Marc Marmino: I’m studying digital surveillance as it relates to the pandemic in Taiwan and the PRC. That’s what my questions are going to be around today with you. It’s OK if I record?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course. I’ll also make a recording locally with just my image, but with both of our voices.

Marc Marmino: At the high level of compliance with digital surveillance in Taiwan…What I mean by that is like the SIM card location tracing during arrival quarantine and that sort of thing. Did that surprise you at all?

Audrey Tang: The question was, was I surprised by the high level of compliance? Is that correct?

Marc Marmino: Yes.

Audrey Tang: Well, it’s not our first coronavirus. Taiwan had SARS back in 2003. At that time, the Pescadores Islands, who was the only smaller island in the Taiwan jurisdictions that had IC-based health cards.

Audrey Tang: The main island of Taiwan was still using paper-based records for healthcare. We can see the difference back in 2003. What difference it makes when it comes to easy access to tests and also just to calm everyone down.

Audrey Tang: The fact that there is a fiber optic line connecting to the central healthcare system reassures people that, for example, although the mask were scarce, you will get more plenty and rationing is fair and vaccination later on this year, again, began as very scarce.

Audrey Tang: Now, we’ve got plenty, but then it’s about fair distribution. This assurance of fairness based on literally more than a decade, almost two decades of the national healthcare system as empowered by digital technologies is the fabric of social trust.

Audrey Tang: I’m not surprised that when we use the technologies that exist way before this way of pandemic, including, as you mentioned, the SMS-based contact or the healthcare card, then people will feel a strong sense of trust because we’re used to that technology.

Audrey Tang: How do we invent entirely new technologies like GPS? We’ve never used GPS this round in the past couple of years or Bluetooth, which is much harder to explain, then the compliance rate is not as high.

Marc Marmino: What happens if somebody arrives at the airport and has to buy or insert a SIM card into their phone but doesn’t agree to do that? Has that happened at all, and what would happen to them at that?

Audrey Tang: You can go to a local quarantine hotel. Actually, everyone is now doing that. We do not restore home-based quarantine until, I believe, next weekend. [laughs] For quite a while, since the Delta variant, the home quarantine, which is the digital fence you were alluding to, was not in effect.

Audrey Tang: People, in essence, have to go to a hotel or one of the centralized quarantine facility — in which case it’s not about a digital fence there’s a physical fence going on there.

Marc Marmino: When that digital fence was in place…

Audrey Tang: …you can always, as I mentioned, choose to go to a hotel or a centralized quarantine place where there is a physical fence.

Marc Marmino: I saw in terms of liberal democracies, Taiwan’s population demonstrated this unique willingness to temporarily give up personal freedom. In the case that we’re just talking about location privacy in the event of a health emergency. Was that willingness known about ahead of time?

Marc Marmino: In other words, when these health surveillance measures were designed, did they factor the willingness of the people to obey the rules?

Audrey Tang: I’m sorry, but I don’t think the contact tracing based on SMS, the 1922 SMS method, “gives up” privacy. Arguably, it’s designed so that you do not have to give private information like your contact number to the venues that you check in. It’s privacy-preserving, not privacy-encroaching. Even the telecom operators that received those SMS numbers doesn’t know which venue those 15 digits correspond to.

Audrey Tang: It’s a multiparty design. It’s not compromising the venue or owner’s privacy when you check in a telecom either. It protects privacy on both sides. I don’t think we would have as much a success had we rolled out a centralized app where privacy is given up. Instead, the SMS with contact tracing won popular support because we’ve never mandated it.

Audrey Tang: You can always go back to use pen and paper handwriting or just stamp your way in, but people switch by and large to SMS contact tracing because people understand it’s even more privacy-preserving than pen and paper.

Marc Marmino: I find that young adults that I interviewed in Taiwan are not very aware of new legislation or specific legislation aimed at these uses of surveillance, if you will, but they are very willing to comply with these technologies. What, in your opinion, causes the willingness of young people to comply? Is it peer pressure or family pressure or?

Audrey Tang: I think it’s just easily understood. People understand why we’re doing this. It’s just like mask-wearing. Almost all of last year, maybe the entire last year, we’ve never fined anyone for not wearing masks, but people wore the mask nevertheless. That’s why we had a streak of 10 months or so with essentially zero COVID cases because people adopted those NPIs very willingly.

Audrey Tang: Now, part of it may be peer pressure, but mostly it’s just that the communication was succinct and clear. People who watched the 2:00 PM press conference or saw the Internet meme-based cute dog info cards understand that we wear a mask to protect ourselves against our own unwashed hands. It is not about some magical property of mask. It just reminds you to wash your hands more.

