Thanks for seeing me again. It’s been a while when I was here for the presidential elections in 2020, which is very nice in hindsight. After that, the world completely shut down. It was good to be here for that event.
Now we’re rebooting.
It’s good to be here again. I’m here for a little bit longer in Taiwan.
A few weeks?
Until Chinese New Year.
That’s awesome.
I’ll stay here for a good while. I’ve read all of your…
Transcripts?
Exactly. It’s great. It’s very easy to prepare for. I will still ask some basic questions, because I’ll also try to bring this out to a broader Danish audience as well. My first question will actually be very simple. Minister Tang, what does a digital minister do in Taiwan?
Our work is on resilience for all. Our logo, MODA, means that we care about the societal resilience, the industrial resilience, and also emergency response resilience.
That’s the MODA proper with our six departments, and the Administration for Digital Industries as well as the Administration for Cyber Security. All of this has the resilience as the most important goal.
For a Danish origins about yourself, what would you highlight from your background? I, of course, know a lot of your best background. If you were to choose, it’s yours. What’s the most important that brought you into government and where you are now?
We’re in the ninth year where we worked with both the civil society. the movements on one side, and the career public service on the other. I’m kind of a bridge that I usually say that I work with the government, but not for the government. I work with the people, but not for the people. To that end, I adopt three main principles.
One is radical transparency. Everything that we say including this interview is radically open, free of copyrights to the public to reboot trust and contextualization, first thing.
Second thing is location independence. Anywhere I’m working, I’m working. I used to tour around the world. Of course, less so during the COVID times. Now that we’re embarking on international travel again, but anywhere I’m working, I’m still working through this connected workspace.
Now, the third thing, very important, is voluntary association. I don’t give orders. I don’t coerce anyone. In the MODA, we do not revoke people’s licenses or put people in jail. Instead, we work with the civil society and the private sector to find out how to do what we call multi stakeholder arrangement, or people public private partnerships.
For example, that’s what enabled us to counter the infodemic without administrative takedowns, which would be coercive. How we fought the pandemic without lockdowns, which would, again, be coercive.
Great. Then, of course, on something that takes up all of our time and efforts also in the foundation — and in Europe, in general, of course — is Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.
With you, of course, very much on the digital side, what kind of lessons have you taken away from seeing this part of the war for Taiwan?
The relationship with the journalists, that’s very important. We’ve seen, for example, how the “The Kyiv Independent” and the international correspondence in Kyiv played a pivotal role in the very beginning of the assault on Kyiv.
At the time, there’s a lot of Russian propaganda that says Zelensky is already in Poland, and things like that. It was thanks to the correspondence that the international community learned of the will to fight, to resist from the Ukrainians. Imagine if they don’t have a proper Internet connection. Then, probably, that disinformation will win the day.
In Taiwan, we’re in a unique perspective, because we are also under a lot of those cybersecurity attacks as well as disinformation, manipulations about our connection to the world is brittle. It’s through a submarine, undersea cables.
If worse comes to worst, there’s a very large earthquake that cuts a significant portion of our international connectivity, then we’re not sure if the international correspondence in Taiwan would have sufficient fibers to connect with the world.
Which is why we also learned from Ukraine to work with non geostationary satellite providers to make sure it has such emergency response. As well as the international correspondence have broadcast livestreaming capabilities even when we suffer a very large earthquake.
I heard, as part of that, there are also these mobile cell towers that you’re…
Yes, it’s already deployed. There is quite a few Taiwanese companies, for example Pegatron, or HTC, and so on that already miniaturizes the entire 5G base station, the core network, into something that fits into a suitcase that you can just carry around like a luggage.
Already in Hsinchu, they mount such 5G core service networks connecting to a European satellite provider, the SES. Even when we suffer a fire or some sort of disaster, the firefighters’ truck, the vehicle can just drive there and connect to the satellite and then provide 5G connectivity.
It sounds like good digital resilience.
Indeed.
Would it be just one satellite provider or you’re looking at more?
The more, the better. We believe in a plurality of providers. We make sure that we don’t put our egg into one basket. We are now working on a configuration where there could be a single car but mounted with multiple WiFi, and 5G, and so on, and then the backhaul could be through multiple, some in the middle Earth orbit, some in the low Earth orbit.
Interesting. Are there other lessons you’ve drawn from Ukraine as well?
