Nicola Smith: You’re having a busy day, I’m sure. How do you enjoy being minister?

Audrey Tang: Pretty good.

Nicola Smith: Yeah, it must be an interesting job.

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Nicola Smith: Great.

Audrey Tang: Are you also recording?

Nicola Smith: Yeah. I apologize, I came out without my business card but, basically, I’ve been based here for seven months. I’m working for TIME and the Guardian and New York Times.

Nicola Smith: As I mentioned in my email, we’re interested in fake news, which has now become quite a global concern but I’d like to hear from your perspective, how does it specifically manifest itself in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: First of all, publicly, I had a declaration, which Zach probably sent to you already, and in it, I pretty clearly said that I refrain from using the word "fake news" because I see it as an affront to the whole journalism media.

Audrey Tang: It's pretty questionable, really, the word itself, which is why I don't use it proactively. There is of course rumors, and there are systematic computational propaganda based on rumors, synthesized to further particular agendas. It is a pretty advanced form of what we call a psychological manipulation, if you will.

Audrey Tang: They’re usually around the social media channels. Other social media companies -- Google, Facebook -- are taking it very seriously and trying to put some kind of control into this phenomena. Because this kind of computational propaganda is still part of social media.

Audrey Tang: Although they may have seen the same format as articles through a news media. I wouldn’t call them fake news because they are not purporting to be news. They are not news. They are just rumors, basically.

Nicola Smith: Sometimes when you say though that there are certain sites who are propagating messages that would appear to be news, but have been made up?

Audrey Tang: They may call themselves a news agency, but they publish things that are not fact checked, that does not meet basic journalism standards. That is still part of their exercise of freedom of speech.

Audrey Tang: The problem is, the people on social media, there is no distinguishing factor to tell, which means a news agency and a rumor-spreading site purporting to be something like a news agency. They don’t usually say that they are a news agency by the way, but they are similar.

Audrey Tang: Still I wouldn’t say that one is counterfeit or one is fake of the other. I would say they are two fundamentally different kind of agencies.

Nicola Smith: In Taiwan have there been particularly recurring themes of this kind of propaganda you’re speaking on? Have you, or has the government noticed any occurring themes that are coming up, in which people are trying to manipulate Taiwanese public opinion?

Audrey Tang: There is a lot of social controversies that the current administration is trying to tackle. Whenever there is such kind of policy being tackled, those sites or multiple sites of course engage in their own kind of computational propaganda.

Audrey Tang: You can see a prime example being the gay marriage case, and also around the Japanese food import case of the radiation standards. You see a lot of, I wouldn’t even call the rumors, because they are more resembling memes.

Audrey Tang: For example, you see one picture with purportedly some mutant species from Japan. Of course there’s also that tsunami wave amplitude photo from the US government agency (NOAA), but with the caption sign that claims it is radiation level. Things like that.

Audrey Tang: All these kind of memes, used for attacking and disinformation and so on, occurs on all sides of political or social controversies.

Nicola Smith: Is this coordinated, or is it just random people using the Internet who are posting inaccuracies, or is it a coordinated attempts to sway opinion?

Audrey Tang: It is evolutionary, of course. That is to say even if it’s coordinated, it still need to resonate with the recipient. Of course, there is always this useful second tier propaganda. There are, of course, very clearly delineated circles on those social media forums, that just churns out these messages.

Audrey Tang: Because it costs almost nothing to manufacture, and if one out of 100 goes viral, it’s still worth it. If you just review it on an hourly basis, it’s not limited to anti-government, there is also pro-government groups doing much of the same thing, much like in the US or any other country.

Nicola Smith: Is that limited to internal domestic controversies or issues, or is there also attempt from outside Taiwan to try to sway public opinion politically?

Audrey Tang: Part of the the idea is that if a meme goes viral in any region, it can spread. Because social media really knows no boundary of nationality, it is likely to go viral in any other region as well. I wouldn’t say it’s purely domestic.

Audrey Tang: I would say that it just depends on how tuned the local population is to that particular meme. Maybe it goes viral or maybe it goes through some translation or adaptation before it goes viral. I wouldn’t call it anything that’s occurring "around" or "across" national boundaries.

Audrey Tang: It is just those memetic centers trying to infiltrate each other’s spaces. I think that’s much more accurate.

