Now, it’s actually how do we have a QR code that we can scan and therefore have a secure relationship over a digital interface such as this one we’re doing now. Very interesting to hear about the QR codes, Might be interesting for some of our startups and SMEs, that also may be looking at ways to authenticate. Thank you for that. On zero civic trust , at the moment, what does that mean for you?
This is the thing that we’re building in, into the basic education. We think that it is much easier if the kids are raised not blindly trusting anyone with an authority’s voice or authority’s print, because those things are very easy to fake nowadays. Growing up, checking their own balance, and have a very nuanced view on news, on media, and so on, then it makes much harder for disinformation or propaganda to spread.
“Achieve” is a progressive framing. I identify as a Taoist, or conservative anarchist. Conservative means we conserve the interplay between cultures—the pluralistic now—resisting homogenization or polarization into binaries. Anarchist means voluntary association, non‑coercion, shifting from vertical control to horizontal coordination and trust . I wouldn’t say I achieved anything; I would say we conserved a transcultural republic of citizens—my translation of Zhonghua Minguo (中華民國).
Now, the idea of international digital democracy dialogue is based on the three different resilience. We have the emergency resilience, which is about responding effectively to various crises, such as cyber-attacks and natural disasters. So, to counter emerging threats, including the interactive deepfakes interfering with democratic processes now, we’re consolidating the public and private cybersecurity capabilities. The N-CERT and the TWCERT/CC are merging into a very quick response team that implements zero- trust principles.
And so that really fascinated me and how the researchers, as I mentioned, are willing to share, even before they publish to the journalists, their ideas with completely random people they met across the internet. So, I made it my research focus to focus on what makes the swift trust and also distrust. Like, we can very quickly hate people, unfriend people across the internet too, much faster than if we have to meet face-to-face, right?
So by saying, “No, it’s the other way around,” we publish non-privacy-related data upon collection. It means that even before I have a chance to censor or redact anything, I actually receive the data the same second as any citizen or any person on the planet received the data. It’s in the commons, so to speak. So that’s maximal trust . It says, “I’m OK for people to point out the data bias.”
Yeah, we could. We could. There’s plenty of material. Joe has it all. There was an early September meeting called “Digital Democracy – What Europe Can Learn From Taiwan,” which is on YouTube and also a transcript hosted by Dominik Hierlemann. Also, there’s, of course, Taiwan’s own counter-disinformation playbook. It’s in English. I can also get Joe a copy. I wrote a blog about trusting the citizens for both the infodemic and the epidemic.
It’s not a government idea. It’s a civic technologist in Hainan inventing this way of people reporting where has masks and where does not. We ensure that we trust the citizens radically with an open API so that after a couple of days of Howard Wu, Wu Chang-Wei inventing this technology, we made sure that we supply him and everybody else, more than 100 teams developing the availability mask map, with the real-time data.
And the next topic is about alignment assembly. We are dedicated to promoting trustworthy AI. Last year, we became a partner in the international non-governmental organization called Collective Intelligence Project (CIP) to collaborate with global organizations in providing the public with more convenient and reliable AI system. Additionally, in the period from August to September of last year, we organized deliberative workshops on AI future democratization to intelligent public participation and discussion on the direction of AI development.
Anyway, so, I think now with that as a template and with this March as another failed attempt, on the foreign part, now I think we know much more about how they think now in a coordinated fashion. Again, the main idea is for them to decimate trust in democratic institutions, but it is no longer about a very quick win, so to speak, but rather something more like nudging, more like a long-term atrophy of democratic agency.
Excellent advice. In fact, that chimes very much with one of the other people that I interviewed about this topic. How can people find out, for example, a disclosure policy? Do you have templates that are out there that the people could take a look at? If a White Hat finds a bunk in a piece of code, how do they communicate them? How do you build this trust and bridge between small businesses and the White Hat community?
When you were going to go for the values, I don’t read Chinese or anything, but I do know, because I have been to China. I have a couple of Chinese friends. I have some sense of the value of harmony in Chinese culture. I was very unsurprised that you picked trust . I didn’t know what it was going to be, but I had an internal bet that it was somehow going to be related to harmony.
…The before part, which is helped by… There’s a slide that talks about the SMS, the trusted SMS number, right? The 111. This is a new invention this year that lets us send out random SMS messages to random people and to hundred thousand at this time. And it went to 170,000 numbers successfully. And so, when people are filling the survey attached in the SMS, first they know it comes from the government. They can trust it and also we have a much wider sampling than traditional like rolling wave or things like…
Because one of the big, like where this kind of segues into social capital theory for us, is that, you know, you see the bonds of trust crumbling all over the place, except in very small groups in this country. So family groups, community groups, those. And that, you know, that for me feels like a source of hope, but also a source… like, to not be kind of starry-eyed about that, because it’s also about atomized communities.
However, because across the screen, you cannot abduct me anyway, right? So, the harm is limited across the screen. And because of that, people come to trust the people they just met across the screen and talk about the most intimate and personal things because they know that it’s harder across the screen for them to hurt each other. Of course, that was before the social media and cyberbullying and broadband. I was talking about the early internet, right?
The end goal is that, whereas we see anything CMMC compatible or NIST-approved as fit for integrating to the Taiwanese zero- trust posture, we want the reverse as well. And we do have our own certification capability. And I think that will massively increase the investment from the private sector, especially the semiconductor tool chain, to cybersecurity. And it will also make the de facto standard established by US and US DOD something that’s more international as well.
As a digital minister, my workspace is totally, radically transparent. All the meetings that I chair, the full transcript can be found on the Internet; it’s entirely published. By radically trusting people and making the state – and how the state works – transparent to the people, everybody can understand not only the why of policies, but also the why of policymaking: the context of policymaking. This is as opposed to other jurisdictions which make the citizen transparent to the state.
I think that is also that many people felt as well. For example, Ethan Tu, when he returned to Taiwan from Microsoft, as director of Cortana and speech technology, he’s basically running a charity here. He’s running a foundation called AILabs that work with the local AI people, and try to find out how AI improve the society, in trustworthy way. Again, I am sure that he took a huge pay cut, compared with his work in Microsoft.
It took two years for me to be generally trusted by the senior career public service. And after I become the minister in 2016, we elevated that system to a cabinet level Youth Advisory Council. So now we have like 30 or so reverse mentors as a institution, chaired by the premier, and co-chaired, I think, by Minister Lin Wan-yi now, basically they work with all 14 or so ministries, each nominating one or two young people under 35.
