President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said yesterday he was confident that security at the Presidential Office would improve following a series of security lapses.
Ma said in his weekly online video address that “something went wrong” recently at the Presidential Office. This included a woman who sneaked into the building and lingered there for half an hour before being found, a chauffeur with a drinking record and an official who accidentally removed air-conditioning equipment at Ma’s official residence last year.
Thanking the media for exposing the incidents, Ma said it gave the Presidential Office the opportunity to “make the necessary improvements.”
“I asked the [Presidential Office] secretary-general to deliver concrete results within three months, but he said he would complete the report within a month,” he said. “We are all very confident that we will remedy all the problems very quickly.”
Ma said personal computers were not available when he was in university, contradicting comments in his debut online videos on July 18, when he said that he first came into contact with computers when he was in university.
His remark drew criticism from Internet users, as personal computers had yet to be invented when Ma graduated from National Taiwan University in 1972.
Ma said yesterday that personal computers were indeed not available when he was a university student, but added that NTU had “giant” computers.
When he was doing his compulsory military service, the computer at his unit was as big as a house, Ma said, adding: “So the experience we had with computers back then was totally different from what we have now.”
Three videos were available on the Presidential Office Web site yesterday. Aside from the one addressing security at the Presidential Office, one discussed the World Games in Kaohsiung while the other was a repost of a pre-recorded video.
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