Kathrin Erdmann: First of all, the United States and other Western countries are increasingly alarmed over industrial espionage, technology theft and control over key technologies by China. Do you share such concerns?

Audrey Tang: We are in the frontline — we’ve been sharing such concerns for decades now.

Audrey Tang: We are glad that the Western countries are joining us in this concern.

Kathrin Erdmann: Our Chancellor came to Japan last week. She was talking about China and emphasized that we need to protect ourselves from China.

Kathrin Erdmann: You are just next to China. Everybody knows there are high tensions between China and Taiwan. Can you give me an example how China perhaps tries to come into your Internet?

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t work like that though... I won’t get technical, but I will try to explain this on a different focus.

Audrey Tang: What we have witnessed is that a concerted effort to sow discord in our democratic process by the way of organized disinformation, by the way of spreading rumors, by the way of advocating to the global society something that is simply not true. I will use one example.

Audrey Tang: For example, when Taiwan petitioned to join the World Health Organization’s annual meeting, there was a concerted effort online, in public forums, that says, "Taiwan is already represented by the PRC. The PRC has been very diligent in communicating the WHO related information to Taiwan. The international community need not worry." That is patently false.

Audrey Tang: However, we do see a concerted effort in spreading such information — or disinformation — online so that people would believe that Taiwan doesn’t need as much participation as we do actually need. This is not, strictly speaking, a cyber attack. Rather, it is a sowing of discord through disinformation.

Kathrin Erdmann: Next year, you will have a presidential election. How do you think you could protect your country from outside influencing?

Audrey Tang: What we have witnessed is that for campaign donations, for example, it’s already restricted to the nationals. Of course, foreign people cannot donate to political campaigns, but we have observed in the previous election that there is a loophole, in the sense that people can purchase advertisements on social media and on other media forms. That could be bought by foreign money.

Audrey Tang: We saw a lot of foreign interest to, for example, instead of donating a specific candidate, to fund disinformation campaigns by means of advertisement through media and social media.

Audrey Tang: We have changed our election code for this year. I would expect that to pass by the parliament before the election so that whatever advertisements have to disclose the funding sources of their payments and the sponsors and that it is held to the same standard of transparency and accountability as campaign donation records.

Audrey Tang: That closes one of the major loopholes that lets foreign powers influence the local election by means of misinformation.

Kathrin Erdmann: I heard or read that you proposed to share cyber attack data with other countries. Was there a huge interest for such data?

Audrey Tang: There is a CERT, or the computer emergency response mechanism, that is already international. This is not something new, but we are seeing a renewed interest in such a response not just for traditional cyber attacks, which occurs more at a technical or network operator level.

Audrey Tang: The content level, the misinformation or disinformation level, that level is new to many countries. We’re seeing a lot of interest internationally about this particular subject.

Kathrin Erdmann: I read that only a few countries were interested to getting this data on cyber attacks from Taiwan. I think this is because they don’t want to have problems with China. Is this true or not?

Audrey Tang: I don’t have that information.

Kathrin Erdmann: Can you tell me how Taiwan is protecting itself from cyber attacks from outside?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Just this January, our new cybersecurity act went into effect. In that, what we are saying is that both critical infrastructure as well as the part of the government, part of democracy, anything that is part of the operation of democracy, need to be protected by dedicated personnel and also dedicated budget.

Audrey Tang: For any large scale budgets now, at least five percent of the budget is dedicated to cybersecurity. We do this by cultivating a local, what we call white hat hacker community, meaning that people who are capable of cyber attack, but they do this for benign purpose. They test a system before the system is online.

Audrey Tang: When we set up new system in administration, we invite such white hat hackers to attack our system so that we can understand our vulnerability beforehand. It’s very important to keep them well informed, well paid. Also, they meet with president and the minister once in a while so that they don’t fall to the dark side, which always has cookies. [laughs]

Kathrin Erdmann: Let’s say you invite not your enemies but...

Audrey Tang: White hat hackers.

Kathrin Erdmann: They were happy to come to you?

Audrey Tang: Yes. In Taiwan, cybersecurity is one of the more popular choices of career for teenagers because it’s fun. Also, we’re in the front line. That means that they get to practice on real field practice day to day.

Audrey Tang: Instead of some experiments or some examples or some lectures by the teacher, they get to practice in the actual field action because there are cyber attacks happening literally every minute.

Kathrin Erdmann: You are not afraid that somebody will, let’s say, buy them and take them away from Taiwan, that they are going to another country if they are so good in their field?