Nicola Smith: This has come to the floor globally because first of, first of all the Brexit campaign and then Trump campaign. Talk of trying to sway voter opinion. Is there anything, so in Taiwan, that China might try to use this kind of propaganda on the Internet to try and influence public opinion here?

Audrey Tang: Any other places can also do this. China is interesting because they have their own Internet. This reason is this year, I think they made VPN connections more difficult to establish on the link to the public Internet.

Audrey Tang: Which means that any message that originates from China and goes viral on the public Internet has to go through much more strict measures — so it takes somebody who is determined, or it’s sponsored by the state... There is no easy way to tell one from the other, and I will refrain to do so.

Nicola Smith: Is that a possibility though?

Audrey Tang: It is of course a possibility, but I wouldn’t say that is even likely in the general idea. But it may be one single case or two single cases, it may be possible to trace it to a mainland China origin.

Nicola Smith: Even if it’s not now, is it concern for government in the future? You could see the same kind of phenomenon in Taiwan that you’ve seen in America or in Europe, where there have been concerted efforts in those cases, allegedly by Russia, to move public opinion in a certain direction? Is there concern in Taiwan that that could happen?

Audrey Tang: I would say that, for people who have affinity to particular political camps -- I wouldn’t even call it Mainland China, I would call it pro-unification -- it is a legitimate political idea in Taiwan. They enjoy the same freedom of speech.

Audrey Tang: If they engage in pro-unification propaganda, it’s much more likely that it originates out of their own pro-unification ideas, not because they were remote-controlled by Beijing.

Audrey Tang: I say this because of the much, much higher likelihood for a pro-unification local meme to go viral here, versus having to cross the great firewall and then adapt to the local memetic sphere. It’s actually far more likely for it to be of domestic origin.

Audrey Tang: Of course it is a concern. It is something that we see every day of those different political camps engaging in propaganda. I would say it’s now a reality. It’s not even a concern or merely a possibility. I would say it’s an everyday reality.

Nicola Smith: Why would you say that it’s not particularly a concern now? Is Asia different, as opposed to other parts of the world? I remember when I was in India, I had to play Indian elections in 2014. There were coordinated efforts by one particular party to organize young people who were very savvy with social media to create messages that came out.

Nicola Smith: Is East Asia not so prone to that kind of trend?

Audrey Tang: Back in 2014, the mastery of computational propaganda techniques were not that widespread. Live stream has just started, and the social media did not reach its complete penetration because of the lack of 4G connection. It was still at a 3G era.

Audrey Tang: It was kind of lopsided. There are certain camps who are particularly adept. There are certain camps which are still learning. Three years from that, pretty much all the sites have sufficient sophistication and technology, so it creates a much more diverse ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: For people who are stuck in one echo chamber, it would just mean that the richness, the "veracity" [laughs] of the information that they receive from become much more sophisticated. For someone who just sees through all the echo chambers, like me, I just see a lot more diversity.

Audrey Tang: It also lets me think that it’s not something that is just specifically from a particular account. It’s a symptom of the underlying system. I was part of the community who worked on concerted efforts to do something about spam, with SpamAssassin and so on.

Audrey Tang: It was back in 2002 or so, when the Internet community made a concerted effort, a multi-pronged approach to try to solve the spam problem. For the first couple years it also seemed not solvable.

Audrey Tang: It looked like that automated spam people would always win, because of the very small cost and anonymity of the Internet, and the unencrypted nature of the Internet back then. It seemed that we were fighting an uphill battle. It’s eventually solved in maybe five or six years.

Audrey Tang: I think this gives me some perspective and also optimism to see that this is mostly a symptom, caused by the current technological infrastructure, which is something that’s malleable; it’s not set in stone.

Nicola Smith: Looking at the Google event, do you think there’s too much hype about fake news?

Audrey Tang: I think that the word itself creates hype. In Taiwan, in our legal system, there is no meaning, no definition of the word "fake news". Everybody associates their different interpretations to it. Whereas there is clear definition for the word, for example, rumor. It is actually part of the legal system.

Audrey Tang: The laws just say "rumor", not "fake news". It’s not news, so people don’t put that much attention. Again, it is a self-selective evolutionary meme.

Nicola Smith: In the case of America, where there’s been so much talk about fake news, would you say that’s a similar situation, where people just don’t understand how to deal with the technology?

