The National Security Bureau (NSB) yesterday said that while Beijing was paying close attention to the Nov. 27 special municipality elections, there were no indications that it had meddled in the political process.
“China is smarter now,” bureau Director Tsai Der-sheng (蔡得勝) told the legislature’s Foreign and National Defense Committee. “Compared with the past, the NSB has not found evidence of China aggressively trying to intervene in the elections.”
Asked by Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Chai Trong-rong (蔡同榮) whether Beijing was seeking to influence or acquire Taiwanese media to “brainwash Taiwanese,” Tsai said that while this was not impossible, it had yet to succeed in doing so.
Furthermore, Beijing’s attempts to influence the media were not limited to Taiwan, he said.
Asked by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lin Yu-fang (林郁方) how often the bureau’s Web site was attacked by hackers, Tsai said the total was about 500,000 times per month.
However, all were identified and blocked by the bureau, he said.
Tsai said bureau statistics showed that from January through last month, its Web site was attacked almost 5 million times, with 3,040,000 attacks coming from within Taiwan and close to 590,000 from China.
Nearly 70 percent of the attacks were attempts to take control of the Web site, 11 percent were viruses and almost 3 percent were attempts to access computer systems and programs, statistics showed.
Tsai said the bureau had put more resources into protecting its computer systems, including making regular systems upgrades, to ensure that sensitive information was not compromised.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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