Audrey Tang: We’re happy to share our talents.

Audrey Tang: Of course, when they test the system, it’s not the real system. It’s a mock system. We always keep a clean separation between the operational system as well as the mock system.

Audrey Tang: One example. In March, we are going to open the autonomous vehicle driving proving ground for self driving cars and other kind of self driving vehicles. Way before that opened, half a year ago, we invited the top white hat hackers to test that field to see if they can take control of the cars and so on.

Audrey Tang: Of course, that is not the actual system that we deploy. Nevertheless, they spent months and couldn’t find a vulnerability, so we feel more secure in that the autonomous vehicles will not go off road.

Kathrin Erdmann: Since you became digital minister, was there a higher rate of cyber attacks against Taiwan or not?

Audrey Tang: I would say it’s about the same. We’re in the frontline. It’s very saturated, meaning that we are used to if we don’t do our penetration testing of, if we don’t recruit some efficient white hackers, once we roll a online system, it will be attacked. That has been true for decades now.

Audrey Tang: It has not changed particularly in the past couple years. We are always on the frontline.

Kathrin Erdmann: You don’t feel any higher tension with China. This has nothing to do with cyber attacks you would say?

Audrey Tang: For example, six years ago when we were building our 4G network we already said that there is such a high risk so that we banned all telecommunication facilities from the PRC in our national 4G network. That has already been part of our assessment six years ago.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say the situation has significantly changed. As I said, I’m happy that other countries are now becoming aware of it.

Kathrin Erdmann: What do you think about this controversy about Huawei?

Audrey Tang: I won’t comment on specific companies. I would say six years ago we did an assessment. That is already our assessment that we cannot include these components in our 4G networks. Of course, other countries are talking about 5G networks now. The decision has already been made when we did our 4G network.

Kathrin Erdmann: You think it is justified to ban such a company from the market?

Audrey Tang: Speaking personally, in Taiwan we are on the frontline and people generally understand that the "marketplace" when we are talking about PRC companies, there is no clear distinction between a state actor and a market actor.

Audrey Tang: As I said, with that realization in mind, we feel completely justified over the decision six years ago about not including them in our 4G networks.

Audrey Tang: We understand that if they enter in the name of market the state actor will actually enter the market as well.

Kathrin Erdmann: As I told you our chancellor recently came to Japan. It was very interesting because she was talking a lot about data and data security. She said, "Yeah, you know, we are talking a lot about data security and personal data but then people have passwords only ’one, two, three, four’ or ’hello’ so they are not aware of the risk."

Kathrin Erdmann: What do you think? Are people in Taiwan aware that you need a secure password?

Audrey Tang: The simple answer is: Yes.

Kathrin Erdmann: Really?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Kathrin Erdmann: They are very different from the Germans, obviously.

Audrey Tang: A few things are different. Firstly, in Taiwan, broadband is a human right. Anywhere in Taiwan, if you don’t have 10 megabytes per second of broadband Internet it’s our fault. Now, over half of Taiwanese population have access to over a gigabit of very high speed Internet.

Audrey Tang: People already conduct most of their lives online. With these online life for a very long time people generally understand of course cybersecurity, and privacy, and so on are very important which is why in Taiwan digital literacy is part of our basic education.

Kathrin Erdmann: Do you teach this in school?

Audrey Tang: Of course. Starting this year we’re also teaching media literacy, critical thinking of the framing of the journalism and how this information is manufactured from misinformation and so on, again, as a media literacy class.

Audrey Tang: I think we’re the first Asian jurisdiction to do that in the basic educational level.

Kathrin Erdmann: I’m always wondering if you are not forgetting half of the population. In my country a lot of people are old. I can tell you they are telling me, "I don’t know how this works." They have the impression that they are not part of society anymore. How is the situation in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Old people are one of the most active Internet user groups in Taiwan, next to students, I think. Both groups have more time than other groups of people. Many Taiwanese people actually rely on instant message systems to stay connected to their grandchildren and so on.

Audrey Tang: While the literacy about disinformation is very important, and there’s a lot of civil society work on getting the more senior people real time clarification of disinformation. They are not being excluded. They too have mobile phone access.

Kathrin Erdmann: This year we have a G20 summit in Japan. One of the main topics will be the ethic part of data. What do you think? Where should the limits be?.

Kathrin Erdmann: Governments, companies, everybody wants to have more data from people.

Audrey Tang: I don’t.