Audrey Tang: I think it is particular to the US, because it’s so intimately tied to the election and its result. In Taiwan, we do have laws that somewhat restrict the freedom of speech and actually fine people over spreading rumors, but it’s always during an epidemic, with some very public, health-related special cases.

Audrey Tang: The only part of it where it is in the criminal code and is state-prosecutable is during presidential or high-level elections. If you spread the kind of rumor that intends to make somebody get elected or not elected, it is actually a crime, but not in any other cases.

Audrey Tang: It is very interesting how rumor and election become inherently tied together when people think about it. If people get an idea that a rumor is determining the election or the election results, of course it gathers the attention of everybody who gets disappointed with election results, which is half the population, more or less.

Audrey Tang: I think it is peculiar to the US. We don’t get that here in Taiwan, because the previous election, the presidential election was a landslide. There was no rumors around the last presidential election that could have affected its outcome.

Nicola Smith: How do you get the balance then between stopping false rumors and freedom of speech? How do you strike that balance?

Audrey Tang: The thing with elections, it could be defended, because if you, due to rumors, elect somebody who then destroys freedom of speech, it becomes self-destructive. So it’s the democratic system trying to protect itself. In other times, I think there really is no excuse to corrode the freedom of speech in the name of rumors.

Audrey Tang: I think this explains why in the law, there’s epidemic and there’s election, because these two cases, they corrode the foundation upon which freedom of speech is built on, right? It is the social and democratic foundation.

Audrey Tang: Other than these, if you just talk about rumors that doesn’t affect the foundation of democracy or its society, then I see it as something to be contained, but not by the state. I think we need a way of inoculating people against the virus of the mind.

Audrey Tang: Of course, we have ways to do that now. We have deliberations, and we can design a user interface so that we see different sides of the argument. We do that on the public participation platform that we built.

Audrey Tang: People can go through this process to become, essentially, immune to propaganda on particular topics, when they have thought and considered very carefully the different sides of opinions. At the moment, it is something of a luxury to build consensus in this way.

Nicola Smith: Absolutely. Is there not a danger over that, political parties...? How do you define what is a false rumor? Who makes that decision about what’s false and how do you rate that? Is there no danger that political parties who accuse each other of spreading false rumors?

Audrey Tang: Rumor, by itself, is not necessarily false or true. It just means that it’s viral and it’s not fact-checked. It may turn out very well to be true, but the person who wrote or spread the rumor didn’t check it. I think that would be the basic idea.

Audrey Tang: Then, of course, if the rumor then affects the election results, then of course, they need to be fact-checked by the judicial branch. If it turns out to be false, it is discovered by the legal process. That’s how I would define it. It’s not something that the administration or any third party can do.

Audrey Tang: It’s just if that it does damage to society and then the judicial process decides that it is actually untrue, and then we determine how much the damage is exactly. I don’t think it’s untrue just because it’s a rumor. A rumor just means it’s viral and unchecked.

Nicola Smith: Essentially, it’s like libel laws?

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Nicola Smith: But, related to elections.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Nicola Smith: Slightly off-topic but along the same lines, I read that you are going to Korea. One of the concerns that people have about North Korea is that they’ve become very good at cyber warfare. There’s been talk of their attacks on Hollywood. How did you assess their capabilities in cyber warfare and how concerned should we be?

Audrey Tang: When I go into the cabinet, I decided I would work on Open Government, and I decided to practice radical transparency. I published pretty much every meeting that I hold. Which means that I’m not allowed to even see or become aware of any national secret.

Audrey Tang: Which means I can’t supervise their cybersecurity department, which means that I don’t even know the answer to your question, except based on my previous experience before I was made Digital Minister.

Audrey Tang: After I become the Digital Minister, I become totally blind to anything related to national security. That is the job of our director of cyber security department. I would say that in Taiwan we’re becoming much more aware than ever before of the security of infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: Especially the critical infrastructure that could be taken over and could be turned into attacks. This is not because of any particular cyber security problems, but because of the Internet of Things is basically turning every single thing Internet-compliant.

Audrey Tang: Then, people naturally become aware that all these things may be used for nefarious purposes, which is why we put a lot of effort on international standards on the cybersecurity of the IoT.

