First of all, the United States and other Western countries are increasingly alarmed over industrial espionage, technology theft and control over key technologies by China. Do you share such concerns?
We are in the frontline — we’ve been sharing such concerns for decades now.
We are glad that the Western countries are joining us in this concern.
Our Chancellor came to Japan last week. She was talking about China and emphasized that we need to protect ourselves from China.
You are just next to China. Everybody knows there are high tensions between China and Taiwan. Can you give me an example how China perhaps tries to come into your Internet?
It doesn’t work like that though... I won’t get technical, but I will try to explain this on a different focus.
What we have witnessed is that a concerted effort to sow discord in our democratic process by the way of organized disinformation, by the way of spreading rumors, by the way of advocating to the global society something that is simply not true. I will use one example.
For example, when Taiwan petitioned to join the World Health Organization’s annual meeting, there was a concerted effort online, in public forums, that says, "Taiwan is already represented by the PRC. The PRC has been very diligent in communicating the WHO related information to Taiwan. The international community need not worry." That is patently false.
However, we do see a concerted effort in spreading such information — or disinformation — online so that people would believe that Taiwan doesn’t need as much participation as we do actually need. This is not, strictly speaking, a cyber attack. Rather, it is a sowing of discord through disinformation.
Next year, you will have a presidential election. How do you think you could protect your country from outside influencing?
What we have witnessed is that for campaign donations, for example, it’s already restricted to the nationals. Of course, foreign people cannot donate to political campaigns, but we have observed in the previous election that there is a loophole, in the sense that people can purchase advertisements on social media and on other media forms. That could be bought by foreign money.
We saw a lot of foreign interest to, for example, instead of donating a specific candidate, to fund disinformation campaigns by means of advertisement through media and social media.
We have changed our election code for this year. I would expect that to pass by the parliament before the election so that whatever advertisements have to disclose the funding sources of their payments and the sponsors and that it is held to the same standard of transparency and accountability as campaign donation records.
That closes one of the major loopholes that lets foreign powers influence the local election by means of misinformation.
I heard or read that you proposed to share cyber attack data with other countries. Was there a huge interest for such data?
There is a CERT, or the computer emergency response mechanism, that is already international. This is not something new, but we are seeing a renewed interest in such a response not just for traditional cyber attacks, which occurs more at a technical or network operator level.
The content level, the misinformation or disinformation level, that level is new to many countries. We’re seeing a lot of interest internationally about this particular subject.
I read that only a few countries were interested to getting this data on cyber attacks from Taiwan. I think this is because they don’t want to have problems with China. Is this true or not?
I don’t have that information.
Can you tell me how Taiwan is protecting itself from cyber attacks from outside?
Yes. Just this January, our new cybersecurity act went into effect. In that, what we are saying is that both critical infrastructure as well as the part of the government, part of democracy, anything that is part of the operation of democracy, need to be protected by dedicated personnel and also dedicated budget.
For any large scale budgets now, at least five percent of the budget is dedicated to cybersecurity. We do this by cultivating a local, what we call white hat hacker community, meaning that people who are capable of cyber attack, but they do this for benign purpose. They test a system before the system is online.
When we set up new system in administration, we invite such white hat hackers to attack our system so that we can understand our vulnerability beforehand. It’s very important to keep them well informed, well paid. Also, they meet with president and the minister once in a while so that they don’t fall to the dark side, which always has cookies. [laughs]
Let’s say you invite not your enemies but...
White hat hackers.
They were happy to come to you?
Yes. In Taiwan, cybersecurity is one of the more popular choices of career for teenagers because it’s fun. Also, we’re in the front line. That means that they get to practice on real field practice day to day.
Instead of some experiments or some examples or some lectures by the teacher, they get to practice in the actual field action because there are cyber attacks happening literally every minute.
You are not afraid that somebody will, let’s say, buy them and take them away from Taiwan, that they are going to another country if they are so good in their field?
We’re happy to share our talents.
Of course, when they test the system, it’s not the real system. It’s a mock system. We always keep a clean separation between the operational system as well as the mock system.
One example. In March, we are going to open the autonomous vehicle driving proving ground for self driving cars and other kind of self driving vehicles. Way before that opened, half a year ago, we invited the top white hat hackers to test that field to see if they can take control of the cars and so on.
Of course, that is not the actual system that we deploy. Nevertheless, they spent months and couldn’t find a vulnerability, so we feel more secure in that the autonomous vehicles will not go off road.
Since you became digital minister, was there a higher rate of cyber attacks against Taiwan or not?
I would say it’s about the same. We’re in the frontline. It’s very saturated, meaning that we are used to if we don’t do our penetration testing of, if we don’t recruit some efficient white hackers, once we roll a online system, it will be attacked. That has been true for decades now.
It has not changed particularly in the past couple years. We are always on the frontline.
You don’t feel any higher tension with China. This has nothing to do with cyber attacks you would say?
For example, six years ago when we were building our 4G network we already said that there is such a high risk so that we banned all telecommunication facilities from the PRC in our national 4G network. That has already been part of our assessment six years ago.
I wouldn’t say the situation has significantly changed. As I said, I’m happy that other countries are now becoming aware of it.