Audrey Tang: With such success in early communication, people understand the science behind it. People comply not because they haven’t read the law, [laughs] but rather they understand the individual components of how those technologies work. Again, this is as opposed to a black box designed by multinational companies, which will be much harder to explain.

Marc Marmino: There’s a phenomenon going on in Taiwan right now where a few personal details of a positive case are being released by the state at some level. Then, those details are then picked up by the media where further personal information is eventually released. Some of these people, the positive cases, sometimes have their entire identity docs online, subsequently cyberbullied, gossiped about.

Marc Marmino: The question is are you familiar with these incidents, and if so are media in essence helping or hurting state efforts in these docs shaming activities?

Audrey Tang: I’m not intimately familiar with those cases. As I mentioned, my focus is I’m bridging civic technologies and the CECC’s decision to review certain place details when they could not contact trace. They fall back. If they can contact trace and quarantine, they don’t publish anything. They only publish when they could not locate exactly which people were in that place.

Audrey Tang: That was before the SMS-based contact tracing platform gets wide usage by all the municipality contact tracer. That was in July. Before July, we used to publish more because we could not get these fine details contact trace in due times, so we rely on people to look at the newspapers and remind themselves.

Audrey Tang: It’s deemed a necessity by the CECC, but if we had a choice, we always prefer finer detail contact tracing as opposed to revealing place information. The CECC treats it as an unfortunate necessity, but because I’m not in charge of that particular part of decision-making, I can’t share the balancing weights and things like that with you.

Marc Marmino: That makes sense. Then, I wanted to ask about this existential threat from the PRC or the constant threat of reunification. Does that have something to do with Taiwan’s…?

Audrey Tang: Well, not “re-“ unification. The PRC regime never “unified” with Taiwan at any point in history. I wonder where that “re-“ comes from. Maybe the neolithic age?

Audrey Tang: Sorry for fact-checking this, but that was one of the narratives that they always use. I must keep pointing out there was no “re-“ in unification, but sorry for interrupting. Please, go on.

Marc Marmino: No, that’s exactly right. That’s a narrative. The threat from the PRC, do you think that has something with Taiwan’s willingness to quickly follow their government’s directives during the pandemic?

Marc Marmino: Is there a sense of duty to protect society in Taiwan? I just looked at a Pew Research poll that put society as number one for Taiwanese interviewed in terms of what’s most important in terms of value of life. Society seems to be big. Is there a sense of duty to protect society? Is it related to this threat from the PRC?

Audrey Tang: Yes and no. Yes, there’s a sense of social solidarity when it comes to disaster recovery. Yet, I don’t think the PRC missile threats is the primary or even the top three resilience scenarios…

Audrey Tang: I’m thinking about the earthquake right around the turn of century, all the social sector banded together to recover from the September 21 great earthquake. People banded together when there’s typhoons. People banded together when there’s gas explosions, or when students occupy the parliament, and so on.

Audrey Tang: There’s this constant test of the social solidarity and resilience because of Taiwan’s unending waves of natural or social emergent threats. There was a missile threat by ‘96, and the people banded around that. That’s true, but I don’t think there’s much since then. It is a factor, but the major factor is this endless flurry of natural and social phenomena that requires all of society response.

Marc Marmino: That makes sense. I’ve also heard the term in my interviews, 正義魔人, social policing. Just curious about that. Does that play a role in ensuring that people comply with government measures on this pandemic? In other words, does the sense the social justice help the government achieve their policy goals? There seems to be at least a portion of the population that believes some…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, if you talk about illegal parking, like double parking, yes…

Audrey Tang: The 正義魔人 is a major part in the community enforcement of a clean street and things like that. There are things like mask-wearing that are easier for this peer notice to work because you can see at a glance who’s not wearing the mask, so for that, certainly.

Audrey Tang: For vaccination, it’s less likely. It’s hard to tell other clients who has been vaccinated. For contact tracing, somewhere in-between. It can’t be answered in a blanket fashion. Specifically, for mask-wearing, yes, peer pressure played largest role.

Marc Marmino: Are there any incentive programs for the public along these lines to help identify lawbreakers? If, for instance, masks could you release a photo or video footage to notify authorities of people breaking the COVID rules? Could someone take a photo and submit it with their smartphone?

Audrey Tang: I don’t think that there’s one for the pandemic-related mask-wearing. There’s one about riding a motorcycle without a helmet. There’s a reward for that, but I’m not intimately familiar with that, so I might be wrong. For traffic, certainly. I don’t think there’s for the mask-wearing in the pandemic times.