Kathrin Erdmann: You are perhaps an exception. Where should be the limits? It it important that we have rules and regulations all over the world about ethics of data?

Audrey Tang: The rules help, like the GDPR. We’re happy to see that GDPR has been accepted and that one of the first largest cases by the CNIL on Google is being actively debated. It is a very good progression.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan’s personal date protection act is modeled after the European one. We share the same tradition of preferring individual autonomy over state or capitalist control.

Audrey Tang: Personally, speaking as a free software development advocate, all the system data I write, they function in flight mode. That means that even if you disconnect WiFi, if you disconnect 4G, they still work. That, basically, means we’re not holding people in hostage to having their data be surveilled in exchange for functionality. If they want to share their data, it is on a voluntary basis.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we always say data is not like oil at all. The data is a beginning of a relationship. If you hold my data, I can ask what you’re doing with it. I can update it. I can take it to some other people. I can ask for deletion, for correction. The more responsive you are, the more accountable you are, the more trustworthy you are.

Audrey Tang: It is like any relationship with your lawyer, or with your accountant, or with your doctor. If you trust someone more, of course, you share more of your personal data. They must act in the interest of you. That is the relation of you.

Kathrin Erdmann: Yeah, but this is a good question. When I ask you to delete my data, the question is if you really delete my data.

Audrey Tang: Yes, there are ways to mathematically prove that. I think one of the important thing about digital literacy is that we educate children so that they are part of this data agency idea so that they also learn that when they become the data operator, when other people ask them to delete the data, how do they prove that?

Audrey Tang: Once they wear the shoe of a data operator, then they can understand what actually to ask of the larger international companies or whatever of a accountable record. They will know how to ask and what to ask.

Kathrin Erdmann: When you became minister, you said that you should create a surrounding that is transparent to attract more companies. Were you successful?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, very much so, yeah. Taiwan is largely seen as one of the leading AI development centers now. In the past couple years, we’re seeing virtually all the large...like Google, Microsoft, even Uber, Facebook, Amazon, you name it, setting up their AI research programmes in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: I think that is a unique combination between the hardware and optics, and audio, and other hardware verticals that Taiwan already offered versus also the top notch research that we’re doing in machine learning.

Audrey Tang: Previously, these two groups of people were not tightly integrated with each other, but now with a set of new regulations, they’re now much more easy to experiment on their integrations. That really attracted the global multinationals to set up Taiwan as their regional center.

Audrey Tang: Another thing, of course, is there are highest rate of Freedom House score as well as freedom to speech and assembly and so on really helps in this region because then they can work on the new technologies without being repressed by the state power.

Kathrin Erdmann: How important is transparency, especially with a neighbor who is more or less the opposite?

Audrey Tang: For us, transparency is a way to build trust in democracy.

Audrey Tang: Without transparency, democracy is essentially a ritual you perform every four years or every two years. With transparency, it is a continuous democracy by which the people can ask the why, not just the what of the policy making.

Audrey Tang: First, it makes us more unique. It certainly builds a national identity around the process and around the democratic culture. Second, as seen by the referendum, such processes enable the civil society to deepen its debate — instead of choosing particular people, we can now argue over particular things in the society.

Audrey Tang: That, again, makes us both more unique and builds much more solidarity between the various different civil society groups and less prone to disinformation or other ways to manipulate information to sow discord.

Kathrin Erdmann: On the other hand, in the past, there’d been more and more countries who cut ties with Taiwan due to the great power of China. The last one was El Salvador, I think, now there are only 17 countries who still maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan. It’s good to have transparency but does this really help Taiwan on the international stage?.

Audrey Tang: Yes, it did. One example. Through the open government effort, we held a presidential hackathon, where the president invited people to fulfill her presidential promise.

Audrey Tang: We had a lot of people who experimented with the ways to analyze water pipes to detect leakage to solve for climate change and water shortage based on machine learning and data in the water pipes.

Audrey Tang: Once we built the system, which correspond to the Sustainable Development Goals on the climate change, we shared this to the international community. The same team went to Wellington, to New Zealand. New Zealand also shared their public water corporation’s data to solve climate change, which is a new problem.

Audrey Tang: New Zealand didn’t use to have this problem, but now they do. This kind of bilateral collaboration for the sustainable goals is much more meaningful than any of the other showbusinessy display because that really solves the problem for people in both countries.

Audrey Tang: The output of such collaborations is in the public domain for the science and academic communities. Finally, it increases trust. If one country is willing to share its public water pipe usage data to another country, to me, that is much more practical and useful than other ways of bilateral agreements.