What do you think about this controversy about Huawei?
I won’t comment on specific companies. I would say six years ago we did an assessment. That is already our assessment that we cannot include these components in our 4G networks. Of course, other countries are talking about 5G networks now. The decision has already been made when we did our 4G network.
You think it is justified to ban such a company from the market?
Speaking personally, in Taiwan we are on the frontline and people generally understand that the "marketplace" when we are talking about PRC companies, there is no clear distinction between a state actor and a market actor.
As I said, with that realization in mind, we feel completely justified over the decision six years ago about not including them in our 4G networks.
We understand that if they enter in the name of market the state actor will actually enter the market as well.
As I told you our chancellor recently came to Japan. It was very interesting because she was talking a lot about data and data security. She said, "Yeah, you know, we are talking a lot about data security and personal data but then people have passwords only ’one, two, three, four’ or ’hello’ so they are not aware of the risk."
What do you think? Are people in Taiwan aware that you need a secure password?
The simple answer is: Yes.
Really?
They are very different from the Germans, obviously.
A few things are different. Firstly, in Taiwan, broadband is a human right. Anywhere in Taiwan, if you don’t have 10 megabytes per second of broadband Internet it’s our fault. Now, over half of Taiwanese population have access to over a gigabit of very high speed Internet.
People already conduct most of their lives online. With these online life for a very long time people generally understand of course cybersecurity, and privacy, and so on are very important which is why in Taiwan digital literacy is part of our basic education.
Do you teach this in school?
Of course. Starting this year we’re also teaching media literacy, critical thinking of the framing of the journalism and how this information is manufactured from misinformation and so on, again, as a media literacy class.
I think we’re the first Asian jurisdiction to do that in the basic educational level.
I’m always wondering if you are not forgetting half of the population. In my country a lot of people are old. I can tell you they are telling me, "I don’t know how this works." They have the impression that they are not part of society anymore. How is the situation in Taiwan?
Old people are one of the most active Internet user groups in Taiwan, next to students, I think. Both groups have more time than other groups of people. Many Taiwanese people actually rely on instant message systems to stay connected to their grandchildren and so on.
While the literacy about disinformation is very important, and there’s a lot of civil society work on getting the more senior people real time clarification of disinformation. They are not being excluded. They too have mobile phone access.
This year we have a G20 summit in Japan. One of the main topics will be the ethic part of data. What do you think? Where should the limits be?.
Governments, companies, everybody wants to have more data from people.
I don’t.
(laughter)
You are perhaps an exception. Where should be the limits? Is it important that we have rules and regulations all over the world about ethics of data?
The rules help, like the GDPR. We’re happy to see that GDPR has been accepted and that one of the first largest cases by the CNIL on Google is being actively debated. It is a very good progression.
Taiwan’s personal data protection act is modeled after the European one. We share the same tradition of preferring individual autonomy over state or capitalist control.
Personally, speaking as a free software development advocate, all the system data I write, they function in flight mode. That means that even if you disconnect WiFi, if you disconnect 4G, they still work. That, basically, means we’re not holding people in hostage to having their data be surveilled in exchange for functionality. If they want to share their data, it is on a voluntary basis.
In Taiwan, we always say data is not like oil at all. The data is a beginning of a relationship. If you hold my data, I can ask what you’re doing with it. I can update it. I can take it to some other people. I can ask for deletion, for correction. The more responsive you are, the more accountable you are, the more trustworthy you are.
It is like any relationship with your lawyer, or with your accountant, or with your doctor. If you trust someone more, of course, you share more of your personal data. They must act in the interest of you. That is the relation of you.
Yeah, but this is a good question. When I ask you to delete my data, the question is if you really delete my data.
Yes, there are ways to mathematically prove that. I think one of the important thing about digital literacy is that we educate children so that they are part of this data agency idea so that they also learn that when they become the data operator, when other people ask them to delete the data, how do they prove that?
Once they wear the shoe of a data operator, then they can understand what actually to ask of the larger international companies or whatever of a accountable record. They will know how to ask and what to ask.
When you became minister, you said that you should create a surrounding that is transparent to attract more companies. Were you successful?
Yeah, very much so, yeah. Taiwan is largely seen as one of the leading AI development centers now. In the past couple years, we’re seeing virtually all the large...like Google, Microsoft, even Uber, Facebook, Amazon, you name it, setting up their AI research programmes in Taiwan.
I think that is a unique combination between the hardware and optics, and audio, and other hardware verticals that Taiwan already offered versus also the top notch research that we’re doing in machine learning.
Previously, these two groups of people were not tightly integrated with each other, but now with a set of new regulations, they’re now much more easy to experiment on their integrations. That really attracted the global multinationals to set up Taiwan as their regional center.
Another thing, of course, is there are highest rate of Freedom House score as well as freedom to speech and assembly and so on really helps in this region because then they can work on the new technologies without being repressed by the state power.
How important is transparency, especially with a neighbor who is more or less the opposite?
For us, transparency is a way to build trust in democracy.
Without transparency, democracy is essentially a ritual you perform every four years or every two years. With transparency, it is a continuous democracy by which the people can ask the why, not just the what of the policy making.
First, it makes us more unique. It certainly builds a national identity around the process and around the democratic culture. Second, as seen by the referendum, such processes enable the civil society to deepen its debate — instead of choosing particular people, we can now argue over particular things in the society.
That, again, makes us both more unique and builds much more solidarity between the various different civil society groups and less prone to disinformation or other ways to manipulate information to sow discord.
On the other hand, in the past, there’d been more and more countries who cut ties with Taiwan due to the great power of China. The last one was El Salvador, I think, now there are only 17 countries who still maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan. It’s good to have transparency but does this really help Taiwan on the international stage?.
Yes, it did. One example. Through the open government effort, we held a presidential hackathon, where the president invited people to fulfill her presidential promise.
We had a lot of people who experimented with the ways to analyze water pipes to detect leakage to solve for climate change and water shortage based on machine learning and data in the water pipes.
Once we built the system, which correspond to the Sustainable Development Goals on the climate change, we shared this to the international community. The same team went to Wellington, to New Zealand. New Zealand also shared their public water corporation’s data to solve climate change, which is a new problem.
New Zealand didn’t use to have this problem, but now they do. This kind of bilateral collaboration for the sustainable goals is much more meaningful than any of the other showbusinessy display because that really solves the problem for people in both countries.
The output of such collaborations is in the public domain for the science and academic communities. Finally, it increases trust. If one country is willing to share its public water pipe usage data to another country, to me, that is much more practical and useful than other ways of bilateral agreements.
Last time when I came to Taiwan, we were talking about the referendums. You had these...
The first referendum that worked.
Yeah!
(laughter)
It took three tries.
Yeah, the referendum on same sex marriage was very surprisingly rejected. Were you disappointed about the result?
No, I fully accept the result. By the way, it’s not rejection of same sex couple relationships. They enjoy the same rights as heterosexual couples. The referendum was just to not call it marriage in the civil code. It’s about the name.
This is true, but do you think perhaps that people are not ready yet?
To call it marriage?
Yeah.
The thing is that only 10 years ago did we change marriage from something that is a social ceremony into a state registration. For many people in the older generations, as soon as there is a large wedding, there is legally binding wedding. They don’t have to actually register right afterwards.
They’re not used to the idea that the marriage is a just like household registration thing. The young people, of course, grew up with this being state function.
When they went into the booth and saw the referendum, they probably imagined different things in their heads. I think it’s really good to start a discussion intergenerationally about the meaning of marriage because of this.
I know many friends of mine who came out of the closet because of this referendum to talk to their parents because they want to win their votes. Some succeeded, some did not, but it’s always better to start a conversation.
But what do you think will happen now, until March, the government has to present something?
A bill that protects the rights of the couples, yes.
Do you think it will be successful then? Or will there be a compromise?
It’s all about the name. it’s not about compromising the rights of same sex couples. It is whether to call it marriage or not. It is basically just a referendum over the name on the civil code. I think it will up to the parliamentary and MPs to decide, of course.
What really matters is that people have the real conversation across different civil society groups. Even right now, our office is holding a preliminary discussion about how future referendums should deepen the connection and the debate before the referendum.
When it pertains to human right as well as the constitutional interpretations, how to make it more accessible to people who are not constitutional law scholars. Basically, we’re retracing the steps of Switzerland. They did this many decades ago. It’s only our third try, but we are actually improving our democracy because of this.
You are recording all the interviews. Why are you doing this?
First of all, because the transparency that I practice is called radical transparency, meaning that as the digital minister, anything that I see or all the meetings that I chair and so on, the people can also know. It’s to contextualize my work. The way of contextualizing this work takes many forms.
Transcripts so far is the most accessible form because people just Google or DuckDuckGo or do some search engine search for anything that I do, and they see the full explanations for why I’m doing this, in addition to what I do this.
How many people would read this interview, for example?
On average, hundreds.
I have another question. As a digital minister, how many technical stuff you have at home?
At home?
Yeah. Do you have things like Alexa, or smart home technology...?
The place that the ministers live is a very, very old building, and so we don’t have that many cutting edge technologies.
Ever since I moved in though, I did bring in the whole set up of iPad, of Apple Watch, Apple TV, and so on, but that’s the extent of it.
Personally, you’re not technology addicted?
No. The thing is that in Taiwan, we have a saying that says one who manufactures the shampoos wash their hair with water, or something like that. I’m sure you have a similar saying.
I’ve been working with Silicon Valley companies on enterprise social software and things like that, so I know exactly how the dopamine cycles work, how manufacturer addictions work. I rejected particular lines of work because I consider them unethical.
Of course, when I use social media, for example, Facebook, I always use it with a extension, a program called a Facebook Feed Eradicator. Once you install that, the Facebook wall disappears and replaced by a saying, for example, from Athlur or something that inspires you every morning.
The other parts of Facebook, the intentional part, for example, you can still contact your friends and family, you can also visit your profile, their page, watch some live stream, why not?
The addictive part, the part that lets you keep pulling on the fear of missing out, that part is gone. I only use social media in this way as to not to get addicted.
OK, thank you very much.
Thank you.