Yeah. The other thing is that the application, which is their all in one Diia citizen participation platform that used to, before the war, be used for a civic engagement, transparency, and so on purposes, but overnight almost, it became a way to crowdsource intelligence to make sure that people still keep calm and collected and so on.
This is kind of what we call digital infrastructure is very important. In Taiwan, we also have similar apps. For example, the National Health Insurance Express app that play a pivotal role in our counter pandemic efforts, the TW FidO for authentication, and many more, but we have not yet, before the Ukrainian situation, thought about the dual use of these.
If you want to use it during a large disaster, then the cybersecurity is very important. You would not want it to be taken over, or denial of service attacks, and so on. How to increase the availability, the service level, as well as the resilience of such civilian apps with the understanding that you will turn into an emergency response app. That’s another thing that we learned from the…
That’s very interesting as well. Then let’s also talking a little bit about disinformation. We’ve talked about this topic before, but we’re interested in you explaining again your take on how to deal with this, and then some practical examples if there’s some newer ones.
Having followed Taiwan, the case in 2018 with Kansai, the Osaka Airport…
That’s a classic, textbook example.
…was classic, exactly. Anne Applebaum also used it in her article in the Atlantic after meeting you. I’ve just been an election observer for the local elections in November. Have you seen any examples there that we can explain what we mean by disinformation in a Taiwanese context?
The truth be told, I think both Google, and YouTube, and Facebook worked with us quite well in their civic integrity effort. Compared to the 2018 situation, we don’t see as much paid advertisements or paid propaganda and so on from oversea actors.
There are, of course, still some cyber attacks that remains. For example, before we actually set up our shop in that August after the speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit.
There’s a previously unseen coordinated attack on the cyber attack side, just changing a bulletin board of a Taiwan railway station’s advertisement billboard. You’d like to check the MOFA website, but then the MOFA website was disrupted with a lot of bots…
(laughter)
Eric here was in charge of cyber security there. [laughs] Maybe he can describe a little bit how that went.
Well, at the time, I was in charge of information security protection operations for offices around the world at the MOFA, and I had to protect the Ministry’s network, be able to continue to provide fast service, and also make sure that all the infrastructure was up and running. As I said, because the attack was very big, very huge at the same time, the network bandwidth was not enough to respond to the requests, and in order to deal with this huge amount of attacks, we put a lot of manpower into monitoring and adjusting the network defense architecture at the same time.
At the time the MOFA website was what we call a dynamically-rendered website. Meaning that for each connection it has to calculate again how the page should look like. It’s actually not going to change regardless of who actually visit the website.
Building as a dynamic website, consumes more CPU on the MOFA side. If they can just get enough connections that saturate the CPU, then the website becomes slow. Now the MODA website, which went online the same hour as the drill started use a different architecture. Any change is rendered into static pages.
That would distribute that through CloudFlare, through Anycast and also through the interplanetary file system, the IPFS. Anyone from the Web 3.0 community can use the Brave Browser or anything to pin our website to help us back up to absorb the denial of service attack.
As a result, the MODA website never went down for even a single second. We also get a lot of people from, I don’t know, Argentine, from Europe, from even some authoritarian jurisdictions that want to help us back up our website. It’s quite participative.
The difference is that so when the cyber attack happens, even though it doesn’t leak any confidential information or temporary any information, this information would say that the hackers have taken over the Foreign Service and so on.
When the journalists go to the Foreign Service website to check why the website is not there… It’s very easy to amplify the effect of a DDoS, which by itself is not as serious as cyber attacks go.
We then worked across all the ministries. At the time we have a group where MODA shared our way to counter such saturation of DDoS plus disinformation manipulation. Within just a week or so all the ministries switched to this kind of static rendering way so that we don’t see other DDoS now leading up to the election.
In addition, we also make our website source code available to everyone, so that friends around the world can use our software for free whenever they want, and check our updates at any time, reducing the cost of re-investing in developing software.
Exactly. Because for each and every ministries, if they have to contract the same specification but different contractors, that would take time. Because we believe in open source, so we relinquish the copyrights of our entire architecture.
Because of that, it can help not just the Taiwanese competent authorities, the ministries but also, I don’t know Danish ones or anywhere. Check our GitHub, we will be updating soon.
Great. I’ll pass that recommendation on. Actually Denmark has just gotten its first new government and its first digital minister. I also had that one as one of my questions would be, what would be your advice to such a new minister, Marie Bjerre, she’s called.