Audrey Tang: I think that’s what captured people’s imagination now. It’s not like they’ve suddenly become aware of these security issues, but because cybersecurity is now everyday. It’s not just something that affects you when you’re using a laptop, but practically everywhere.

Nicola Smith: In North Korea’s case, how advanced do you think they are, based on your previous experience, with their Internet capabilities?

Audrey Tang: I know for sure that they care about this capability very much. I don’t have any particular first-hand experience in working with or against them, so I’ll refrain from making any guesses. The only thing I know is that they care about this.

Nicola Smith: Generally, cyber warfare, you were talking about how our infrastructure has become more dependent on the Internet. So, generally, how big a threat is cyber warfare, in terms of world peace? I mean, how do you rate it?

Audrey Tang: You mean, relative to what? Climate change? [laughs]

Nicola Smith: Relative to climate change, to nuclear threat, to all of the other things that people are discussing a lot in the media here. I mean, this region, there’s been a lot of discussions of nuclear threat because of North Korea but then, there’s also much discussion about climate change, as you mentioned, as well.

Nicola Smith: How would you rate cyber warfare? Does it loom as quite as much? How big a threat do you think it is?

Audrey Tang: That’s a very good question. I think it’s like this. The Internet is designed to survive catastrophic damages. It’s designed to survive those, including nuclear war and climate change. [laughs] It was part of the original design.

Audrey Tang: What I’m saying is that I’m not that worried about the Internet as an infrastructure. I do worry about people’s trust in the Internet. It could very easily be corroded if people are led or even convinced to believe that the Internet is no longer a safe space for expression, for assembly, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Then, it will leaves to people who, either are very advanced, who know that they are safe, or people who are still unaware of the dangers. Then, normal people would just tune out from the Internet and the social web, if they want to conduct any business that they don’t want to be eavesdropped or manipulated.

Audrey Tang: I think the psychological damage would take longer to reverse, and it has a very harmful effect on the freedom of assembly and speech. The Internet was one of the very precious gifts given to people who care about freedom of speech and assembly.

Audrey Tang: I do worry about that, but it’s not catastrophic in existential sense. It is because, rather, if you care about freedom of speech and assembly, in which case there is a large threat, but I wouldn’t call it an existential threat.

Nicola Smith: Looking at that threat, there has been one heightened one, for example, this week of Mr. Li, who went to China, and we don’t exactly know why he’s been arrested. They hadn’t said but there has been talk of things that he was talking about on WeChat and openly discussing democracy.

Nicola Smith: Do you think that Taiwanese citizens heading to China should refrain from discussing things openly on the Internet? Do you think the danger has increased for Taiwanese going to the mainland?

Audrey Tang: WeChat... If there’s a particular app that somebody trusts enough, and its design is for communication, of course, one should fully audit the encrypted communication channels to protect oneself against eavesdropping.

Audrey Tang: With China’s Internet infrastructure, ensuring that is a very sophisticated task. Even if I am to travel to China, just to make sure of the security of the communication channels, I would take me hours to ensure this.

Audrey Tang: For people who are not equally sophisticated, you might as well assume that everything that you install there or communicate over there is actively being monitored. It is a safer assumption. That’s my assessment.

Nicola Smith: Would you warn Taiwanese citizens to be more careful on the Internet?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Be careful. First, for this particular case, I can’t really comment because I don’t really know. We don’t even know the details.

Audrey Tang: We also know that people who don’t think that they are saying anything that’s offending, may nevertheless, find that their sayings are being taken out of context, or even manufactured, around the world. This is not specific to China.

Audrey Tang: I would of course encourage people to use stronger security and encryption, to get into a habit of cryptographically signing all important messages, so that when there appears to be something from this person and it’s not cryptographically signed, then one can say, "This is not from me. You cannot use it to make me responsible for this Internet message."

Audrey Tang: All these requires a lot of dedication and desire to make it practical to people. I really commend the instant messaging companies who have, for a few years built end-to-end encryption into their products, whereas, before, they did not think this is important or worthy of the investment.

Audrey Tang: All the primary ones, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and LINE and so on, have end-to-end encryption now. Some has perfect forward secrecy built-in (e.g. Jitsi, ChatSecure). Using these apps in these modes is an essential protection, if they are not otherwise tampered, in its communication channels.

