Now, compare that with the legacy systems inside the Intranet. In those setups, if I’m a minister, I present my ID card, I’m physically in the Intranet, then I’m allowed to do practically everything. I don’t need to authenticate my device or my SIM card every time I sign on a “ trusted ” desktop computer within the intranet. That creates a lot of loopholes and possible problems.
Even people who wants to fight for withdrawing funds from their banks, and so on, were subjected to this random redcoat treatment because it was very top down. In Taiwan, it’s entirely decentralized distributed, so people can put the data in the places they trust , it could be a local grocery store, it could be their telecom company, it could be Bluetooth, peer to peer, at any given time.
When you have that nature, then even though it’s cutting edge…Well, it’s no longer cutting edge. [laughs] It’s been around for six years at least as free software. Even though it used to be cutting edge, the accessibility and exclusivity of these technologies can be guaranteed. Add to that the cybersecurity too, because people can host it on the digital public infrastructure that they could trust .
It is basically a way to do contact tracing in a decentralized way. It requires enormous amount of trust from this CECC to those nightlife businesses, but it’s proven to work. It works better, actually, than threatening to put people in jail, because otherwise, they don’t even have the option of working with the CECC. They will entirely go underground, as the US did in the Prohibition Era.
He always take a very humble attitude and say, “We’re all in this together. We need to learn from each other. If you have anything that I have not thought of, please let me know and call 1922.” That humble position basically increased the trust of the lessons and lectures that he’s getting. It also helps the minister’s spokes dog. This is literally our social distancing meme.
Key technologies like the mesh network you mentioned, distributed ledgers, and so on, make sure that people can trust each other on their data without the capability of any party to overwrite, or to exploit, to tamper with the data for private purposes. I think a data ecosystem is very important. Once we have this ecosystem, we can prove to more people that it actually makes sense to do so.
People can ask for a copy of the data if they are either a Taiwanese national promising not to use it for encouraging foreign trade negotiation purposes or that you have a legitimate reason. For example, you get statistics in the aggregate and you can, of course, give a algorithm to a person or entity trusted with this data, which runs your code and published the results back to you.
Even more than that, we have professional fact checkers in the Taiwan FactCheck Center that looks at the trending disinformation as reported by this mechanism and do a real reporter fact-checking public audit to that by checking to the sources, and so on, and publishing the report. The TFC, or the Taiwan FactCheck Center, is entirely nonpartisan and only accepts small donations, and so it’s generally well trusted .
It’s not our philosophy to make…It’s not just about privacy. It’s also about people’s right to fiduciary control on who they trust to process their data. It is also about people’s way to form coalitions or data collaboratives that, together, pool around their data. All this disappears of the state posed itself as a single intermediary, as in the so-called “social credit” system.
Any fees that you have when you are here. For example, if you come to Mobile World Congress, because in Mobile World Congress, we will also do a summit of Digital Future Society. We still don’t know which day, but once we have all the information, if you are member of Mobile World Global board of trustees , you will receive an invitation and we will support all the expenses.
Our main values are: The idea of open government at the government side, to make the public servants trust people more; and social innovation on the society side to make civil society play a much more active role when it comes to public service. Instead of waiting for government to do something, the civil sector can pilot something and then prove to the government that this way actually can work.
On the other hand, of course, cybersecurity and safety is very important, which is why we use pretty much tried-and-true open source components, pol.is being the one exception. When we are using it, it is not yet open source. There is significant algorithm in it. We don’t necessarily have to trust their explanation to it. We have to do a lot of validations and so on.
So moving on to a more serious topic, not that the things we've been discussing aren't serious, but how might the events we're seeing right now, especially in the United States, playing out with big tech and tech oligarchs, damage people's inherent trust in technology that might limit some of the opportunities you've been describing. What do you think about that?
Okay. And as you know, Taiwan needs an AI ecosystem. You can see the talent cultivation, the technology, and the investments. And all of these are a part of the work of the Ministry of Digital Affairs, as well as the administration for digital industries. But underneath all of this is the AI innovation system so that we can establish standards and application guidelines to ensure that the AI is trustworthy .
So the adjacency is not by geographics, but rather by shared values and systems. And so the joint defense is very important. And so we’ve been adopting, as the US and other liberal democracies are adopting, the so-called zero trust architecture, meaning that instead of relying just on the firewall or just on passwords and so on, for each access, one needs to pass at least three different checks.
And this is exactly how we are doing our trustworthy and dialogue engine in the science ministry. We’re working with not just Mandarin, but also Taiyi and so on, so that people in different languages in Taiwan have a real say in how to model their language instead of forcing people to speak a majority language. And I think this methodology is quite applicable to the majority world as well.
If I understood you well, if you look for the side of the clients that read the newspaper, the readers, you can say these words that I can read it like this. What you read, it’s good being in business, the titles, the stories, but not to use the words, “fake news”. Be careful. Don’t believe in everything, trust yourself to think if there is something not so correct or…
Already in this trustless world, they develop ways to authenticate nevertheless with just digital signatures and some proof state or proof of work and so on. If you ask these people what are the ways to do computation in a way that doesn’t sacrifice privacy at all, because if just a little bit is on the blockchain, it’s on there forever, so they don’t accept this tolerable sacrifice.
When they feel they are in a, let’s say, a trusted space between partners, they can actually, and they quite often do share their case studies. Meaning, that they can share, “Look in our elections last year, this is what happened. This is what we did. This is what we did not do, because we don’t have the political support, for example, and this is how it ended up.”
I’m just on that note, my last question with regards to algorithms. You’re talking about using individuals with expertise, they’re working behind the scenes to help do this. There’s that behind the scenes operational side, I would imagine then, as the minister, you have to have a high level of trust to those who are working for you, because you’re giving them access to, so much.
