A top National Security Bureau (NSB) official yesterday confirmed to the legislature that the bureau had set up a task force to respond to Taiwan-related leaks from the whistleblower Web site WikiLeaks, which in its latest release showed that Taiwan was on a list of countries that could be targeted by terror attacks.
NSB Deputy Director-General Lin Hui-yang (林惠陽) told the Foreign and National Defense Committee that the bureau had held meetings at frequent intervals and had established a cross-departmental mechanism to deal with leaks and mitigate their impact on national security and relations with other countries.
Chang Wei-ming (張蔚銘), an NSB section chief, said about 3,000 of the 250,000 documents obtained by WikiLeaks were related to Taiwan-US relations, 136 of which were allegedly classified as secret.
Chang said the bureau had been able to determine the nature of two documents, one on behavioral guidelines for officials at the American Institute in Taiwan and the other relating to US-Taiwan cooperation on weapons counterproliferation.
Although Chang declined to discuss details of the document on counterproliferation in the committee session out of confidentiality, he said he would brief legislators in private.
“In terms of cooperation on intelligence, none of the classified documents on our end or on the US end have been leaked,” Chang told Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chang Hsien-yao (張顯耀).
Asked in the legislature about the severity of the WikiLeaks release, Chang Wei-ming, director of international intelligence at the NSB, said Taiwan had received assurances from US intelligence officials that bilateral intelligence files were not compromised.
“On the issue of intelligence gathered through joint efforts, we have received repeated guarantees that they have not been leaked,” Chang said.
The presentation came as a secret document, which some observers said was the most controversial yet to be released by WikiLeaks and labeled by the UK’s Times newspaper as a “targets for terror” list, included several Taiwanese undersea cables and the nation’s largest port.
In its National Infrastructure Protection Plan, the US Department of State was shown to have identified six locations in Taiwan that it considers part of its critical infrastructure and resources located outside the US.
Their loss, the document says, could “impact the public health, economic security, and/or national and homeland security of the US.”
The undersea cables listed in the report were at Fangshan Township (枋山) in Pingtung County, Tamsui (淡水) and Bali (八里) in Taipei County and Toucheng Township (頭城) in Yilan County. Kaohsiung Harbor was also listed.
KMT Legislator Lin Yu-fang (林郁方) said the presence of those locations on the US’ National Infrastructure Protection Plan raised a number of concerns.
He said he was worried about the security of Taiwan’s military facilities as well as the nation’s relations with the US and China, adding that the recent leaks was “just the beginning.”
Playing down the threat, NSB section chief Kuo Tze-yung (郭自勇) said that like landlines and satellites, undersea cables were only a means of communication.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift