The Mayor of Taipei, for example, say, “No, we will all move clockwise and never counterclockwise.” [laughs]
Yeah, we of course do. There was a cruise ship that visited Taiwan a few weeks ago, and there was an SMS, actually, [laughs] a cell broadcast that shows a map of where they have been to, and asking people who have been there to watch themselves for 14 days. We know it reached 20 million or something cellphones because it’s broadcast.
As long as your phone is turned on, no matter if you are on a mobile roaming network, or whether you’re on whatever network, you are guaranteed to get this cell broadcast.
If you are connected to any of the towers unless you are using a satellite phone.
If you’re using a normal cell phone, then you are guaranteed to get this broadcast. That’s what we do when we have cases where we don’t know yet which specific people are at risk, then we just do this broadcasting. I think in the cruise ship case, everybody in the two Taipei cities and in Keelung, in north Taiwan.
Yeah, that’s a great question. People have raised that question, which is why MOHW, as of last week, started to have the dog speak English but previously, they only speak Mandarin.
Of the 20 national languages, English is not one of it.
We’re quickly moving toward a bilingual nation but it’s not yet an official language. Everybody agrees we should move there as quickly as possible.
No. We are appointees, so we support the Cabinet and support the Prime Minister. People have the approval rating of the entire Cabinet, which is, as I said, 69 percent. Not bad.
That’s right. We are. We also have, for example, English immersive classes starting in kindergarten or things like that. It’s very recent that we got 20 national languages anyway. It was just two years ago and one year ago if you really count the implementation. It’s really new. It used to be Mandarin is the one only language. It takes time to get bilingual.
Before the sustainable goals are reached, in this decade, sometime, we will move toward a bilingual state.
Will speak English.
Yeah.
You mean the dog?
It’s very cute. I’m sorry.
This is very serious.
It’s a dog but that’s why you share it. It’s fun. It’s memetic. We want them to be more viral than rumor and disinformation. This humor over rumor strategy is necessary. It’s almost a survival skill for us because there’s just so many rumors around, including PRC interference but also other organic rumors or financially-motivated rumors.
We have to do this. Now, in Denmark, you have a really good institutional media and fact-check everything. You don’t have to do this. We do this by way of looking at the media landscape and say that if we don’t make our messages go more viral, we’re doomed, and that’s by necessity.
It’s very expensive, those comedians, but it’s also entertaining, so why not?
Personally, I’m more about making inspirational videos. This is not my forte. I recognize the necessity though.
Sure.
Awesome.
That’s awesome.
Of course. Thank you.
OK, I’ll share it.
I’ll share this with my colleagues. Let’s take a picture…
All right. There’s three digital systems about identity currently in use in Taiwan. Since you are a Taiwan national, you are probably familiar with all three, right? There’s the national healthcare part, which I’m sure that you have to say SE card, but it is restricted to medical use.
The second one is the National PKI card, or the Taiwan citizen certificate. A little-known fact is that it’s also issued to foreigners, although there’s a little applications for foreigners, except for I think there’s an online system to query whether you’ve banned from entering Taiwan, but I don’t think it’s very useful.
In any case, it’s used for tax filing, of course, but also electronic signatures in general in all kinds. I think the PKI card is relatively stable, and there is a way to virtualize that card into phones already, so you don’t have to carry the physical card.
That is called the TFIDO, the Taiwan FIDO. This conforms to the international FIDO standard. That’s the second one. It’s based on the Taiwan National, like PKI card. The third one is based on the paper-based card, which is called the national ID card.
It’s not digital at all. The non-digital, paper-based card, on the other hand, has the photo, has all the information on it, and is actually, due to a very curious law, people, it’s mandated to carry with them all the time with them.
It actually has no enforcement rules, so if you don’t carry, I don’t really think anything happens to you. These three very different systems are in the process of virtualizing into mobile devices, using FIDO as the main idea.
Now, there is a lot of people who prefer if they can have the laser two cards, the National PKI card, and the paper-based ID card to be somehow glued together, so that you can have one card that serves both purposes, and add to that the NFC interface makes it easier for people to identify themselves without going through the physical IC-swiping card.
On the other hand, there’s people who prefer to have them as separate cards. We’re now developing technologies to allow both use cases on an opt-in basis, so that people don’t have to activate the PKI card on their ID card if they don’t want to, but they can if they want.
That is the current plan. There is also, in the civil society, a lot of experiments about decentralized identity, like self-signed identities, especially in the very vibrant blockchain communities, like I’m also on a foundation board with Vitalik Buterin to work on intersectional groups-based identities.
At the moment, that identity is only used for the general population in smaller scales. For example, the Orchid Island, which is a smaller offshore island from Taiwan. The Tao, the indigenous people, made an identity of the Tao coin, the T-A-O coin, I think.
That is the idea that they can have a self-signed, not only cryptocurrency, but also a kind of certificate authority to make sure that only people who identify with the Tao culture is part of their cryptocurrency ecosystem.
We see that as a really good expression of Taiwan’s transcultural nature to allow more than 20 national languages now to have their identities. That is currently in a more regional basis. Of course, without blockchain, the Taitung coin or whatever, they are also their own tokens of appreciation of being a virtual Taitung citizen and things like that.
That goes into gamification territory, and I will spare you with the details.
There’s two different ideas. One is about the cybersecurity, the property of the system that we use. One is about social trust. These are related, but these are not the same concept. In Taiwan, of course, cybersecurity is one of the top priorities.
A lot of the systems that we introduce, including the Sandstorm system that I introduced to the public service as part of our everyday virtual workspace, we ask white hat hackers to do penetration testing for extended amount of time, like six months for the Sandstorm case, a similar amount for the self-driving car lab, and things like that.
We are getting into a habit of just getting the white hat hackers a lot of opportunities to file CVEs before any system goes online. I think that is not strictly about social trust, but it is about this fundamental trust of the infrastructure.
Of course, more advanced techniques, such as proof-carrying code, all help to reduce the attack surface and make penetration testers’ work easier.
Now, on the social trust level, we have the national standardized OpenAPI standard from the Linux Foundation called the OAS3. We also have the national standardized schema, .gov.tw, that lists the common schema for computer age systems to interoperate.
We further have a procurement rule that says that, if you procure an information system that has input and output functions for people, then the procuring agency can demand the vendor to produce such OpenAPIs so that robots can do exactly the same techniques as people have for import, export, and also interactive components.
If the vendor says that they have to charge extra, or they cannot make it an API-first design, then the vendor can actually be disqualified for discrimination against robots. Not really that, but we use the same section that talks about disabilities.
Like you cannot build a website that say only people with sight can see it, but people with blindness cannot. We use that purpose section and introduce procurement rules so that whenever any agency procure anything, if they want API access, they can get it essentially for free.
That is the interoperability argument, and that is how we build the different systems from different back ends, like the civil IoT system, which is the integrated system from the social sector that measures air quality.
Also, from the public sector, also from the private sector, but because everybody talk the same OpenAPI, since are things the API in this case, we are able to then interoperate without the government mandating control.
Rather, we’re supporting the ecosystem of existing standards, and we use that for many other things as well. That is also why the TFIDO Project uses the FIDO standards, instead of inventing things on our own.
