What does it mean when you say "hacker"?
A hacker is someone who immerse themselves into a system so that they become an expert in seeing what is missing, and what are the shortcomings, loopholes of the system.
A white hat hacker is someone who fix the system, who patch system, notifying the system owner what are the problems that needs to be fixed. A black hat hacker is someone who use those loopholes for their own benefit without notifying the person maintaining the system.
As I’m not a cyber security hacker -- I’m a civic hacker, I hack politics, I hack law, I hack other things -- but when I say "hack," it’s just by seeing the same problems, the same loopholes in the system, but instead of fixing it or exploiting it for my own gain, I work on a needs system that doesn’t suffer from the same problems.
I’m more a creative hacker. Rather than working with an existing system, I try to make new systems.
What did your ex-friends of hacking or activists say when you became a minister? They’re anarchist, you are anarchist, but you are in a government, so you work with or for government. That is not typical.
I work with the government, here, but I’m not saying that I work for the government. There is a very important difference, because all the work that I do is open software. It’s free software.
It means that any government can use it. It just happens that the Taiwan government is the first one to try to pioneer certain programs or certain procedures.
But because I relinquish, I give up all my copyright during this work, so if any other government want to use the system that we built, they don’t have to ask for a license. They don’t have to ask for our permission. They can just take our work and use it.
In this sense, I work for everybody, including the private sector and also the Civil Society, without specifically for the government. It’s just the government pays my salary.
What does exactly mean, "open software," and what does it mean applied to all this?
A open source software or free software means a attitude when developing software. Normally people who write software like writers enjoy copyright, meaning that when other people try to copy or adapt our work, we can sue them, saying, "OK, you have infringed my copyright."
In open source or free software, we believe that software is better when everybody develop them together. When many people want to develop together, by necessity, just like in Wikipedia, they give up some part of their copyright, saying that, "As long you give me credit or as you long share it in the same way, I will agree not to sue you."
This idea of a partial giving up of copyright is the foundation of the collaborative culture that lets thousands of people, sometimes never met each other, develop software together.
In politics, this is what we mean by collaboration or crowdsourcing. It means that we open up the policymaking process so everybody can see how it’s cooking. People who never met us before can show up and say, "Hey, I want this change because I have this very good reason," and so on.
The idea is that it enables citizens or even foreign people who look at the policymaking process to give useful contributions without having a agreement or a collaboration contract beforehand. I can just meet strangers. Those strangers then become collaborators by giving useful suggestions.
How is your influence on the other ministers and ministries? How is the process of your hacking the system?
At the moment, there is a central website called join.gov.tw, Join Government Taiwan. This website, every ministry is required to make their regulations pre-announcements 60 days before it takes effect on this website.
Also, all the ministries receive people’s petitions so that when people have 5,000 countersignatures on this platform, the ministries are required to give a reply to the people’s voice. Also, every ministry is required to publish their major construction budgets or other budgets on the same website for everybody to audit.
Combining those three, the regulations and the petitions and also the budget overview, it enable in Taiwan, of the 23 million people, about 5 million is already using this platform to communicate directly with the ministries. I would say we affect pretty much all the ministries.
Now we have a special regulation that says every ministry must have at least one participation officer that connects directly to people on the Internet or over other media. But it’s not just to media people, it’s not just to legislators, people in the Parliament, but with anyone who shows up with a good idea.
Why do you think we need a Ministry of Digital when we are a digital society? All ministries should be Ministry of Digital, digital ministries.
This is a very good question. Taiwan does not have a digital ministry and digital minister without portfolio, meaning that my work connects to every ministry. As you said, this is what we call a digital transformation, meaning that every ministry must eventually become digital.
In this transformation period, it is useful to have a minister with a portfolio to connect the different digital transformation efforts in all the different ministries together.
It doesn’t make sense to have a digital ministry because otherwise it would be all this ministry’s business. Every other ministry doesn’t have to work. I work by establishing a virtual team of officers from every ministry, more than 30 of them, together instead of having a small ministry of my own.
(pause)
What do you think about gov tech in Singapore? I mean this modern, it is a good modern in the structure, but it also creates a sort of oriented people. It’s not a question of influence but a question of choosing the direction of behavior that people has to follow. They are not conscious of that. What do you think about it?
There is of course certain elements where we call behavioral insights or nudging or things like that that is more about policy shaping people’s behavior rather than people shaping the government’s behavior.
Like Yin and Yan, you can’t really tell one from the other. Because when the government proposes something, it is natural that the citizens respond with something else.
If the government of course is one directional, like if you have an Internet link that downloads very quickly but you cannot upload anything, then nowadays we would think that this is broken because you cannot contribute to the Internet. My work here is not to make it entirely upload nor entirely download.
It is essential that we forward something to the citizen to inspect, to audit, to deliberate. Their voices are also met with the same attention, with the same carefulness from the public service.
This is how trust can grow between the public servants and the public in general because every side trusts the other side to treat carefully the messages sent and also give useful response and then go back and so on.
I would not say any particular direction is more important than the other. What is important is a iteration, a loop, between the public servants and the public.
Don’t you think that in the majority of the digital societies and digitalizing government the question is about it regulated the society and not so democratic? Sort of totally opposite vision, opposite realizing of the previous vision of Internet.
I think this is because algorithm, meaning how the computers work, it is like law in the sense that it is written by people. Unlike law, it is not interpreted by people. In law, we have the judges, the legislators, the executive people interpreting how each law and regulation apply to a new social condition. For code, for algorithms, the computer enforce its design by itself.
You create a disparity, a imbalance, because always the regulation needs a careful consideration from the human beings. The existing code already runs very fast and without any deliberation really at all with the society. That is what they call disruptive innovation.
Our work is what we call regulation technology. We use the technology not just for disruptive innovation but also for transforming the governance process itself so that we can offload as many as possible of the repetitive work into autonomous agents, into AI, into other efforts, so that we can catch up as quickly as the new technologies come.
To make a very concrete example, we are just about to pass a fintech sandbox act. This is the law the legal system’s saying if you come up with blockchain, with other disruptive technology, you can work with a city government to try it with maybe just 200 people at first.
Once you try it for six months or for a year, you are required to write a report of how this technology integrates well with the society or if it’s not a good idea with the society. During this experimentation period, our government promise not to fine or not to control this experiment.
We can have many experiments going on all over the place in Taiwan. Some will fail. That will be like paying a tuition for everybody to learn about new technology.
Some of them will be accepted by the society. By that time, we already have a lot of data for our regulation technology. We can make up a good new regulation for this new technology. This idea is that a technology and the law, instead of fighting against each other, we use many small-scale experiments so that they inform each other and can work in tandem with each other.
Digital skills, in your opinion, does a government has to teach in education or they come along as in your case for example that you learn alone?
I did not learn alone. I learned it with the free software community, with the world web community, with the Internet Engineering Taskforce community. It just seems alone because we are in different continents. We’re in different places on Earth. But we are together and connected by the Internet.
I think the idea of digital skills never grows alone. It always grows in a community. But the difference is that, with digital skills, the community can be distributed. It could be all over the place on the Earth. The community stays active instead of goes asleep at the same time. It’s like 24 hours every day, every time.
In this large community, like the Wikipedia community or other communities, one finds a sense of belonging, that one can always contribute something but without fearing that the community will disappear if you go to do some other things the other day. It has a idea of stableness that is not found by physical communities because it is virtual in a sense.
I think all the learning of digital skills need to happen in community. It is best if the face to face communication and online communication is overlapped by a number of conferences or summits, meetups, hackathons. But it is possible to learn strictly from the virtual community.
In this vision, do you think the national borders will survive the next 5 or 10 years?
When I put on my virtual reality glasses and look at the earth from the international space station, I don’t see national borders, so the national borders already only exists in our own minds.
