Ukraine is the world leader in digital services, Taiwan takes you as example - Minister Audrey Tang

Thank you for this opportunity to talk to you and thank you for supporting Ukraine, we really appreciate it. Audrey, tell us about Taiwan’s experience expanding services for citizens through digital technology. Which other countries are leading the way?

Of course Ukraine with the DIIA app is a model for the world. Housism participation in addition to service delivery  through the mobile phone can enable all the citizens and also residents to contribute. In Taiwan we have the same - universal healthcare, the national Health Express app counts more that 10 mln of people doing different medical procedures, including vaccination under app, so that we are able to counter the pandemic for the past three years without a single day of lockdowns. And the experience of even filing a tax via app by contributors from civic technology, by community so that we can co-create better services. Every year we run the presidential hackathon with more than 200 teams from domestic and abroad co-creating better services, and the five winners every year get presidential commitment to turn their small-scale experiment, small apps like Telemedicine, etc. into national scale deployments within the next fiscal year, with all the budget personnel and regulator support.

You mentioned our Diia App (meaning action in Ukrainian). How can you rate it? Have you seen this App, tell us about your first impression. 

We paid very close attention not just to Diia, but before it there was Prozoro - an open procurement platform for anti corruption, better participation and international communities, because around 2014 we were pushing this in agenda in Taiwan - procurement, contranting and so on. We joined each other’s forces under open government partnership sharing the toolkits, including the hackathon - not Presidential hackathon, in Paris, in the presidential office. All the connections are people to people ties, civic technology communities together. So when Diia offered an easier to deliver form of such services, we were very excited.

Thank you. What lessons is Taiwan learning from Ukraine in combating cyberattacks and disarming disinformation?

I remember when the Kyiv situation happened, the start of the brutal war from the Russian side, I stayed up all night checking not just Twitter but also The Kyiv Independent with many journalists on the ground doing the reporting. Imagine if there was no internet connection in Kyiv at that time. People would still have that appetite for the information, but all they would see would be probably deep fakes propaganda from Russia and things like that. So the #1 lesson we learnt is that we must provide broadband communication through whichever means to order journalists, including civic ones. That is why we invested more than EUR 15 mln over the next couple of years into stationary orbit satellite receivers. We will build more than 700 such receivers - both fixed and mobile, like we have seen in Ukraine, so that they can power themselves maybe through solar panels and receive satellite internet and then relay the communications through 5G towers to the nearby towns and journalists, exactly like we have seen in Ukraine.

What are the key factors driving the development of information and digital technology in Taiwan?

Two things. One is broadband as a human right. No matter how remote you are, from very rural areas, remote islands, even the tip of Taiwan - the Jade Mountain, almost 4,000 m high, you can still live stream, you can still enjoy broadband internet for 15 EUR a month with limited data. So this is a human right. The other is called digital competence. All our school children - junior high school, senior high school - they learn about not just media literacy, which is when you read, but also competence, when you write and produce. So they participate in measuring air quality to debunk rumors about air pollution, to find our actual pollutants, to fact check their presidential candidates as they were having their debate leading to the 2020 Presidential Elections. And if students found a typo, an error or something that is not factual, their name may appear on the broadcast. Working to world, collaborative fact checking or co-facts are an important civil society endeavor that many other jurisdictions are now also learning from Taiwan because our code is an open source public code.

And I would like to ask you about Taiwan’s experience in protecting personal data and digital services.

No one is an island, not even Taiwan. And to defend against cyberattacks, we work with the International Community. Anyone in Ukraine or elsewhere in the world can donate some of their harddrive storage to pan our website, to defend against the denial of service attacks, as in the early August there were 23 times more attacks than during the previous peak. And also we manufacture through a TSMC and the supply chain chips for the advanced encryption so that people can compute, train AI and so on for the public good when they are actually looking into any of the private data. This requests very advanced chip making capability that we are happy to share with our democratic allies.

Russia's brutal war of aggression against Ukraine has garnered global headlines. How would you describe the local media’s coverage?

I think all the local media, regardless of their partisan affiliations, consider Ukraine and Taiwan very closely bonded. We are on the frontline facing territorial brutal expansionism. And when, for example, a young soldier from Taiwan joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces to defend, it was widely covered in Taiwan, and everyone felt the need to pay more attention to what actually is happening in Ukraine, because as I mentioned, we share the same situation. Since the very beginning, when the core sanctions on TSMC chips against Russia started, I think everyone in Taiwan understood that this is not about market access, nor about earning GDP, etc. This is about , as I said, the advanced microchips are used not just for size or public good, but also for cryptanalysis, attacking on the cyber front. Denying access to the most advanced chips is essential in defending democracy. So I believe this is the angle that most of the Taiwanese media are viewing this conflict.

You mentioned Jonathan Tseng, a soldier who fought in the Ukrainian war, and he is a hero for us, Ukrainians. We really appreciate it. And my last question - in what areas can Taiwan help Ukraine?

During the recovery and rebuild processes Taiwan has extensive experience because we suffered around the turn of the century a huge earthquake. We also participated in the relief and rebuilding efforts following the even larger earthquake in Japan. So in many ways digital can connect people who are in different time zones to gather as if we are in the same room. That is called co-presence. Through these skills we were able to provide high quality education, health services, public services to even our most remote islands despite the physical disconnect. I think in a digital world, vicinity is measured not by the kilometers on a map, but rather by the shared values we all cherish. So as a fellow signatory to the Declaration for the Future of the Internet (The DFI), when I signed it on a video conference, there was Minister Fedorov in the rectangle next to mine. We sign the same declarations protecting human rights and resilience of the Internet. And it is through the Internet that MODA (The Ministry of Digital Affairs) can deliver the kind of services that we already enjoy here in Taiwan. We have experience following a recovery and we are standing ready to help.

Audrey Tang

Digital Minister of Taiwan and software developer, who was described as one of the "ten greatest Taiwanese computing personalities" and became the first minister - transgender in Taiwan.

As a child, Audrey was considered a prodigy, read classical literature at the age of five, studied advanced mathematics at six and started programming at eight. At the age of 14, Audrey dropped out of school and started to study independently. Two years later she launched her own software company. Worked in Silicon Valley, CA. Performed as a consultant at Apple. 

Her political career started in 2014, in the midst of the student protests against Taiwan's convergence with China. Later she started developing a media literacy education program for Taiwanese schools. In 2016 she became Taiwan’s youngest minister. 

As a digital minister, each day she fights cyberattacks and disinformation, which are part of the Chinese hybrid war against the autonomy and democracy of Taiwan.