Yeah, no, that’s not it. They also introduced that you can use Trojan horses, GovWare, state malware, let us say, to bug computer and stuff… so they can do also that.

But concerning the law, in Switzerland, there was a reform of the Secret Service Law. They introduced instruments of mass surveillance concretely. Concretely, they introduced selector searches…

You mean the animals are coming around Taiwan now?

[laughs] I mean, “cut the cables” would be to destroy availability.

They are searching around Taiwan if there are people trying to…

And what about the undersea cables? Did you analyze if they are perhaps…?

Or, a little bit like in Switzerland, where they… have military or some surveillance posts… or something in Taiwan around…

We think it is not very realistic to compare that with something like e-voting, where you have centralized attack vectors…

That is the thing we have there, and otherwise, it is just a mess. Switzerland is a mess. It has a reputation as a stable and great democracy, and people vote four times a year on a federal level and stuff like that, but there are no real standards, not ...

If that is the case, if the difference is too big – of course, you need to define which difference is allowed – then you need to recount everything by hand. I think like that, it is more or less acceptable, but you can only do that in big cities, ...

Yeah, well, there was lots of criticism that this stuff is all proprietary and that it is not well-done, but what the government is now enforcing, at least, is that you make a statistical control. If you have enough people who voted, you can, of course, like count… let us ...

Yeah, of course. What also exists in Switzerland in several cities, like Bern or St. Gallen, is that they use e-counting. That means they just count paper with OCR scanning or so.

You live-stream all the people like counting that by hand?

You even do that on a…

I think we also need a digitalization Greta Thunberg, like seriously. It cannot be that [these] things happen. Entire projects of the Swiss Confederation for example… just break down… e-voting was running for 20 years, and now, it is dead. They are trying to revive it.

So if governments, at least some parts of it, start to realize that we are lie doomed, in a way… at least, in the long run… or already now, in certain cases…

…They even wrote in a half-year report – I think, last year – that the hardware is basically broken which we use. We should like create everything ourselves, or we just need to recreate. So, this is the question here.

And especially in the last two years, with all these Intel issues coming up with names like Meltdown and whatever… [laughs]

What about cyber defense institutions in Taiwan? Because in Switzerland, there is, for example, MELANI. That is… in German… for “Meldestelle für Analyse” and whatever “Sicherung”… so “Informationssicherung”. That just means they are observing what is going on with malware. And also, if there is an advanced attack – an ...

Perhaps you can also help…

Yeah, but you did it not that good, to be honest. You need someone who is really able to run a campaign in the right way, and then you might find people from there.

Yeah, and SCO Linux who started to to sue other people, because they wanted to introduce communism, or whatever. [laughs]

Yet… yeah.

Perhaps we can change that, if federal governments…

Yes, probably we need a similar thing also for the very basis of our ICT infrastructure. We just say that we require that critical infrastructures are built upon, let us say… open components as most [much] as possible. Then the industry perhaps starts to provide such things.

I think the problem here is incentives. You know that GDPR thing of Europe, where they are now incentivizing to create privacy-preserving technologies? Probably, we need a similar thing.

In the meantime, coming back to the that voting thing, how do people of Taiwan, if they live abroad, vote? That is always one of the main…

What is the name of that professor who supported you? He is from Taiwan.

It would be collaborative, anyway.

Too much information. [laughs]

RISC-V?

They are producing here?

Taiwan used to produce…

Or Taiwan.

In the transcript… I will make sure that we can write it correctly.

Oh, “pastéis de nata”?

What?

Personally, I think Shenzhen is just… I mean, if you say, “We are producing libre hardware,” in the first place… I would have a trust issue already. So, the question is, how can Taiwan help? Can Taiwan help? [laughs]

You can say it. You are not in Mainland China.

You mean the protests?

Really? OK, cool.

Do you want to talk a little bit about Libre…Silicon?

OK.

OK, because Switzerland failed there. There was a WikiLeaks revelation where it was written that certain biometric readers, they have for biometric passports, were like subverted by the CIA. Then the government even confirmed it in parliament, and there was a left-wing politician, Balthasar Glättli, asking that… if that is ...

And technically, I mean, the components are also ensured that they are not from the US or from PRC?

So, also here you see such things everywhere. Switzerland, of course, does it everywhere. Not to start about Mainland China…

…nowadays, that is also a discussion point we might enter into – it is turned around. The people are fully transparent. Even here, we have everywhere… like cameras everywhere. We have to give our fingerprints when we enter the country.

That is nice, because that is something which the CCC is saying since the 1980s: the government must be transparent, and the people need to have privacy…

You also have this idea to make the government machine-readable?

No, you can do it now. That is the point. We think that – and we are also saying that in public all the time – we need public money, public code. That is like from the Free Software Foundation in Europe, that is like I think what they said. ...