For many international collaboration projects, like the Wikipedia I just mentioned, most of the participants will not think that they are working for a nonprofit foundation in a certain country.
It doesn’t really matter. It is a common, shared by everybody who participate, so I would argue that in the open-source software community, in the free culture community, the border is already dissolving. There is no idea of nationality anymore.
There may be still borders of different languages, or different cultures, or diversity, and that is great, but that is not geographical. It is not based on lines and rivers on Earth.
What do you think about blockchain activists? For example, we have seen that I introduced Joseph Lubin for this rehearsal, the co-founder of the Ethereum. He expressed me this idea of the decentralized world.
When I hear some good experts in some governments, such as in Dubai, they had not this idea of the centralized world and freedom. It’s the way of ruling a difficult society, so it is more or less the opposite, also better case.
What do you think about blockchain? Is it a danger for democracy or is it really an opportunity?
Blockchain technology and also distributed ledger and distributed consensus, it is a new protocol, a new way for people and machines to work with each other. Like any other protocol, like the Internet is built on the Internet Protocol, this is why we call this IP address, because it’s an Internet Protocol address.
Internet Protocol can be used for democracy, for federating, for a lot of freedoms to protect speech, but the same protocol can also be shaped to build a great firewall, to build a intranet to monitor, to survey everybody’s every keystroke, every movement to profile them.
The protocol, itself, is not good or bad. It is just a new way to more efficiently, more conveniently let people communicate with each other. It is up to us, the humans to determine the values that we want to embed into the technology.
The technology will not determine the value for us, so the same technology like blockchain or Internet Protocol, it will eventually be standardized. Once they’re standardized, still be used, whether it’s for democracy, or whether it’s for authoritarianism, the ratification process in the standard will not say about which site I’ve used.
My answer is that, yes, it will be used on both sides, and further each sides agendas as well. It will be a boon, a good thing for people working on democracy, and it will also be a good thing for people who work on authoritarianism. It is a new tool that both sides can use.
In my country, many influencers from politics or journalism, also the most democratic ones against automation in the Web, because they think too many people distribute fake news and spawn fake news, and that this is a danger for democracy. What do you think about?
I think anonymity, of course, lets people express unpopular views. That is what’s its main use. As a journalist, surely you know there are whistleblowers who also need some anonymity or at least pseudonymity in order to speak out when there is something injustice going on, so there are pro and cons for anonymity.
I think the main fear is that if anonymous people will waste everybody’s time by having a lot of automated or spending resources, and we see this already like 10 or 15 years ago when the email spam issue becomes the spam wars that was in the early 2000s.
Many people at that time also suggested that in order to have an email account, you really need to identify your real name, your citizen security number, and so on, because everybody received too much junk mail from anonymous people. In the end, this is not solved by requiring a real identity in order to own an email account.
Rather it is solved by a lot of technical and policy tools that make it very easy to see which email are spam, which email are junk mails in order for people to report and catch the spam mailers, in order to make them very expensive to spam 10s of thousands of people.
You can now still anonymously email me and it will not be identified as spam, but if you email me anonymously and also 100,000 other people. The Internet is now adapting itself so it will be caught as a spamming behavior. This is the consensus of the stakeholders in the spam wars and expect the same for the misinformation issues.
It can be, of course, solved in a very heavy-handed way, like in the spam wars, but I don’t think this is what the stakeholders want in the long run.
Cyber security, I mean the contrary, cyber, could be the point of the failure of the Internet?
The Internet was designed to survive a nuclear attack. It was designed so that as long as there are three computers in the world still operating, they can still communicate with each other, even if every other computer has been destroyed by war. It was designed to survive this scenario.
I’m sure, of course, there will be cyber attacks in the future. It is very probable that it will disable whole networks or even cities or countries, and will be traumatic, but the Internet Protocol, it’s designed to be very resilient, that it is always very easy, easier than destroying the Internet.
