During a routine anti-surveillance check last week, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) found that the party's headquarters had been bugged, according to a Chinese-language newspaper report yesterday.
The party will be tearing down part of the ceiling on the ninth floor to determine the source of signals from suspected eavesdropping devices, the report said.
The Liberty Times (the Taipei Times' sister newspaper) reported that last Tuesday, the DPP detected unusual signals in its headquarters' meeting rooms and in high-ranking officials' offices on the ninth floor.
DPP spokesman Tsai Huang-liang (
The party rents the eighth, ninth, 10th and 14th floors of a building on Beiping E Rd as their headquarters. All important meetings are held in conference rooms located on the ninth floor, and the offices of the chairman and secretary-general are on the same floor.
According to Tsai, the DPP regularly asks a private security company to carry out security checks at its headquarters.
This time around, inspectors detected strong signals emanating from bugging devices suspected to be on the ceiling of the ninth floor.
The DPP has decided to dismantle part of the ceiling to find and remove the source of the signals.
"We don't rule out the possibility that it could have been done by intelligence agencies, the opposition parties, the news media or even a Chinese `fifth column,'" Tsai said. "But if Chinese spies were involved in this eavesdropping, we think the national security departments should deal with it quickly."
When asked about the suspected eavesdropping, DPP Chairman Yu Shyi-kun said in Ilan yesterday that it was not unusual for the DPP to be monitored, since the party was established 20 years ago during the Martial Law era and the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) authoritarian rule.
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