Audrey Tang: …I think it’s good we have our cases under control again. Yesterday, there was no local cases. The virus situation is back in control.

Audrey Tang: Yes, we use a healthcare card, but the healthcare card use the same national ID number. Just to check my understanding, all the Japanese citizens have already this 12-digit number, whether they have a card or not? They already have a number, right?

Audrey Tang: It’s the same in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: I see.

Audrey Tang: Sorry, it’s just to check my understanding. The card is a plastic card. The app using NFC which means only newer iPhones, I guess, can use as a card reader and you can put the card to your phone in order to access the functions, but there’s no way to use your phone as the card and do without the card, like virtualizing the card.

Audrey Tang: OK. Not yet.

Audrey Tang: Congratulations. That sounds like a real improvement.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. The experience will be, the first time I’m a older person, I get a vaccine, I also learned about my number for the first time and I take the same number for my second dose. Is that the idea?

Audrey Tang: Excellent.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, it’s very similar to Japan. The first shipment is very limited and only goes to the medical workers and so on. Then the next shipment, including the one that we produce ourself, will be generally available around June. It’s in two quarters, the first quarter very limited, the second quarter generally available.

Audrey Tang: I just had a conversation yesterday with the Japan representative in Taiwan. Because I don’t want to bypass professional diplomats so I let them know that we will have this conversation. I also said that this is not about trade negotiation or anything like that. This is us sharing what happened to us every month and they understand that.

Audrey Tang: The Digital Ministry.

Audrey Tang: I am happy to.

Audrey Tang: Originally, I was tasked by the Premier to find a digital minister. I asked many people and they don’t want to do the job, because it’s the first time Taiwan has a digital minister. I shifted from the recruiter to the minister. I don’t know, maybe the same will happen to you. [laughs] We will see.

Audrey Tang: My hesitation was that, at that time, I’m a consultant for Apple and also Oxford University Press. Oxford is easier because it’s academic, but Apple is impossible in the law of Taiwan that I continue to work on computational linguistics on Siri while being a digital minister. This will be a massive conflict of interest.

Audrey Tang: I have to take one month, because I gave Apple one month’s notice, and also transfer all the work that I’m doing. At that time, I was doing the Shanghaiese, the Wu language version of Siri. [laughs] It’s something very unrelated to policymaking. Just computational linguistics, AI work. I had to transfer that to other parts of Apple before accepting.

Audrey Tang: I gave the cabinet one month so that I can gather more ideas. The truth is, I need one month to transfer my work in Apple to the teammates.

Audrey Tang: My salary is 30 percent or less compared to what I used to earn.

Audrey Tang: Many of my colleagues made the same decision because many people joined. For example, from IDEO Shanghai, from the Policy Lab UK, originally from the RCA, the Royal College of Art, and so on. My colleagues were many talented designers and programmers and they are all earning 30 percent of what they used to earn. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audrey Tang: I make it very public that I’m taking a pay cut so people would do the same joining me. I would also say, this is at a disadvantage. For example, one of my very talented colleagues eventually, after two years, gets hired by Taiwan Semiconductor, and Taiwan Semiconductor offer five times his salary. [laughs] He can only contribute that much because everyone has a career ladder.

Audrey Tang: I like to say even two years is like military service. [laughs] Two years, you can do a lot [laughs] to contribute to the country.

Audrey Tang: Yes. In Taiwan, it’s military drafting. We had a lot of alternate service people. They have health, family, or whatever reasons they cannot serve in the military, they can choose to go to my office to serve instead.

Audrey Tang: No. The alternate military service was one year and four months. Something like sixteen months. At the end of that service, we usually offer a full-time job. Once they finished the military service, if they want, they can then stay at the office and promoted to a full-time job.

Audrey Tang: To date, there’s only one person choosing to go to the office and they’re still working full-time, a very talented coder and director. Other military service people, after they work in my office, they get very high salary from Taiwan Semiconductor or from some other company. They get poached, is what I’m saying.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Audrey Tang: Yes. We are now proposing a act. I think it will enter the parliamentary floor by March. With any luck, our digital ministry might be established around the same time as yours. [laughs] In the design, the digital ministry of Taiwan has the arm about digitization infrastructure, which is a role currently played by the National Communications Commission.

Audrey Tang: That will be transferred into the digital ministry. That’s one part. The other part is about the application layer, data consultation, e-petition, regulatory preannouncement and reconciliation, and so on. That part would be transferred from the National Development Council also to the Digital Ministry. It has both the infrastructure as well as the application layer.

Audrey Tang: The Personal Data Protection Office, on the other hand, may stay independent. We will see.

Audrey Tang: It is. It is. It’s also very service oriented and very agile. Anyone who is working on a large system with a service edge, that is to say, nowadays they call user-generated content. With UGCs, I think is a good fit because the digital services nowadays need to work with many private sector and social sector delivery mechanisms.

Audrey Tang: We do the core of the service, but actually the application, the interface, and so on, may be crowd-sourced, may be done by third parties and so on. In gaming industry, they call them mod, modifications, mods.

Audrey Tang: Any game community like the id Software like Doom, Quake, they are both a company for the core engine, for the initial content and downloadable content, also for fostering the modification community. Anyone working with that ecosystem I think is a good fit. It’s most closely resemble digital service in government.

Audrey Tang: Not at the moment. Our Privacy Act takes a blacklist approach. That is to say, unless we blacklist certain brands as detrimental to national security. Otherwise, other brands and other localizations can compute on their own facility outside of the boarder without having to compute within the boarder.

