Audrey Tang: Welcome. When I first entered the governments as a minister at-large in 2016, one of my first projects was on emergency response with the EMIC and NCDR system which formed the backbone of the Civil IoT system. And I thank Microsoft for helping popularize these ideas.

Audrey Tang: We were just having a conversation before this meeting, with Dr. Herming Chieuh and we talked about red team assessments. While other governments and companies have to pay people for such service, we get such service for free, like from actual red teams. This is one of the areas that we are very concerned about and really this is a pan-partisan issue. All the four major parties in our Parliament, this is maybe their number one focus when they inquire our ministry.

Audrey Tang: Now, cybersecurity is usually about confidentiality and integrity, but maximum availability through multiple channels is becoming very important now.

Herming Chiueh: Yeah, actually they do have a press conference in NDC this afternoon. I got many posts, asking why I was not there.

Herming Chiueh: It’s from another project we have worked on, introduced few minutes ago. There’s a joint project to ensure capability of Taiwanese company and Microsoft working together and connecting to the video link.

Herming Chiueh: So we are very interested in this kind of solution, especially you also mention the possibility to compute computation in the space.

Herming Chiueh: That’s a very new idea. Especially now, we are very interested about what kind of a computation can be implemented in a few years.

Herming Chiueh: We have learned that there’s an Azure Space in the Microsoft. There are also related programs with United States government. So we are very interested about the content. Considering that we are doing the recording, you can edit your remarks afterwards.

Audrey Tang: We will use speech-to-text through Azure Cognitive Services. I trust that you trust Azure?

Audrey Tang: So the double key encryption is over there, yeah, and I’m quite familiar actually with confidential computing, general-purpose confidential virtual machines and containers…

Audrey Tang: This is applied to… like arbitrary container code that I run in Azure?

Audrey Tang: Or you just the data kept in your applications such as OneDrive?

Audrey Tang: It is general-purpose then?

Audrey Tang: Because you know, around the world we have seen many jurisdictions that have this data residency or localization requirements. Not just the infrastructure, but also on who operates those infrastructures.

Audrey Tang: Do you have any success in approaching other jurisdictions on this “cloud for sovereignty” approach?

Audrey Tang: But what’s the goal here? Do you want to say it’s as good as data localization?

Audrey Tang: For the record, I use Linux as my main work environment.

Audrey Tang: Yes, we have studied the works of the Дія team.

Audrey Tang: The moda, our ministry, is something of a ministry-sized sandbox, so we try new things here first. For example, we asked specifically for Entra’s decentralized-identifier capability, and Microsoft Taiwan said nobody ever asked for that capability before.

Audrey Tang: We’re quite interested at that use case. Our CIO Dr. Chiueh helped us to transition to a passwordless, always-verify, assume-breach architecture, which means on all levels of services configuration, I can use Linux 100% of the time collaborating with other colleagues. I think all of this is part of our demonstration of a public code approach, so that all ministries who may be considering zero trust architecture can see the value in that.

Audrey Tang: This is also true for example this kind of non geostationary orbit satellites. The POCs don’t require commercial licenses to run because they are well bound as a pilot project. I think trustworthy, confidential computing will be key.

鄭明宗: On the other hand, where were we also concerned about the Azure space how to maintain this network setup. For example, if the project runs for two years. But two years in the POC, It sees about 2023-2024 and then how to maintain that?

王誠明: Actually my question is not about the service. Today I see some information, since the SpaceX launched, they announced they were launched 12000 satellites. And the other countries also want to launch their satellites. I wonder if if you will launch your Microsoft satellites?

Audrey Tang: I see. I will be more free to travel in the new year…

Audrey Tang: We are in the parliamentary budget session now.

Audrey Tang: Working level is easier, right? They can travel now, return by October 13th and skip the quarantine.

Audrey Tang: Awesome. Anything else?

Audrey Tang: Let’s free the future.

Audrey Tang: Appreciated.