There is a core network of people who send people to my office and a periphery network in each of hundred people now working toward digital transformation.

A digital minister’s work is actually to coordinate across all ministries toward digital transformation. I don’t have a ministry. My office is one person dispatched from each ministry. At most, I can have 32 colleagues. At the moment, I have 22. In each team, also in each ministry also has ...

Actually, this is a new post in Taiwan as well. I’m the first digital minister. My job description is on my Twitter. You can easily see that job description. You probably have already seen that, so I would not read it aloud again. It is a form of a prayer.

Sure, of course. Yeah.

So thank you for the commons as well.

Yes, the same. I’ve always been a creative commoner as well. I participated in the first translations of the Creative Commons. Ever since the introduction of Creative Commons Zero, that is their public domain universal, I’ve been adopting it for all my software work.

May glory make us strong.

Freedom and liberty belong to your heart. May glory make us strong.

Darkness breaks apart. Express your dreams and sing our song.

Darkness breaks apart…

“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget the perfect offering. There’s a crack, a crack in everything, but that’s how the light gets in.”

I’ll just repeat my closing remarks, and so you can send a copy of that video for me.

Taiwan being at least rising for four million years now, is older than humankind, and so it will continue to exist along with our beautiful biodiversity. 10 percent of marine biodiversity on the Earth is around the seas around Taiwan. Our job as Homo sapiens is to protect this plurality ...

Taiwan’s future is growing upwards, toward the sky. Our highest mountain, the Jade Mountain, is almost 4,000 meters now, and it’s growing 5 centimeters every year, so we just keep rising up toward the sky.

We can see that when it’s an authoritarian system on one side and a democratic system on the other side, the delineation between the two inevitably cause conflicts in cases not just jurisdictional, but also in cyberspace where they overlap with no clear territorial boundaries.

I think none of the Taiwan presidential candidates have anything to even consider that so‑called “one country, two system” policy now.

Sorry. Please, repeat.

…and we’re on the record.

We’re one country with many parties, but that has nothing to do with parties… More like “one country, no parties?”

Sorry, that’s not even true. It’s “one country, two systems.”

What?

The Hong Kong protesters have perfected that art of “being water,” turning leaderless movements into an art that I very much admire.

We didn’t do completely leaderless movement back then. We have around 20 NGOs or so coordinating different aspects of the movement, but the demonstration was not just a protest. It’s a demo of how it could work in a leaderless environment.

Since the MPs were on the strike, so to speak, so people took their seats and begin their work, which is to deliberate the CSSTA, very much in a way that are leaderless.

Personally, only five years ago, I was in our parliament, and not by invitation. We occupied it, and so that’s called the Sunflower Movement of 2014. That was because, at that time, the government was rushing through the Cross‑Strait Service and Trade Agreement, or CSSTA, a deal with Beijing that ...

Every other country facing disinformation crisis have taken some actions that concentrates power somewhat back into the state, but only in Taiwan, we countered disinformation by making the state transparent completely to the people. Every other jurisdiction is being tempted around making their citizens more transparent to the state, but ...

Taiwan is the only jurisdiction, in our region within the Indo‑Pacific, that currently, as evaluated by the CIVICUS Monitor as absolutely open when it comes to the freedom of assembly, the freedom of speech, the freedom of press, and things like that.

Rather, everybody who are constituents, who are fighting for something, for a social cause, environmental cause and so on, should all be at the table and make policies together. This kind of norm first architecture approach is exactly embodied in the forming of the Oslo Freedom Forum.

We’re promoting this idea of co-gov, as called by the UN — Digital Interdependence — that means that around things around digital, it’s not just the technologists making the decision, nor are the lawyers making all the decisions.

I am a hacktivist myself. [laughs] I’m working with the government now, not for the government. For me, my office is already a intersection of all those roles.

I’m here to deliver the opening remark, to share with the world that Taiwan has built a way to counter disinformation, to make sure that everybody have digital broadband access by relying and indeed trusting more on the social sector, rather than concentrating power on the public or the private ...

Hello, I’m Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of social innovation and open government.

Thank you.

OK. Thank you.

I am really happy to help as a technologist, as a spam war veteran.

If you do have any pressing questions, feel free to ask now, and/or email me later.

We are at time.

So did Chairman Terry Gou, and then, of course, Dr. Tsai, and also, Mayor Ko. No one is endorsing even the possibility of putting one country, two system on the table now. That’s gone from the political narrative. That’s the most significant impact.

That was the party line of the KMT before 2013. Now, after Hong Kong, I think Mayor Han says that one country, two system, “You have to step over my dead body.” [laughs]

Sure. The immediate impact is that none of the presidential candidates or hopefuls are saying, “One country, two systems,” anymore. It used to be that, when it was 2013, it’s that, “We respect that it’s their position, and we might want to talk about it sometime in the future, but ...

It’s just politically, they have never used it for PRC originated activities, so they can publish the raw data. As far as I understand, Facebook and ex Google+ did not have that policy. Therefore, they are still rethinking how they should work.

They have a policy that specifically says, if you are a coordinated fake, spamming activity that bans from your jurisdiction, but is spreading in another jurisdiction, and you have evasion tactics, then it’s as bad as a traditional cyber security operation. Therefore, is not protected by our privacy terms of ...

Yeah. Just let me, yes. The thing with this is that, so here. All the accounts, as Twitter is blocked, some accounts did not actually require a VPN. They have a policy called platform manipulation that specifically says…This is the raw data of the Taiwan tweets.

Is still considering that.

Mm hmm.

Facebook, after being notified by Twitter, they did not publish the raw data, only the statistics. That’s still something, because that actually will get them into a lot of trouble with the Great Firewall’s maintainers. Google also followed up a few days after. We’re witnessing a different cyber norm now.

When a political event comes like Hong Kong, they suddenly start spreading disinformation to their fans. Twitter, to their credit, before taking all of this down, published the raw material, instead of their previous tweets, and also, I think, IP addresses, and everything. This is a different cyber norm. They ...

Facebook also did their part. They, thanks to the prong by Twitter, I think, published for the first time that there a specific bloc of IP addresses coming in from the PRC territories that does not need special VPNs to have direct access to the social media. They all look ...

Facebook, frankly speaking, at that time, privileged the outrage messages pertaining to referendums that dominate the discussion over the mayoral candidates’ platforms. I think that’s just a fact. We did our part, so it’s now on alternating years. It’s presidential election, referendum, mayoral election, referendum. Representation, deliberation, representation, deliberation, right? ...

Confusing, and frankly speaking, non deliberative environment. They work in a way that, for the referendum, we adopted a Switzerland like model. The Swiss model requires a year long deliberation. If the referendum day is the same day as election day, all that deliberation over the past 12 months may ...