Now that you’ve been digital minister a little bit longer, what do you think is important for her to build as a first thing?
We learned from the Estonian example where instead of maintaining their own infrastructure, they decide to share it with Finland and Iceland and many more. They have this Nordic consortium, the NIIS, that maintains the X road together.
The benefits of public code in this way is that we don’t have to redo the penetration testing, the red teaming and so on. Our security contributions can be freely shared. Which is why if you look at our website and the GDS UK website it’s the same.
It looks the same because we share the same front end components, the design system and so on. I would encourage anyone in the democratic camp to look at the existing public code infrastructure and to reuse as much as possible.
I’m also part of the strategy advisor board of the public code. I think it’s a foundation, is the institute. Contribute into the public code idea. I think in the Europe, the FSF, Free Software Foundation already advocates for this idea of public money, public code.
We really need to invest jointly so that on the cybersecurity measures, the public code excel that of proprietary solutions because that’s the only way that the Korea public subs will feel at ease to adopt such shared international components.
Great. I’ll pass that on. Back to cyber attack and disinformation. First, maybe on cyber attacks. How great is the threat against Taiwan on cyber attacks, and do you see it as increasing, and what are some numbers?
It’s millions a day, and last year we’ve seen like on average doubled compared to the year before. This year, of course, At a peak of the Pelosi visit, 23 times more than the previous peak. It was unheard of. A very large earthquake, so to speak.
Because of that we’re now moving to be more proactive instead of waiting for an attack to happen to one of our critical infrastructures or ministries, and then defend against it. We want to know it, the sort of attack that we’ve seen on the foreign service, and then to make sure that all the other institutions and the infrastructures can withstand the same amount of attack.
To that end, early January we’ll set up the National Institute of Cyber Security, the NICS. We will also recruit architects and reformers, refactors…
Including me?
Well, of course…
(laughter)
Due to the salary is much higher than the general…
Yeah, I know. The top salary would be around the minister’s level of salaries. We’ll also get people working on cyber security in the public service extra rewards to make sure that there’s no sense of jealous here.
In any case, the public sector experts and the private sector experts are expected to proactively convert all the major agencies that’s in the Level A, meaning that they have the personal data of the entire country to switch to what we call the ZTA, the zero trust architecture.
Once we adopt that, then we can reasonably say that even if there’s already a breach somewhere, that breach will not go around. It will not cause significant damage.
What is that? The zero trust architecture?
Yes. Zero trust architecture has three components. It means, for example, when I’m abroad or I’m quarantined at home and I want to sign an official document, it checks three things.
First, biometric. I have to prove to my iPad that it’s actually me doing this signing. Second, the device integrity. Including the SIM card and the configuration on the device needs to be rechecked so that it can be sure that it has not been taken over.
Finally, the trust engine will detect whether I have unusual patterns of use. I cannot, for example, like if I don’t ever sign official documents in Denmark during the weekend…
(laughter)
It just so happens I’m somehow connected to Denmark…
(laughter)
I always do.
You always visit Denmark in the weekends… Sure. [laughs]
Anyway, it will deny access even though it’s biometrically me and the device is me. It means manufacture of authentication so that even one of this gets taken over, it doesn’t cause harm and the forensic attribution and so on can be done in a more convenient time slot instead of like mitigating the damage and then also doing attribution.
We can say, “Oh, there’s no damage done.” It’s like a honeypot and then we mitigate the damage. The idea is to don’t rely on the firewall, intranet, or anything, but instead verify each access as if assume breach, assuming each component has already been breached.
Interesting. A simple question. Do you use paper in your ministry or no paper?
I think this name card is paper.
Just this.
Do you print anything?
Me personally? Not really.
Not really.
Not really. We…
I can show you. Here’s my business card.
Yeah. That’s very nice. When I say we sign official documents, that’s already electronic. The only exception is confidential documents. Even for that, we’re working on end encryption so that as soon as it arrives, it can be encrypted to the next recipient, to the next recipient and so on.
That it’s encrypted at rest. The IT vendor will not be able to look at the confidential documents. That’s still in the works, but it should be done sometime next year. We’re digitizing even the confidential copies of the paper documents, thanks to end-to-end encryption.
Back to our question, follow up question on disinformation, and also to make it very concrete.
I was recently doing some research on your excellent semiconductor industry. Looked over YouTube, and suddenly, YouTube suggest a video. It seems strange…The way they explain it, there’s something odd here. Then, I suddenly noticed that the numbers they used are renminbi, chinese currency.