Audrey Tang: For very private data, we would need then to use homomorphic encryption, which is a new mathematical device, so that we can decouple privacy with computation. I can send an encrypted text for Amazon to calculate, but Amazon do not have access to the raw data. They compute, they send the result back, I decrypt.

Audrey Tang: That’s decoupling of the privacy and the computation. It’s called homomorphic encryption.

Audrey Tang: Yes, we do. Usually helping the small and medium enterprises, if they choose cloud services, we can give them subsidies up to 50 percent or something. For the national computation, we usually use the National Center for high-speed computation.

Audrey Tang: There is no law forbidding individual government agencies to also use the AWS, Azure, or whatever public cloud, provided that they use the appropriate cyber security and privacy-enhancing technologies.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think so. We use the same API standard. That’s the Linux Foundation OpenAPI version 3. All the digital service, no matter where they run, use the same open API standard. For open source and source control, we use the Linux Foundation SPDX standard. For deployment, we usually use the microservice, the Docker container format.

Audrey Tang: Whether it’s Kubernetes on the National Center for High-speed Computation, Azure or any other cloud provider, it’s the same deployments. It’s easier to do high availability using microservice anyway. Even our equivalent to my number card, the Citizen Digital Certificates, the driver on the personal computer is also a Docker container, is also a microservice.

Audrey Tang: It makes inspecting the source code and so on much easier.

Audrey Tang: I know. Some of them may be running DB2. Some of them may be running dBase III, maybe. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: What I’m saying is that through the use of open API, we charged each contractor using our procurement rule, saying that there’s a law in Taiwan that says, “If you do a government service, and it only works for people with sight but not people with blindness, then you may be disqualified as a vendor for discriminating against people with blindness.”

Audrey Tang: We changed or amended that rule. When I become digital minister, I changed our rules saying, if you make a human oriented, citizen facing Digital Service, but do not provide API in JSON, in open API formats, then you are discriminating against robot, and you can also be disqualified.

Audrey Tang: The upshot is that they can still use their legacy system, but they have to provide a compatibility layer for all the human input and output. They need to provide open API so that the persons doing new interfaces can interface with the machine readable and writable interface without worrying about database level access because that’s very hard.

Audrey Tang: With stored procedures and so on, it’s impossible. If all the human-facing part have API’s, then that makes it easier. Also, it’s better from a cybersecurity perspective, because you only have to defend the endpoints, not the database.

Audrey Tang: When I started to work, they are owned and operated by all the different agencies, not at the ministry level. One example, the Ministry of Interior, for example, have the agency for household registration, have the agency for military service, have the agency for immigration agency for police, and so on, many different agencies.

Audrey Tang: Under my term, I made sure that all those different agency-operated data centers must be uploaded to the ministry level data center. In Taiwan, each ministry can have their own data center, their data protection mechanism and so on, but only at the ministry level. The individual agencies are not allowed anymore to operate their own database.

Audrey Tang: They have to transfer the data using as simple as VMware maybe, but preferably using microservices and so on, on the data center owned by the Ministry. It’s easier to defend in cybersecurity and also easier to allocate the resources.

Audrey Tang: Yes, they need to conform to schema.gov.tw and of course, data.gov.tw for both the license and the data schema.

Audrey Tang: The cybersecurity reason is the most motivating reason, because individual agencies, they get cybersecurity attacks all the time. They don’t want to defend all by themselves. That’s the main incentive. This strategy was set up around 2014, when I was still just a consultant to the cabinet project, and is put into action on 2015. By last year, we’ve done most of it. It took four years, five years.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audrey Tang: Four years.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Before I serve in a cabinet, I was a project consultant to the minister, actually in this office too [laughs] , Minister Jaclyn Tsai. She was also responsible for what they call the cyber regulatory reform. I was a consultant for the consultation part of that. I worked maybe one-fifth of my time in the project during ‘14 to early ‘16, so, six years in total.

Audrey Tang: Congratulations.

Audrey Tang: That’s great. I’ve read the Eindhoven test bed materials. I think this is very exciting. It’s not just for the science, but also it enhance people’s general understanding on the importance of key distribution, end-to-end encryption and things like that. It also has great pedagogical value.

Audrey Tang: Before we formed the Digital Ministry Act, at the moment, it is in the Board of Science and Technology. I attend the meeting every Thursday, also. I’ve brought your ideas there. Last call, I mentioned some people, both in the civil society now, Nicole Chan of APNIC, the people within the Board of Science and Technology.

Audrey Tang: If you personally are interesting, or you have a team who are interested in explore that, we can set up another bi-weekly or a monthly call for that topic.

Audrey Tang: I understand.

Audrey Tang: The network I’m saying is the TWAREN, the Taiwan Advanced Research and Education Network. It interconnects with the tower academic network, of course, which is for the education facilities. I think TWAREN is responsible for many of the more advanced researches like gigapops, and up to 9000 gigabits per second on future demands, software-defined network and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Although they don’t report to me, they report to the Minister of Science and Technology, we’re on very good relationship. I’m happy to introduce the TWAREN people to you or to your team for this kind of academic research oriented dialogue.

Audrey Tang: I think they’ll be very interested. They currently has the Chicago Starlights, the Equinix Pwave. As far as I understand, there’s no dedicated research link to Japan. I’m pretty sure they’d still be interested in having a conversation around this.

Audrey Tang: Of course, yes. We’re also interested – I’m pasting you a link – in the very social innovation-oriented data innovation-oriented agreement, like Australia and Singapore, they just signed one last December.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Looking forward to the next conversation.

Audrey Tang: The two secretaries will arrange.

Audrey Tang: Bye.

Jun Murai: Bye-bye. Take care.