Nicola Smith: Yet, companies like WhatsApp, and not just WhatsApp, but other instant messaging companies using encryption, have come under fire from intelligence agencies for allowing then terrorists to operate with impunity. If you take the ones that had recently, they suspects there, with the terrorist there, he was using WhatsApp?

Audrey Tang: The terrorists always can use their own system instead of the system that’s compromised in security. This is the old saying: If you outlaw encryption, only outlaws have encryption. The terrorists, if they are determined to use a secure communication method, always find a way. This is not an excuse for backdooring systems.

Nicola Smith: No, absolutely. Where do you then draw the line? Where do you, when it comes to the issues of natural security, do you just say the intelligence agency should have absolutely no access to encrypted messages, or do you allow some leeway?

Audrey Tang: On the business between the platforms and the intelligence agencies, ultimately this is not something that the state can determine alone. Because if the state rushes to act on this, it would end up outlawing particular forms of cryptography, which doesn’t work.

Audrey Tang: Cryptographically speaking, the same cryptographic invention that enables blockchain and other useful communication channels, also enables the same issues that you talk about, which is the restriction or limitation of intelligence agencies’ power. The whole idea of blockchains is that you cannot tamper with it without putting a lot of cost into it.

Audrey Tang: I would say that it is a major part of the Internet now, and then if we want better monitoring, better crime-fighting abilities, we should work with the material, not against the material.

Nicola Smith: What do you mean working with? Do you mean infiltrating certain groups or...?

Audrey Tang: For example, there is this very old idea of how the blockchain-based Bitcoin cannot be taxed. This is a very similar analogy with end-to-end encryption disallowing anyone from listening to their conversation. It turns out it is possible to design a blockchain or a cryptocurrency that could be taxed. It just requires effort.

Audrey Tang: It requires consent from all parties, all the stakeholders involved. If you disallow or ban cryptocurrency, you don’t even get to develop this. It is by having all the stakeholders in the society agreeing that taxing some form of cryptocurrency is a good idea, how exactly to do that, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Enacting the technical changes should reflect the societal consensus. Do we actually get a better material that preserves the cash-like properties of blockchain, but nevertheless, can be taxed, if the general population think it’s a good idea?

Audrey Tang: The same thing applies to communication channels and expressions. As a society, we need to first come together and agree on some of the balances, about what we want in a future technology. It’s not that we look at technology and just take things that seems to be convenient as something that the society wants.

Nicola Smith: I read that the Administration wants to set and coordinate efforts to fight rumors. We touched on it briefly before, but what would you suggest as a technological way to tackle this kind of issue?

Audrey Tang: Rumor has it that I’m the person who coordinates this, but it is actually not true.

Audrey Tang: Minister Wu Tsung-Tsong is coordinating this effort.

Audrey Tang: I made some technical suggestions back in February, but when this whole conversation started around March, it was actually already out of my purview. I don’t even know where the notion came from...

Nicola Smith: Taipei Times? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: [laughs] Back to your original question.

Audrey Tang: Back in February, what I said is that there’s something that the government can do. We already could have clarifications in the form of frequently asked questions. In fact, if we don’t do that, people still write email to the ministries anyway.

Audrey Tang: They heard some rumors, and of course some would check with the Ministry of Health and Welfare, or the Ministry of Labor, and so on. We do already have a lot of public servants who spend a lot of their time just answering to these rumors and these questions, as part of their time tending to the Minister’s mailbox.

Audrey Tang: It’s all one-on-one, though. Even if you reply to hundreds, thousands of mails around a rumor that was spread around the new labor law, for example, there is no automation... It is an uphill battle that we’re bound to lose.

Audrey Tang: Because most people who heard the rumor will not check with the ministry, and then the ministry, even if they reply to every single email, they duplicate most of the answers anyway. It’s not a wise use of human time.

Audrey Tang: What I proposed, very simply, is to publish frequently asked questions, and then add some structured way for the existing website, so that people can link to one specific question instead of part of a huge document, as they were doing in February: A web page with hundreds of questions, which takes forever to scroll to anything.

Audrey Tang: What I proposed was very simple: Make one clarification per URL, make it easy to find, and base those questions not on imagined questions, but on actual questions that was asked to the ministry, of course removing all personal details, so they are phrased in a way that people can relate to it, like a question I would actually ask.

Audrey Tang: That’s it. Just making the government’s responses as easy, as viral to share, as any rumor. That’s my only technical recommendation.