It’s basically a Chinese produced video about how negative it is that the Americans are forcing Taiwan and TSMC to open the Arizona lab. Then, I look up the YouTube channel, man, it has a good amount of 20,000 followers, and claims to be a reliable source in tech. I look at the “About,” it says that it’s produced in Hong Kong, but doesn’t really say who made it.
Anyway, that was my own small example. I’d be interested in some of those newer ways that you see disinformation trickling through YouTube, through many others into Taiwan.
It’s now becoming much more overt. Previously, we’ve seen covert operations that relies on paid advertisement, precision targeting, and things like that.
The content was obviously false. It’s not pro or con, any party or any faction. It’s to decimate viewers’ trust on the democratic process. Point to authoritarian models, and say only they can counter the COVID, or things like that.
We don’t see that anymore, mostly because it’s not based on fact. [laughs] Also, because the larger platforms — Facebook and Google — is already aware of such coordinated inauthentic behavior. They don’t give them airtime anymore. It’s been de platformed.
Nowadays, the kind of narrative you saw is not strictly speaking false. It’s an alternate interpretation of things. That becomes much harder to say it’s coordinated inauthentic behavior, because it’s more like propaganda now. It’s less like toxic disinformation now. It’s more like a winning a narrative framing war. Through that, I think the TSMC…
For example, it was part of that one, I saw that the Taiwanese workers would suffer a lot living in the Arizona, which is… [laughs] I don’t know. None of us know, but it sounded…It is propaganda, of course.
It’s obviously propaganda. That brings it to more familiar ground to the European audience. Well, Russia does that all the time [laughs] to reframe anything into something that is a victory for Russia, like “the PRC may be the biggest winner. That’s a fixed phrase for this kind of narrative, 中或最贏 or something.
To your question, I think this is both good and bad. It’s good, because it means that with sufficient amount of journalistic attention and the civic journalistic ability, this is not something that’s covert, that requires specialized expertise. This is something that’s overt, that can be tackled using traditional journalist ways.
The bad thing is that the industrial analyst, the journalist and so on, who are passionate about this and actually know the whole context, who can debunk it effectively, not all of their publications have been successfully digitally transformed.
In the past 10 years, many of them, especially if they work on magazines, lose their audience, lose their advertisement budget. I think we’ve heard figures such as a 50 percent reduction in revenue, a 20 percent staff cut, and things like that.
When the society needs the journalistic integrity the most, the journalists are being removed from the playground thanks to the side effect of the global advertisement based platforms dominance. I think that is also a big problem in Europe as well.
It is. I think that’s something that the new government that’s in Denmark would probably also like to tackle.
If you have any good advice on how to make the funding model for journalism.
Indeed. We just held four talks from Google and Facebook to the published text based and video based journalists. Four meetings in total. We’re sending those consensus, recommendation to the Ministries of, I think, Culture, as well as Science and Technology, and the Communication Commission, and so on, to figure out the kind of law or the kind of funding mechanism that we want to make.
The heartening thing is that both Facebook and Google, especially when it comes to real time countering of such propaganda and so on, they want to invest a significant amount of resource into it.
Into making sure that the journalism sector can digitally transform itself and also offer shared dashboard on what kind of propaganda is now going viral, so that the fact checkers in both institutional journalism and also civic tech can tackle all this.
I don’t have a dollar figure yet, but both those large companies see that, because they risk becoming irrelevant really if it’s all deep fakes and ChatGPT or whatever flooding its content. They are also stakeholders who want journalism to thrive.
That’s true. Microsoft as well has taken also a lot of initiative in that regard. What about you? Maybe this, of course, administration is likely to end in 2024. What’s the legacy you would like to leave in…
You know, I was there… in 2014.
(laughter)
Maybe being the longest serving minister. I know in ‘14 you were not minister.
Sure, a reverse mentor to a minister. Of course, I think John Deng was also around in 2014. He was the Minister of Economic Affairs.
There’s also the Central Bank…
(laughter)
A couple of things. First, I think the kind of mutual trust that we co created ever since 10 years ago, this is precious to Taiwan.
The fact that the civil society always comes up with ways that respects the privacy, the personal data, and so on, but can nevertheless effectively respond to the challenges of our time such as contact tracing and so on, that trust need to be amplified. It need to continue.