It’s always very easy to rebuild the Internet after such an attack, because it was built using very simple protocol, very simple methods.
What do you think about direct democracy? The one that Birgitta Jónsdottir wanted to live in Iceland, that our Pirate Party in Italy is trying to improve, and somewhere else.
You believe more in a representative system, of course because you’re in ministry, or you think that we will pass to a third one?
I’m a appointee, so I’m not elected. I don’t think I’m representing any particular constituent. I’m only representing myself in a sense.
For direct democracy, I think the consensus now is if it’s a very small city or a town, it’s very easy to practice direct democracy, because everybody knows everybody, or at least have heard of everybody. When the scale becomes large, when the population becomes 10s of millions, 100s of millions, it becomes much harder for everybody’s voice to be heard in a fair fashion.
Mainly it is about whether we can take the listening that is happening between you and me at the moment, and make it a scale, meaning that it makes possible for millions of people to listen to each other, and understanding each others’ point of view.
When we solved this technological and cultural problem to thousands of people, then we can have theoretical democracy for thousands of people. When we solve the scalability issue for hundreds of million people, then we can have direct democracy of hundreds of million people.
Before it is solved, of course, we will need some kind of representation. Whether the representation is done by drawing lots, or by voting, or by some other method, there are many different theoretical considerations and political realities, but we will always need some kind of representational system before we solve the issue of listening to millions of people.
You know Hiroshi Ishiguro will say that in the future we will have only two social classes. The ones who will live because they know the systems, and they know how to dial up with the machines, and a big part will be only biological bodies for artificial intelligence. What do you think about?
The same argument could be made during the middle ages about literacy, or how to count numbers, how to do multiplication with rote numerals, and things like that. There will be classes like that.
In Taiwan, what we believe is Internet as a human right, meaning that everybody in Taiwan should have broadband access. We are one of the highest connectivity-enabled countries. Also, we’re using a special budget to make sure the last few percent are also equipped with high bandwidth broadcasting equipment so that they can also connect to broadband Internet.
Why this is important is the digital technology tend to divide people to the haves and have nots. If we molded our basic K-12 education so that every school children learns how to have media literacy, how to do critical thinking with the help of Internet and communication technologies, that we can make sure that this class divide actually shortens instead of widens as time goes on.
This depends on affordable access to the computation equipment, and also broadband Internet every point in Taiwan. This is what we firmly believe in. I think this is one of the things that the government in its current form has a obligation to do. If it does not intervene, then of course, the society will tend to split.
How did you convince the government to have this role? If you convince or did they ask you, and they were not scared about you influencing the other ministry?
In Taiwan, the Constitution specifically says that education is one of the most important priorities, and in fact, we’ve set aside a certain percentage of the government budget just for education, and it is protected budget. You can’t take those away.
The idea is just to put this Internet-enabled curriculum, this idea of learning with machines not against machines. Learning with AI, not against AI into the basic K-12 curriculum. Once it’s put into the curriculum, which will take effect about a year from now, then the education budget is determined to make sure that this kind of learning must happen as a universal right everywhere in Taiwan.
This is the work that was broadly adopted by people working the education field and is not considered as political.
Which are if there are gender difference in approaching technology?
I think in Taiwan, we have the highest number of access to Internet technology by women. I think in Taiwan, we usually think technology, they don’t really care about the gender of the user designing it.
I think our curriculum also emphasized the idea of diversity. Instead of one gender against the other, we emphasize that it is essential that when we’re designing a service or designing a product or completing a project together in school, it is very important to have diversity. If there’s two teams in the school and one boys and one girls, then that is not so good because people will not brainstorm into so much different possibilities.
We try to mix things together so people see from each other’s perspective and generally become much more celebrating the diversity, not just on gender but also across generations, on racial ethnicities, and things like that.
What do you think about the fact that Trump doesn’t care about net neutrality?
I haven’t spoke to President Trump or the FCC about net neutrality.
He said he doesn’t care. He doesn’t want to keep it, net neutrality.