Nicola Smith: I also saw reports of technology of showing fact-checks to people when they’re sharing...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, Facebook was already deploying that.

Nicola Smith: It’s basically just using the regular Facebook App?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Google also has this "claim review" idea, which is if you are a fact-checking site, and you claim that you have reviews on other website, Google and evaluates your reputation, and eventually shows your item next to the thing that you check in Google News.

Audrey Tang: Facebook works with Politifact and Snopes, and if something is being disputed by users, they send it to fact checkers. When somebody is about to share it, it may say it’s being disputed by Snopes and Politifact. "Are you sure you want to share it before you read the fact checking?" That’s the basic mechanism. I did not interfere in its design.

Nicola Smith: When you’re talking about people checking with ministry websites, how many people actually do that? Rumors spread so fast in the Internet, especially on contentious issues. How many people actually bother to check, or take the time to ask?

Audrey Tang: That’s where the gov-zero (g0v) movement comes in, with community efforts to basically take the clarification, including but not just from the government, into the channels that people actually use. There is a LINE bot project, and there is a NewsHelper project, which targets LINE and the Web version of Facebook, respectively.

Audrey Tang: If you install these plugins or add the bot as your LINE friend, all it takes is just to share that particular message to the bot, which we will then fact check, and then go back to you saying, that it has been clarified.

Audrey Tang: This is basically reaching the same endpoint as our message is being read, and using the same mechanism in the field to reach the person, and in future, maybe, it may also be that you can invite one of these bots into your chatroom, and then it will fact check all the links or the pictures.

Audrey Tang: I don’t know much about this project, but I’m aware of its existence. I mentioned its existence back in February, saying we need to work with it in mind, but they’re not particularly tied to the government.

Audrey Tang: Government news are also subject to fact-checking. If we spread rumors, the same mechanism will keep us in line.

Nicola Smith: Is there a concerted effort to actually get people working for the government to identify false rumors, and then to counter them in this way?

Audrey Tang: There’s already clarification links in pretty much all the major ministries. They’re been doing that since the newspaper days. I’m not aware of any new human resource requirements.

Nicola Smith: They would then just use this method, rather than your regular newspaper saying we got that wrong, maybe we could use this method and...?

Audrey Tang: Right. Basically making a FAQ on the ministry website, which they already do anyway. It was just not in a form that’s very easily shared.

Nicola Smith: Now they’re starting to share it in a more targeted way?

Audrey Tang: That’s my recommendation back in February. The Minister of Health and Welfare, and the Ministry of Labor have implemented some of it. Some other ministries have expressed an interest on it, but it’s not my purview anymore. I don’t hold regular meetings with them or anything.

Nicola Smith: You are essentially an expert adviser?

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Nicola Smith: How successful do you think that’s going to be, that method, of a more targeted point where people are in Facebook, you are in other social media channels?

Audrey Tang: If there’s anything we learned from the spam epic, it’s that one single method never works by itself. It takes a collective awareness that whatever message that one finds comfortable with, may not be entirely fact-checked. It requires a much more deeper understanding on how journalism works.

Audrey Tang: We’re putting this also into our new education curriculum, hopefully starting next year. We’re working on education material on that as well. Then again, it will not be fixed by education alone.

Audrey Tang: It takes technological, it takes educational, it takes an awareness of people’s responsibility to each other, for as long as it takes, it would take all sides to solve this. Eventually we’ll solve it.

Nicola Smith: What is going to be added to the curriculum?

Audrey Tang: It’s called "Information Technology and Media Literacy". It was designed so that it is not as its own study, but integrates with all studies, and starting throughout the whole K-12. Every single part of the curriculum needs to find its link to the literacy points.

Audrey Tang: The point being, for example, being able to look at one argument, and find its pros and cons, the debate techniques, the fallacies that it’s falling under. Looking at propaganda, knowing it as propaganda. Learn what sources are, the basic journalism training, and how this changes or is going to change in the information society.

Audrey Tang: Also, we try to get people into this idea that whatever view that they are perusing, critical thinking and a balanced view is always useful to their studies, as someone who learns. Because otherwise you might as well be learning from random sources, which may not actually be apparent, and may have other agenda other than helping you to learn.

Nicola Smith: That’s going to be introduced next year?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, hopefully.

