Osaka and Kumamoto, ran internal departments it called a "general affairs section" and a "contracts section," and drew its main income from referral fees calculated against the earnings of the women it placed into sex businesses. The white paper does not name it.
What the Outline Does Not Say
It does not say that remote analysis would be used against scouting.
Every published description of the trigger is about a person in danger: a victim likely to be targeted in telephone fraud or robbery, a serious crime about to happen, information that cannot be obtained any other way. The harms named are financial and violent. Neither the Anti-Prostitution Act (baishun bōshi-hō) nor the Businesses Affecting Public Morals Regulation Act (fūei-hō, the statute licensing and policing sex businesses) appears in any account of the outline, and neither does the Employment Security Act, the law under which Japan's illegal scouts are actually charged.
There is a coherent logic to that. A woman being steered toward a sex business by a scout is not in the position of a person about to be robbed at knifepoint, and a preventive power built around imminent physical or financial harm does not obviously reach her. Whether the final report draws the boundary that tightly is not yet known; the panel has not written it.
But it is worth stating what the gap would mean in practice. The proposal would open the encrypted channel that the National Police Agency says is concealing the flow of sex-industry money into these groups — and, as the outline stands, read it for the fraud and the robberies.
The Constitutional Question
Article 21 of Japan's Constitution provides that no censorship shall be maintained and that the secrecy of any means of communication shall not be violated. It is a short clause with no explicit exception, and Kyodo reports the concern directly: the scheme risks colliding with it.
The National Police Agency's answer, as given to Kyodo, is that "implementation within necessary limits, under due process, is constitutionally permitted." TV Asahi reports that the outline requires officers who conduct an analysis to report to and be checked by the Public Safety Commission specifically in order to address public anxiety about improper surveillance.
The pressure behind the proposal is documented. National Police Agency figures reported by Kyodo put combined losses from telephone fraud and social-media investment and romance scams in 2025 at roughly ¥325.7 billion — about $2.2 billion — a record, with telephone fraud alone accounting for some ¥142.3 billion, itself a record and up sharply on the previous year. TV Asahi cited a robbery-murder in Tochigi Prefecture in May of this year among the cases driving the work.
What Happens Next
The panel will take the outline into a draft report at its coming sessions, and will address the legislative framework there. The National Police Agency expects to have the recommendations in hand as soon as this month and to pursue an amendment to the Police Duties Execution Act.
If it passes, Japanese police will be able to ask a judge for permission to look inside a phone that has not yet been used to commit anything. The people on the other end of those phones are, by the government's own description, the same people who run the country's scout groups. The statute that gets written will decide how much of what is on the screen the state is allowed to see.
Sources: Kyodo News, "Expert panel of the National Police Agency publishes outline of recommendations on countermeasures against anonymous, fluid criminal groups" and "Remote analysis of anonymous-group smartphones — permit required, aimed at preventing harm," September 2, 2026 (also carried by the To-o Nippo and other regional papers); Jiji Press, "Tokuryu devices to be analyzed remotely — court permit among requirements; expert panel outline, National Police Agency," September 2, 2026; Sankei Shimbun, "'Remote analysis' of handlers' smartphones to prevent tokuryu harm — National Police Agency expert panel publishes outline," September 2, 2026; TV Asahi (ANN), "Tokuryu countermeasures strengthened — remote analysis of encrypted apps; new investigative method to be recommended," September 2, 2026. Nikkei and Mainichi carried the same outline the same day. Background on the composition and funding of anonymous, fluid criminal groups, including the passages on sex establishments, scouting and referral fees, is from the special feature of the National Police Agency's 2024 white paper. The 2025 fraud loss figures are National Police Agency statistics as reported by Kyodo News. The panel held its first meeting on August 10, 2026. The recommendations are not final, no bill has been introduced, and no legislation has been enacted.