Of course, for someone who wants to use the word “transparency”, sometimes it means different things.

And also in Taiwan, the words are the same. The word for digital, 數位, also means plural — to work on plurality or pluralism, a collaborative diversity, is written with the same word as digitalization. So I’m also the plural minister.

So we have, for example, participatory budgeting; we have citizen’s assembly; we have the ideas of people participating online and offline in a hybrid way — all of this around the turn of the century. Working on digitalization and democracy, for me, is the same thing.

From the very beginning of Taiwanese democratization, the imagination is not just limited to the low bandwidth, high latency communication, namely to vote, like three bits uploaded every four years or every two years, but rather something that is more like a continuous democracy.

In Taiwan, democratization and the internet happen exactly at the same time. We had our first direct presidential election in 1996, and already all the campaigns were having bulletin board systems, world wide websites, and so on.

But there are also civic hackers who build new systems, not suffering from the same vulnerabilities without getting into the attack and defense of cybersecurity. So a hacker is anyone who thinks innovatively outside of the box.

It is true that there are cybersecurity hackers, like the white hat hackers, that discover the vulnerabilities, the issues with the system, and then notice the person running the system so as to stop the black hats, the bad people, from hacking into the system.

Well, a hacker is someone who thinks outside of the box. To deeply understand a system so as to fit the purpose of emerging requirements, not just the original requirements.

And the head of the school said: OK, from tomorrow on, you don’t have to go to my school anymore.

Then I just wrote emails to those researchers and start doing research because they didn’t know I was just 14 or 15 years old. So I told the head of the school that, you know, that the end goal is already being met by the way, and I don’t have ...

But I told the head of my school and my parents that there is already this new thing at the time, 1995, called the World Wide Web. People do publish on arxiv.org from Cornell University, the preprints, that’s to say, the drafts of their papers.

They, of course, were very interested in getting me into a good research lab, working with advanced researchers, the doctors and professors and so on.

I think this made computational thinking part of my thinking pattern, so I can face a problem and just distill it into modular parts, so as to interact with them one at a time.

So without having a personal computer, I started programming by writing with pencil on a piece of paper, typing the keyboard like CLS, enter, and then using an eraser to erase the output and then simulate what the computer will output.

Yeah, I still remember when I was eight, I was very interested in mathematics, but not that good at math, that’s to say to manually do the calculations. Then I encountered programming in the form of a programming book.

In a liberal democratic society, it should always be that a state initiates this trust.

Definitely. I think, for me, this is not about citizens trusting the government, but about the government trusting the citizens. Only when we trust the citizens can some of the citizens trust back with co-creation.

So all the meetings that I chair, the ministerial meetings of my ministry, as well as the lobbyists and the journalist visits, we publish as either a transcript or sometimes also as a video.

Yes, the idea, very simply put, is to share the why and how of policymaking, not just the what of policies.

Definitely. Because I’m not video conferencing but just doing the radio, we usually publish the transcript after 10 days of co-editing.

Great to meet you.

Thank you.

Yeah. And looking forward to more collaboration in the future.

All right. Thank you for visiting.

Yeah, definitely. Thank you for that.

Yeah, definitely. And I totally agree that this almost forced interoperability between firewall vendors or whatever vendors, that creates the space for open-source community. Because if it’s so tightly integrated that it has to be reverse engineered, no community members will even take a look at it. So, I think ...

There’s a hobbyist group here in Taiwan.

So, if there are similar small, mobile, and interoperable solutions, we’re always willing to add to our existing configurations of either satellite providers, public cloud providers, backup providers, and such.

Right. So basically, we want to work with a plurality of vendors, so we prefer a plurality of cheap and cheerful solutions over one full stack vendor that charges as much, but with one zero day maybe just goes away, right? So, we very intentionally make it such that multiple ...

It’s very expensive.

Okay, excellent.

Anything from our international strategist?

Excellent.

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 ...

And finally, the industrial resilience part. We didn’t cover the semiconductor supply chain, but they do have their own zero-trust architecture standard, the SEMI E187. That is a direct result of the WannaCry incident at TSMC. And so, they learned from that and produced a really top-notch cybersecurity awareness, toolkits, ...

So, there are many legislators that are very interested in any model that works overseas that empower the senior people, because they also want to contribute to be proper cyber hygiene practitioners and advocates. So, if you do have anything toward that general direction, whether it’s basic education, textbook curriculum, ...

And the second is this societal resilience to counter FIMI. And I mentioned a little bit about verifiable credentials, DIDs, and so on. But many of this is actually just proper cyber hygiene and awareness in the population to use multi-factor authentication, to keep backups, some very simple ones. And ...

So, not just 700 satellite receivers, not just the local resilience for the public cloud, not just the backups, virtualization of core networks, and so on. They’re all converging on the same time point. So, anything that you can contribute to accelerate out any of these arms, that will be ...

Yeah, I think you can be helpful in all three. Yeah, I mentioned at the very beginning, the communication resilience. And that is, basically, we’ve got the same deadline for all the communication resilience endeavors, that’s end of next year.

To be more closely integrated.

And at that point, maybe also interoperability with the eIDAS and other European blockchain and becoming a spiritual European in Taiwan. And there are precedents because Ukraine is not part of the EU yet, but they are working on fast tracks in such integrations. And so whatever Ukraine is going ...

Yeah, definitely. I think the EU, especially with their Digital Markets Act and the relevant acts, they are really pushing toward that direction. And mostly I think because otherwise there’s no GDPR compliant way to do scam fighting, right? So, they’re kind of forced by the GDPR philosophy to innovate ...

Yeah, also pseudonymous. Yes.

Yeah. So, we just passed a few months ago a new set of laws because of the increased biometric authentication and so on. There are scammers that are just trapping people into large places, sometimes overseas. So, it is actually a real crime, but at least there is a physical ...

And only by retaining the pseudonymity of the Internet would people, especially journalists and so on, civil society people, voluntarily switch. If this is all real name basis, I don’t think it will carry much weight in such digital transformation. But if we get the decentralized identifier and verifiable credentials ...

Exactly. And what we’re now working on is, again, with the EU, what they have is this idea of verifiable credentials, meaning that when you digitally sign something to prove you’re an EU resident or a Lithuanian EU resident, which I am, you can prove you’re of a legal age, ...

And then, of course, each ministry may bring their own four-digit, like one nine something or one eight something, to the mix. But what’s important is that just looking at a sender alone, you can’t tell a governmental communication, which is always three or four digits, versus a registered commercial ...

But for things that are more point-to-point, that is not broadcasting, and that may actually coordinate with cyber-attacks, phishing, scams, and things like that, we have a lot of purviews on this particular part. And this is not about takedowns or shutdowns or things like that, but rather about preventative ...

Yeah, so FIMI, foreign information manipulation and interference, which is a term we prefer to use, is an EU term. So, FIMI has two parts. One is the more like broadcasting part, the ones that you see the disinformation going viral and things like that. And so, for such broadcasting-related ...

Exactly. So, they still retain, of course, their domain knowledge, especially philosophy and communication are going to be very important for chat-based AI, but they are not afraid of applying what they have learned in the six months and to work on digital transformation in their main career.