Nicola Smith: Who’s designed the course?

Audrey Tang: NAER. The National Academy of Educational Research. I was one of the development committee members, before I was made a minister. Nowadays I don’t work on the curriculum anymore, but I did enjoy working on it.

Nicola Smith: Is this an idea that you’ve been pushing as a minister that kids need to be educated better?

Audrey Tang: Of course. This is to say, literacy is the foundation.

Nicola Smith: Will children also be taught about encryption? Is that something that you...?

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Nicola Smith: In schools, to be taught about how to encrypt those messages?

Audrey Tang: It’s integrated. If it’s classes about the use of social media, for example making an online presentation of their own projects, it is more media-like course, then security is an essential part of it. In other cases it may be security on a more defensive nature, like how to identify illegitimate website, a fake domain phishing, things like that.

Audrey Tang: It may be designed differently, and may be implemented differently across schools, because for this new curriculum, we put a lot more autonomy to the individual schools, so that they can design the implementation curriculum, with particular details, particular fields, particular interests, or particular composition of the students.

Audrey Tang: We are not hard-coding classes, instead we are saying that you have to achieve these things... We’re saying that the literacy means at least awareness of these things, and schools can work with the text book makers to design coherent, autonomous learning materials.

Nicola Smith: Would you say that Taiwan is pioneering in this field by educating young people?

Audrey Tang: When we were working in the NAER, we talked a lot about Finland. We talked a lot about countries like Estonia, with its e-citizenship awareness programs. I wouldn’t call us pioneers... [laughs]

Nicola Smith: But in Asia, would you say that Taiwan is taking a leading role...?

Audrey Tang: I would say we take freedom of speech much more seriously that most other Asian countries. Many other Asian countries see it as a utility value, which could be traded if some other value of higher utility, for example if national security is at risk.

Audrey Tang: For many people here, it’s a core value, not utility value. We have to design our curriculum, our cybersecurity agenda, our whole response to rumors, by taking in freedom of expression as a core value. We are unique in that around Asia, I would say.

Nicola Smith: Are there lessons in this that Taiwan could teach the world, address the world, do you think?

Audrey Tang: If we do figure out some combination, a cocktail method that does something about this, then of course we’ll be very happy to contribute. They will take a long time to develop, though.

Nicola Smith: You are making the effort?

Audrey Tang: As you said, as a technical adviser. I’m not leading any effort, though...

Audrey Tang: The paradox of this is that leading an effort may actually backfire. You don’t see one particular sector, or one particular department leading the whole solution, because the solution space is vast.

Audrey Tang: It took a swarm-like approach for 1,000 approaches to appear, 900 approaches to fail, the other 100 to converge, before we arrived to a blend that actually made emails work better. I expect very much the same thing here.

Audrey Tang: Because we are still in the early days, I think just mandating one particular way would be like over-investing in particular technologies. They way we’re working now is just to get all practitioners on the same page, know what every other practitioner is doing, and then get people more room to think about this issue, and then we will see thousands of different approaches emerge.

Nicola Smith: You’ve describe yourself as a civic hacker before, how do you define that?

Audrey Tang: A hacker is someone who immerse themselves into a system, and knows its details. If someone then exploits those details, that is a black hat hacker. If someone then makes a better system by patching the old system, that is a white hat hacker, but I’m neither. I make entirely new systems. I don’t even touch the old system.

Audrey Tang: Basically, I’m a hacker in the sense that I’m trying to learn where the public service works or not, but we’re not patching it or exploiting it. We’re trying to come up with a different way of making policy, starting small but gradually expanding, so that people can learn there is a different way, a more inclusive way to make policies, so more and more policies can be made this way.

Audrey Tang: That’s essentially what we call open-source governance. Just taking the lessons we learned from Internet community, and see whether its applicable to public service as well.

Nicola Smith: I’ve just got a couple of questions.

Audrey Tang: It’s fine.

Nicola Smith: [laughs] OK. Time is ticking on.

Audrey Tang: No, it’s fine.

Nicola Smith: Again, I’ve got a couple of questions, a bit off topic. You mentioned in the context of propaganda that’s coming out of the issue of same sex marriage. That’s become a very contentious issue. Gender identification, same-sex marriage at the moment, it’s a political topic.

Audrey Tang: It is.