To that end, because I’m now the government co chair of our Open Government Partnership National Action Plan committee, I’ll be working over the next few years with our civil society co chair to make sure that we include even more ministries, even more competent authorities into the co creation part.
For example, during our first NAP, the Ministry of Health and Welfare was not part of the commitments, mostly because they were very busy with the virus, but now, many people think, for example, for our long term healthcare, that we need to involve more civil society to simplify the funding model, to introduce more democratic funding models, and things like that.
The MOHW is quite interested in that, now that they are less busy. I think we need to expand to more ministries. That’s the first thing.
The second thing, equally important, is to make sure that cybersecurity is not just a single ministry’s business, but rather, we want all ministries, and also the civil society and private sector, to see cybersecurity as just like washing your hands, and wearing a mask, and so on.
To build good cyber hygiene, so that we can design with zero-trust ideas in mind so that we do not lead ourselves into an overconfidence situation, where we thought we’ve bought the latest firewall equipment and so on, but maybe people don’t attack through those venues. They attack through social engineering and so on.
A complete awareness of cybersecurity and cyber resilience, along with the satellite and everything to back that up. That is the second thing. Open government and resilience for all.
What about the media competence? That’s something I heard you talk about as well, and you mentioned co creation. That would be interesting to hear your thoughts about…
Yeah. That’s the open government. That’s the open government.
Yeah, but also in schools and…
Yes. The Ministry of Education is part of the government plan. Specifically, they want to empower people who are younger than 18 into a decision making process. There is quite some successful stories. Some of them are in OGP stories that shares the bottom up agenda setting that the people younger than 18 have on our national direction.
We want the young people to know that even before they can vote, we still appreciate their voice and input. It’s not the fact checks themselves. It’s the fact checking process.
It’s not about the final result of, say, a referendum or a petition, but rather, it’s the process of deliberating, that when you go through that, you become less likely to share those outrageous disinformation. It’s a self inoculating process.
The Ministry of Education is doubling down on that, and there are very active pods in the NAP for the open government.
You think that’s the long term inoculation to Chinese disinformation?
To any sort of disinformation. In a sense, it’s just journalism, but civic journalism, and the incentives to speak, to get young people to participate in journalism. Aside from if you fact check a presidential candidate, your name appears on the big screen, is actually to result in meaningful policy changes.
It could be, for example, instead of mandating everybody show up at school by 8:00 AM, now for most days in a week, four days a week, they can show up by 9:00 AM, and that’s because of their mobilization and voting. Also, plastic straws are banned from takeout of buble tea franchises.
They can point to these actual changes in their life that they have successfully effected. Then on those domains, it’s far less likely for them to be spreading disinformation propaganda.
Do you evaluate that …?
Yes, we do.
Of falling in disinformation?
Yes, we do. Media competence is now not just in the basic education, but also in lifelong education as well. For the elderly, maybe through community colleges and so on. My grandparents, they would love to be the one offering fact checks instead of the one being fact checked all the time. Both my parents are journalists, although retired, but they are now also very active.
I see. That’s also something in the foundation, where we actually have some media literacy programs. Would be interesting to work with you and the ministry. The result of seeing in Taiwan, we made it as also a game that you play up to an election.
I think Academia Sinica, our national academy, did a survey to compare before and after for people’s likelihood to believe those PRC wins it all narratives. After the media competence effort has been introduced, there is more and more percentage of people — I think it’s a majority now — that automatically assume that anything that says the PRC wins is propaganda.
That is one of the sort of inoculation that I was hinting at.
Interesting. I’m going to look, while I’m here, also the other zero defense initiatives like the Kuma Academy, with Puma Shen.
Yeah, the IORG, and DoubleThink lab.
Is there something you would recommend, maybe of new things that since last time, from Cofacts to g0v, to Kuma academy?
The IORG is a new one…
What do they do?
You can check at IORG.tw.
I will check it out.
I think what they are doing is interesting, because it’s also about societal resilience, to make sure that everybody understand what’s going on.
They have the international outreach on that talks to the international correspondents, but also more interestingly, they have their own public outreach to ensure people know what’s the latest tactic, so we’re not stuck in the 2020 or ‘21 and things like that, like the newest Omicron variant.
Yes, they deal with that. That’s great. Joining to the other side of the Strait with the A4 Paper Revolution. I’ve been here while this happened. I just wanted your thoughts on that.
Certainly, it looks like it’s a very empowering thing. For many people who participated, to actually see a policy change as a result, direct result of their protesting, I think it’s feel as very empowering.