Marc Marmino: Several interviewees tell me that they are less fearful of government consequences from COVID and more fearful of shame if their family found out that they did something wrong and got caught. What role or how big of a role do you think the potential for shame plays in following these rules for pandemic surveillance?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, because it is a norm-based response where there’s a strong social norm, as I mentioned, to protect oneself and then also protect the others around you. It’s not just about the threat of public shaming, but also about being singled out as the 破口. As the breakthrough case that let the community spread happens.

Audrey Tang: The CECC tried very hard to reduce the stigma associated of being a so-called 破口, but there is a strong community norm around trying not to be that one that let community spread happen. There’s a strong sense in that. I would concur with your assessment. Yes.

Marc Marmino: Can you talk a little bit about some of the ways that you use this concept of calm technology or build surveillance concepts around existing technology?

Audrey Tang: The idea is that the technology should adapt to the society. The technology should not be in a way so the society have to adapt to technology. That’s the essence of calm technology. The 1922 SMS-based contact tracing is one such technology because even on your phones are lock screen you can swipe and point and send that’s just three seconds or less, and then you’re checked in into the venue.

Audrey Tang: Every time I use the SMS contact tracing system, I’m very much aware that I don’t have to type anything. It’s literally just a couple of seconds, and so that helps with the compliance because people don’t have to stop in their tracks or queue a long line before entering public venues or the high-speed rail stations and so on.

Audrey Tang: Also, it’s a little bit of fun involved in it. People would share the kind of color code scanner they want to use. People feel a sense of triumph when they successfully petition that line and to end Messenger to introduce SMS scanning capabilities [laughs] at a friend screen and things like that. There’s the real comradery of participatory technologies in play here. It’s not just con, but it’s also convivial to use a longer word.

Marc Marmino: Thank you. I had a question about back to when the digital fence was in place. When people were caught violating quarantine surveillance, like leaving the room or going out to a store, can you talk at all about why those individuals said that they broke the rules?

Marc Marmino: What do they typically say? Is it always out of convenience or like to go do something outside the hotel room, or did some of them disagree with the digital surveillance scheme? Anything you can say about that?

Audrey Tang: I don’t think it could be generalized. Each individual case is very different. As I mentioned, since it’s mostly last year, it’s a year and a half ago, my memory is faulty. I’m bad, so I can’t tell you that.

Marc Marmino: Will Taiwan stop using measures like any form of pandemic surveillance once the pandemic becomes endemic and life normalizes?

Audrey Tang: In the Special Act is tied to the existence of the CECC. Once the CECC disbands, the Special Act dissipates, and then it goes back to the regular laws and systems. There’s really no telling when does the CECC disband, though… But the idea, as you said, is that when it stops becoming a pandemic or maybe it mutates enough, so it become flu-like. We will see.

Marc Marmino: Do you think that Taiwan’s long history with resilient authoritarianism has anything to do with their willingness to be obedient, especially with the older generation that might remember things like Martial law, single-party governance? Do you think that has anything to do with compliance to these forms of surveillance technology quick and…?

Audrey Tang: I don’t think so.

Audrey Tang: It’s been quite a while since we lifted Martial law. It’s almost 40 years now, so three decades or more.

Marc Marmino: Some lived under that time and they’ve raised their kids, and there has to be some legacy there. Would you agree with that?

Audrey Tang: Right, but there is also a legacy that we fought for the freedom of the press, of assembly, of the completely free and open speech, and things like that. Politically, anything around a top-down take-down lockdown censorship, and things like that, is a non-starter. It’s just politically not viable to consider those options.

Audrey Tang: I would say that it has a dual result. Maybe, as you said, that there’s some familiarity with compliance, but also there’s a strong sense that the compliance must be peer-based, communal based, and instead of dictated from above. If you follow the Central Epidemic Command Center, the commander behaves, not military commander like.

Audrey Tang: Not only does he admit mistakes very quickly and readily, and when journalist points out a better way to do things, he always say, “Yeah, why don’t you say that earlier. Let’s switch to that new way to do things.” We also make sure to refrain from lockdowns. We tried very hard and succeeded to not mandate a lockdown when the level three national-wide alert was issued.

Audrey Tang: There was a debate also within our team about whether to make the contact tracing SMS a mandatory. We found that it probably will backfire if we made that mandatory. We instead said, “If you prefer a more private way of keeping your contact history, please do this, but if you’re not comfortable with that, feel free to continue to use handwriting or stamp your way in.”