I think net neutrality is very interesting, in the sense that different people on the different part of the value chain tends to think of it either as a liberating force or a constricting force, depending on whethere you work on: the content layer, the transmission layer, or in some other layers.
I think this is a natural thing that, during the digital convergence, different interested parties will take different stands on net neutrality. I think it is very important to have a informed dialogue. But I really don’t know personally about the US government’s stance on this matter.
Also, because we don’t know if these are fake news, [laughs] everything that does not say the person. Which is your system of e-petitions? Which is your use of artificial intelligence in politics?
The idea of using e-petitions is that it brings awareness to the national government of the social issues or environmental issues that we may have overlooked but the people are caring very much about.
Any time there is an e-petition that is countersigned by 5,000 people or more, every ministry will meet and make sure that the right ministry take charge of the petition issues. This has been true since two years ago.
One year ago, when I joined the Cabinet, there was a problem. Because when the petition was just for one ministry, the ministry knows very well how to answer it. It was often handled pretty well.
If one petition for example about misinformation on Facebook or scam bots selling fake goods on Facebook, this actually involves the Ministry of Finance, of Economy, of Transport, of National Communication, of everybody.
It is very difficult for any one ministry to answer for that whole petition. Sometimes they explains the problem and say, "OK, we can do 10 percent of the work, but the other p-, 90 percent is out of our hands."
My main work after joining the Cabinet is to establish this virtual team of participation offices so that the cross-ministries issues are collectively handled by the six or seven different ministries together and to, like pieces in a puzzle, try to talk face to face with the things the petition issue that they care about.
We also internally vote. Every ministry has a vote about what kind of cross-ministry issue they want to talk about this month. The ones with the highest votes gets the help from the third party facilitators, from the expert researchers, and so on.
We invite the petitioners to the national government to have a face to face brainstorming session for five hours and then take the result of that brainstorming to the Prime Minister and other ministers’ portfolio so that we can form policy based on people’s input directly and very quickly.
Sometime it’s not really national. It is a local issue such as the remote island about the Marine National Park. We all fly there to have our meeting there because otherwise it will widen the digital divide. People who cannot travel to Taipei or people who are not so good with using the Internet technologies, their voice will be left out.
We go to Hengchun. We go to Penghu. We go to all those remote places when petitions about the remote issue so that a local fishers people and so on, they can participate personally.
Were you born a hacker or you became one?
I think everyone is born a hacker, in the sense that one has curiosity of all the system involved. Sometimes the educational school system kills the curiosity as the child is growing up, but otherwise I think people with their natural curiosity are natural hackers.
You’ve gone to US and then come back. Why did you come back? Many people go to the US and stay there among their similar when you are so advanced with your brain and you in dialogue with technology and the systems. Why did you come back?
When I worked with Silicon Valley companies before I joined the Cabinet for eight years, physically and mostly in Taiwan actually. I travel to US to meet my colleagues and so on from time to time.
About seven months or eight months a year, I’m actually based in Taiwan and using video conference, using robotics, using other telepresence tools to work with my counterparts in the Silicon Valley and also in London and other European places.
This is one I think the national border doesn’t really make any difference. The only thing that makes difference is the time zone difference, is about jet lagging. It’s about coordinating my sleep cycles so I can stay awake a little bit past midnight.
When people in Silicon Valley wake up, we at least have one hour of stand-up meeting time to work together. But it also means I don’t get dragged into meetings that are unnecessary because I’m physically just not there.
I’m very used to working remotely. I don’t think that I’m returning to Taiwan. I’m mostly now just focusing on Taiwan. My work pattern has always been the same.
There is something I didn’t ask you, think it’s important to say?
Nah, I think it’s all very good questions. We’re good. Thank you so much.
Now you stay here for the meeting.
Yeah, we have a lot of interns also working remotely, in all corners of Taiwan, helping to fix all the websites of the national government of the different ministries. We’re now looking at their work results.