You think that will keep making change in the PRC? At the same time, we also see the other tools of surveillance and repression as well.
I agree with you. However, a successful social movement creates a peak experience that people can keep referring back to. For example, in 2014, we did our Occupy, but it was thoroughly non violent, around the parliament. We can point it out when we talk with civil servants and say that it doesn’t always turn violent, you know.
The Sunflower movement.
Which is why we are winning hearts and minds from both sides really, the movement and the government so quickly at the end of 2014. In the PRC previously, when something like that happened, it ends with tanks. It’s not a peak experience by any measure. Now, they can point to the A4 movement, and say, “Actually, policies can change.”
I noted that you had a Department of Democracy Network. I, of course, like that.
(laughter)
You can write this ahead.
Congratulations. Why did you choose that title?
First of all, because we don’t network with autocracies. [laughs] In other ministries, it’s called usually the Department of International Cooperation. We want to make it crystal clear that we’re not cooperating with non democracies. That’s the first thing.
Also, network means that we’re playing by the Internet rules. When we join multi stakeholder organizations or hybrid organizations, we don’t always insist on our proper sovereign name. [laughs] We’re happy to…
To gain more friends.
(laughter)
Yes. We’re happy to join as .tw…
(laughter)
…which is quite different from the more traditional MODA play where, in order to build a full ambassadorship with our government, you have to first acknowledge that somehow, the government represents a very large territory.
(laughter)
Have you talked with Kosovo about this? They also built, I remember, a very strong digital strategy for digital presence. They registered the digital domain way before they had a lot of the recognition that later followed.
With the help from the Taiwanese, from Kuo Chia You. The Taiwan Digital Diplomacy Association, their very first project is on the Kosovo domain name. Connecting the tw nick, our side, and their Internet confidence community on the other. Of course, they would go on to join the art projects, and many things.
It seems the idea of domain names, the idea of Internet participation changes people’s feeling of vicinity or proximity. People suddenly feel very close because of our shared values or conditions instead of geopolitically measured by distance or time zone differences.
Especially, with Europe, I think that’s a very viable strategy, because we certainly don’t share borders. [laughs] Even by that interpretation of borders, [laughs] we don’t share that. We do share a lot of very critical core values.
For example, AI must be assistive, not automating away people, not authoritarian. We share the value about privacy preserving technology instead of things that will build centralized surveillance state or capitalism, and so on.
These commitments on human rights, and so on, when I appeared at the Digital Future of the Internet — the DFI, Declaration Future of the Internet forums — with the European counterparts, everyone feels like Taiwan is like Estonia as a neighbor. It’s not someplace that’s very far away.
No, I would totally concur with that.
(pause)
I was interested, do you think Taiwan…? Maybe, I’m already by asking a question, and calling it a unique model. At least, the way you’re shaping society with where you also come from originally — from the g0v to GovHack, to all these things, to PTT — is this replicable elsewhere?
Of course.
A lot of it has to come from civil society. If you’re a new minister of digital affairs in Denmark, you can say, “I would want the civil society to do this.” If your civil society doesn’t do it yet, how do you make that without it becoming too government run?
First of all, the civil society is international in nature. G0v used to meet the Korean, Japanese counterparts in Okinawa, because it’s the middle point [laughs] of the three jurisdictions.
It turns out, for example, the mask visualization map, the COVID dashboard, and so on, it’s all on GitHub. Anything that the local people built, the international people can contribute very easily. What I’m trying to say is that the civic tech ecosystem is a worldwide one.
Even if your local civic tech is not as strong as you would like it to be, as long as you say, “Oh, we’re open to adopt public code, to use components that’s already built by the civil society, or even other governments,” then you’re in business.
It requires two things. One is the change in perspective to seeing those digital commons, digital goods as infrastructure.
It took us about 10 years now. Back in 2012, Eric was advocating within the government that open data should be treated as more like infrastructure, not a product, or things like that.
At the time, it’s very like people still thinking shrink wrap off the shelf for packages. This idea of data as infrastructure was very new at the time, and it’s always classified as OPEX, as operation expense, and never as CAPEX, as capital expenditure. As a result, because the OPEX shrinks by 10 percent every year…
(laughter)
…we didn’t get the kind of investment to do the infrastructure that we needed back in 2012. Fortunately, things changed very quickly afterwards.