Kathrin Erdmann: Last time when I came to Taiwan, we were talking about the referendums. You had these...

Audrey Tang: The first referendum that worked.

Kathrin Erdmann: Yeah!

Audrey Tang: It took three tries.

Kathrin Erdmann: Yeah, the referendum on same sex marriage was very surprisingly rejected. Were you disappointed about the result?

Audrey Tang: No, I fully accept the result. By the way, it’s not rejection of same sex couple relationships. They enjoy the same rights as heterosexual couples. The referendum was just to not call it marriage in the civil code. It’s about the name.

Kathrin Erdmann: This is true, but do you think perhaps that people are not ready yet?

Audrey Tang: To call it marriage?

Kathrin Erdmann: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: The thing is that only 10 years ago did we change marriage from something that is a social ceremony into a state registration. For many people in the older generations, as soon as there is a large wedding, there is legally binding wedding. They don’t have to actually register right afterwards.

Audrey Tang: They’re not used to the idea that the marriage is a just like household registration thing. The young people, of course, grew up with this being state function.

Audrey Tang: When they went into the booth and saw the referendum, they probably imagined different things in their heads. I think it’s really good to start a discussion intergenerationally about the meaning of marriage because of this.

Audrey Tang: I know many friends of mine who came out of the closet because of this referendum to talk to their parents because they want to win their votes. Some succeeded, some did not, but it’s always better to start a conversation.

Kathrin Erdmann: But what do you think will happen now, until March, the government has to present something?

Audrey Tang: A bill that protects the rights of the couples, yes.

Kathrin Erdmann: Do you think it will be successful then? Or will there be a compromise?

Audrey Tang: It’s all about the name. it’s not about compromising the rights of same sex couples. It is whether to call it marriage or not. It is basically just a referendum over the name on the civil code. I think it will up to the parliamentary and MPs to decide, of course.

Audrey Tang: What really matters is that people have the real conversation across different civil society groups. Even right now, our office is holding a preliminary discussion about how future referendums should deepen the connection and the debate before the referendum.

Audrey Tang: When it pertains to human right as well as the constitutional interpretations, how to make it more accessible to people who are not constitutional law scholars. Basically, we’re retracing the steps of Switzerland. They did this many decades ago. It’s only our third try, but we are actually improving our democracy because of this.

Kathrin Erdmann: You are recording all the interviews. Why are you doing this?

Audrey Tang: First of all, because the transparency that I practice is called radical transparency, meaning that as the digital minister, anything that I see or all the meetings that I chair and so on, the people can also know. It’s to contextualize my work. The way of contextualizing this work takes many forms.

Audrey Tang: Transcripts so far is the most accessible form because people just Google or DuckDuckGo or do some search engine search for anything that I do, and they see the full explanations for why I’m doing this, in addition to what I do this.

Kathrin Erdmann: How many people would read this interview, for example?

Audrey Tang: On average, hundreds.

Kathrin Erdmann: I have another question. As a digital minister, how many technical stuff you have at home?

Audrey Tang: At home?

Kathrin Erdmann: Yeah. Do you have things like Alexa, or smart home technology...?

Audrey Tang: The place that the ministers live is a very, very old building, and so we don’t have that many cutting edge technologies.

Audrey Tang: Ever since I moved in though, I did bring in the whole set up of iPad, of Apple Watch, Apple TV, and so on, but that’s the extent of it.

Kathrin Erdmann: Personally, you’re not technology addicted?

Audrey Tang: No. The thing is that in Taiwan, we have a saying that says one who manufactures the shampoos wash their hair with water, or something like that. I’m sure you have a similar saying.

Audrey Tang: I’ve been working with Silicon Valley companies on enterprise social software and things like that, so I know exactly how the dopamine cycles work, how manufacturer addictions work. I rejected particular lines of work because I consider them unethical.

Audrey Tang: Of course, when I use social media, for example, Facebook, I always use it with a extension, a program called a Facebook Feed Eradicator. Once you install that, the Facebook wall disappears and replaced by a saying, for example, from Athlur or something that inspires you every morning.

Audrey Tang: The other parts of Facebook, the intentional part, for example, you can still contact your friends and family, you can also visit your profile, their page, watch some live stream, why not?

Audrey Tang: The addictive part, the part that lets you keep pulling on the fear of missing out, that part is gone. I only use social media in this way as to not to get addicted.

Kathrin Erdmann: OK, thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.