Audrey Tang: That is because everybody remembered the Martial law and don’t want to go back to the Martial law.

Marc Marmino: [laughs] Yeah. What do you think are the biggest differences between the PRC’s approach to this with digital surveillance and Taiwan’s approach? What stands out the most? I know there are massive differences.

Audrey Tang: Let me get it. It’s completely diametrically opposite. I can’t even begin to compare those. For example, our SMS-based contact tracing system has this reverse auditing feature at SMS.1922.gov.tw.

Audrey Tang: Anyone who entered their phone number and typing in an SMS one-time PIN can affirm that the contact tracing works as it said under 10, and in the past 28 days, which contact tracing, which municipality have looked at your check-in records for what reason. It’s completely transparent.

Audrey Tang: The way it works is making the state transparent to these citizens. In the PRC, they are making the citizens transparent to the state… I can’t even begin to compare those because they are diametrically opposed.

Marc Marmino: Another question I had was, what would you do different next time, next pandemic, in terms of surveillance design? Did you get things wrong in the beginning?

Audrey Tang: That’s a trick question because it depends on what the virus looks like?

Audrey Tang: Had it not the Alpha and Delta variants appeared, we would not have to design the SMS-based contact tracing system just mask wearing, handwashing, social distancing alone would be sufficient to reduce our value to be under one in the original non-variant version of the novel coronavirus. The variants made it necessary to shorten the contact tracing time.

Audrey Tang: It’s not about planning for things. It’s about being resilient and having a civic infrastructure, a strong, multi-sectoral, cross-sectoral trust so that we can source out the distinct characteristics of a variant like Omicron now or a new virus. Then, reconfigure our social technologies to respond and to make sure that people understand the scientific reasons why that we have designed it this way.

Audrey Tang: I can’t answer that in a blanket fashion because the next pandemic will certainly not be the now non-dominant original variant. We will have to do things very differently, but I don’t know how differently.

Marc Marmino: Specifically to the digital fence, was that seen as effective and not too intrusive? Do you think the popular sentiment around it was, “This is an OK tool, and we should probably use that again in the future if we need to?”

Audrey Tang: Yes and no. Yes, it was quite effective, but it was certainly not effective enough to counter the Delta variant, which is why we switched back to a centralized quarantine until we have a higher vaccination rate, which we have now.

Audrey Tang: The point here is that it’s a tool for its time, but we’re not using a tool for a tool’s sake. We use the tool when the situation calls for it. For that particular situation, the digital fence did play a positive role. Yes.

Marc Marmino: Can you talk briefly about how present Tai’s administration has increased transparency? I know you’ve done things like radical transparency, but just the idea that Taiwan came out of the Sunflower Movement and the Ma Ying-jeou era into this increased transparency, if you will, and the ways in which that maybe prime Taiwan for this moment to be ready to be resilient during the pandemic.

Audrey Tang: The mask rationing map, which we didn’t get into detail, is a direct result of the AirBox, the air pollution map that was also started as a civic technology because reliable infrastructure makes our lives simpler and more convenient.

Audrey Tang: Public infrastructure and digital realm does the same for democracy. The local air quality tracker is now in a variety of places from schools to household balconies, and those citizen scientists supplemented our limited capacity in the state and exemplify data competence in environmental education.

Audrey Tang: When we launched the Civil IoT Taiwan Program, we expanded, not fought against the AirBox citizen network to industrial parks, for example. Originally there were just around 2,000 AirBox island-wide, and now there’s tens of thousands. The point here is that data sharing is seen as a common good that can help to form shared goals.

Audrey Tang: That has been the norm since at least 2014, as you mentioned, and that prepared Taiwan to use this radical transparency for mask availability and later on, as I mentioned, the reverse audit for SMS contact tracing. I didn’t invent it because zero civic tech community invented those two ideas.

Marc Marmino: Any idea when the arrival quarantines will end in Taiwan? What does that decision depend on in terms of metrics? Is it vaccination rate or…?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s primarily about vaccination rate.

Marc Marmino: Once that gets better. OK. Those are all my questions.

Audrey Tang: We were super-efficient.

Marc Marmino: Yeah. That’s great. I appreciate your time. Thanks for conducting this interview with me. It’s extremely invaluable.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. I’ll send a voice recording your way. We usually make a transcript and publish after 10 days of co-editing, but if you prefer to just publish a video, we can also do that. We usually do the transcript. The transcript is easier for your purpose, right?

Marc Marmino: Yeah, a transcript would be great.

Audrey Tang: We’ll make a transcript. OK. Cheers, then.

Marc Marmino: Bye-bye.