Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday urged President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration to explain whether it has tapped the mobile phones of key DPP officials to gain campaign information.
“This has been a concern for us for a long time, as we suspect that our e-mail accounts have been hacked and our mobile phones have been tapped,” DPP presidential candidate Tsai said in Greater Tai-chung’s Jhueifen District (追分) in the middle of her 11-day campaign trip along the nation’s west coast.
DPP officials, including Tsai and her running mate, Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全), started using secured mobile phones yesterday after Tsai’s campaign team questioned how its rival — the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) — seemed to have knowledge of confidential information about the DPP’s campaign that allowed it to “counterstrike” instantly.
Photo: CNA
Ma is seeking re-election in January
His campaign team presented a policy on farmers’ subsidies one day before Tsai said in Yunlin County, one of the nation’s most important agricultural areas, on Tuesday that she would initiate a similar subsidy. Both sides also talked about the regeneration of agricultural land at almost the same time.
The Ma administration should offer an explanation as to why it had aroused suspicion and forced the opposition campaign team to take precautions and extra security measures during the election campaign, Tsai said.
The DPP said in August that hackers from China and Taiwan had accessed the e-mail accounts of officials and senior staff at the party’s presidential campaign office, stealing confidential campaign information.
The e-mail accounts were accessed by IP addresses in China and Taiwan, with an IP address of the Beijing bureau of China’s state-controlled Xinhua news agency making an attack via Australia and Xinhua’s Malaysian bureau, the DPP said.
An attack was traced to a domestic IP address belonging to the Executive Yuan’s Research, Development and Evaluation Commission, the party said at the time.
The commission subsequently denied the accusation.
A DPP meeting on Tuesday concluded that the mobile phones of key party and campaign officials had been tapped.
Chief campaign manager Wu Nai-jen (吳乃仁) said the countermeasure to tapping was to apply for new mobile phone numbers under the names of people unrelated to the DPP.
Ten new mobile phones with new numbers have now been distributed to DPP officials.
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