Local media have reported that news clips in Public Television Service’s (PTS) digital library were accidentally deleted by an outsourced data storage company on Feb. 8. As many as 420,000 valuable clips were reportedly deleted and more than 84,000 of them cannot be restored.
In response, Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) said that she was not only shocked, but also furious, as she did not expect that a level A agency like PTS would make such an amateur mistake. More importantly, she said that if no one had exposed the incident, it would have remained covered up forever.
“Is PTS trying to pretend that everything is fine?” she asked.
Wu said that she had been at a complete loss for how to respond when she found out about this “cultural catastrophe” and she severely condemned the agency responsible for the mishap, which had been kept under wraps until she received an anonymous message.
Surprisingly, the Ministry of Culture’s latest report to the legislature, which Wu read in detail, failed to even mention the incident. Nor did the ministry, which oversees PTS, take the initiative to make the incident public. Naturally, a review report about the case did not exist.
Wu’s anger is fully understandable. As she said, if no one had exposed the case, the public might never have found out about it, and there would have been no proof that it had happened at all.
Even more infuriating, what gave PTS the nerve to think that it could cover up this major information security flaw by itself? Who made this outrageous decision?
Similarly, another major information security flaw occurred when the Ministry of Education accidentally erased tens of thousands of “e-learning profiles” of high-school students in September last year. PTS failed to learn its lesson from that mistake.
According to the “cybersecurity responsibility levels” of the Cyber Security Management Act (資通安全管理法), the PTS Foundation is a level A agency, the highest level there is. Unfortunately, after making the lowest-level mistake, PTS adopted a negative attitude by trying to quietly “turn big problems into small ones, and small problems into no problems,” as the old Chinese saying goes.
It is necessary for the agency to explain and clarify the matter.
Hu Wen-chi is a former vice chairman of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) Culture and Communications Committee.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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