First, the data as a national strategy, as infrastructure, is institutionalized at the end of 2014. Then at 2016, for our forward looking infrastructure budget, for the first time, digital software is classified as infrastructure money that can use a special budget.
This year, I think the Private Participation in Infrastructure law, the PPI, just got passed, a new revision that says now things made of bits can be considered PPI targets, just like the large Taipei Dome. Maybe not like the large Taipei Dome.
(laughter)
Over the past decade, we’ve seen that software in Taiwan has been progressively but surely classified as a national infrastructure. In other jurisdictions, it’s not yet always that case. It’s still more often than not seen as an OPEX thing.
A shift in mind on the infrastructure status of digital infrastructure and a shift in mind that says through public code, we can engage the international community. These two are needed, but these two together can bootstrap an existing very small scale local software community.
That’s great. Now I realize that I’m a digital dummy. I had not pressed my own record button, it looks like.
It’s OK. We’ve got two.
I’m glad that you have two. I was looking like a little bit panicky, looking weird. It’s not recording.
No, it’s fine. It’s called resilience.
(laughter)
This is digital resilience. Actually, I would look forward to your transcript of it, now that I, of course, I haven’t take notes.
This has been great. This is a lot of the things that I wanted to cover with you. Is there something you think I should have asked about that you’re doing at the moment that’s important for you?
Sure. Our hashtag is #FreeTheFuture. Because you ask about legacy and things like that, I think I should not over prescribe how the society should work or how the mechanisms should work, because if I over prescribe, then the next generations will not have as much freedom to respond to their emergent needs.
I think Taiwan is quite unique because we’ve not adopted the same sort of zero hate mechanisms back in 2014, where the PRC decided that the retweet button is too much. It’s that year where they decided they’ll ban the word civil society from Internet communication.
Previously, they also had civic tech community. They also had local journalism. They had a lot of the same things we were talking about, but just because the PRC saw that there is this viral hate or, from their viewpoint, also disinformation, or Western propaganda, or whatever, they decided on a zero hate lockdown approach when it comes to the virus of the mind.
It’s very interesting that whereas many jurisdictions are now seeing this as a trade off — they’ll be more top down or do suffer more disinformation, — Taiwan has never seen this as a trade off. We want to be more democratic and therefore inoculate. It’s like working on a vaccine and a cure instead of on lockdowns.
#FreeTheFuture resembles this idea of never locking down future generations, but rather, work with them so that even if they’re younger than 18 or younger than 8, they can also become active participants in our democracy.
Will that also protect you against the PRC?
I think if the people who participate in social movements in the PRC understand the same sort of mobilization, the same sort of…Many of them still remember the situation before 2014. I think that will build people to people ties.
As I mentioned, even people in authoritarian regimes during the August cyber attack, many of them also offered and did actually help us in backing up our website and things like that. Still to this day, the PRC have not banned GitHub, the main place where we coordinate.
This is a very interesting kind of difference model to the same threat, this viral disinformation, but taking wildly opposing ways of doing things.
GitHub, because it’s in their own interest to get access to AI research or…
Yeah. I think they’d face huge backlash from their own science and technology community if they disconnect themselves from GitHub. I think they’ve tried a few times now to somehow block it, but none of it was successful.
Maybe it’s one of the ways to share those cures or vaccinations and to empower also the civil society, which may be unnameable at the moment within the PRC, but they exist.
Thank you. It’s always a pleasure to be with you. Look forward to continue the contact.
We have, of course, the Copenhagen Democracy Summit on 15th or 16th of May 2023 coming up, where we typically always have a lot of Taiwanese join, from the President, Tsai Ing wen, to the Foreign Minister, and you’ve also been on some of our webinars. We had Freddy Lim and other Taiwanese parliamentarians join this year. Keep that in the calendar if you go to Europe.
Sure. I’ve got a department now for this.
(laughter)
We’re actually doing in the Alliance of Democracies foundation, this program on democracy and tech entrepreneurs, where we have a cohort from Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova…
I see.
…that make innovative projects that should help solve some of the…or be part of some of the solutions for democracy in their country as well, as a way of strengthening the digital resilience as well for them, of course, with Russia as a big, looming neighbor.
That would also be interesting to have you and the ministry associated with that, maybe of giving a talk to them.
We’re like mirror images.
Exactly. That would be, we could have you or Eric join in and give them a talk about Taiwan’s perspectives on this.
Awesome.
Thank you.