Nicola Smith: Is there anything -- given your experience in gender identification -- is there a message that you have, in particular, on this issue?

Audrey Tang: About this particular issue? I am not that into marriage myself, so I refrain from sending any messages, but I do think that people who care about marriage -- gay people or straight people -- they have more in common with each other than they do have with me. It is my sincere hope that they come to agreement on what to do with marriage.

Nicola Smith: Politically, you’re also coined as the youngest minister of the cabinet. One of the reasons that’s put forward was that you can bridge this generation gap. How do you see Taiwan’s youth going forward politically?

Nicola Smith: Do you think that Taiwanese younger generation will be happy to co-exist with trying out with their own individual identity?

Audrey Tang: Just a quick fact-check, I’m the youngest ever Minister without Portfolio, but I think Minister Cheng Li-chiun, when she first entered the cabinet in 2004, was one year younger than me. She headed the youth development administration. Interestingly, I’m responsible also for the youth advisory council in this administration.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a generational gap. There is a gap, but it is between scarcity and abundance. People who think in terms of abundance, who thinks in terms of thing that when shared actually becomes more. People who think in terms of scarcity, would think of goods that when shared becomes less.

Audrey Tang: There is a gap because it is a fundamental different attitude between what scarcity and abundance. The reality is a mixture of these two.

Audrey Tang: There is resource that are scarce which are becoming more abundant. There are also resources that are abundant that are under threat of becoming scarce, the trust in Internet being one.

Audrey Tang: The work here is not just getting the so-called older generation to bridge the gap, so that they can converse with the new generation, but also for the new generation to not take everything for granted, so they can think and empathize with people who do manage scarce resources.

Audrey Tang: Then, maybe we can collectively find a way toward abundance because it’s a preference, but not by ignoring each others’ reality. We see a lot of youth advisory council members suggesting fantastic ideas, such as universal basic income. When talking with the premier and with the other ministers, they also gradually become aware that it’s not just about building a bridge across a river, it’s about acknowledging how wide exactly is the river.

Audrey Tang: Maybe in the end it’s about helicopters, it’s not about bridge-building anymore. It’s not about any particular mechanism, it’s about collectively trying to find out what the problems and the visions of the society are, rather than jumping into any particular solutions.

Audrey Tang: It is true that people sometimes jump to solutions. If you work exclusively with abundant resources, trying out experiments cost nothing. You can try 10 ideas every day. In many other areas it’s not like that; there may be a lot of cost for trying.

Audrey Tang: For the older generation, my message is to re-evaluate with new organizational and technological advances. Which part of previous scarce resources are now actually abundant, and should be given more freedom to innovate?

Audrey Tang: My message to the younger generation would be to recognize what things are not yet abundant, that are actual scarce and really need to be collectively decided and managed, rather than just imagine everything is going to be digitally transformed. That’s my main message.

Nicola Smith: Is there a generational gap? Do you think the Taiwanese youth are moving in a different direction, perhaps with previous generations, in terms of how they identify as Taiwanese?

Audrey Tang: You are asking the one wrong person here; as an anarchist, I don’t even have a national identification... When I make contributions, I think of not just human beings, but future species that may enjoy the fruit of the work. I don’t even think in terms of speciesism, let alone nationalism.

Audrey Tang: It is true that many young people, they are much more comfortable of being eclectic in their identification. Nationality may be one identification, but not always the primary one, not just nationality. Whereas the older generation, because of the the martial law and everything, they tend to think that’s very important, maybe key, because it’s existential.

Audrey Tang: The younger generation may no longer think it’s existential, so maybe they identify more as, for example, a Jazz player. It’s more about overlapping communities nowadays, with better access to globalized cultures. That is becoming even more so in the case of 20-something people.

Nicola Smith: One last thing is this puzzle pieces they got here. Maybe you can shed some light on it. There seems to be a lot of hackers in the very general sense from Taiwan who go abroad, and then seem to get into trouble abroad?

Audrey Tang: Like what?

Nicola Smith: It just seems to be a lot of stories in the press about, either in Africa, or they are in Thailand, or in Spain. What is it? Where is the attraction of Taiwanese hackers to go abroad and then hack from foreign source? What is this phenomenon? I haven’t seen it in other places.

Audrey Tang: There is a lot of general interest among people on cybersecurity. The equipment here is cheap. One can get easy access to pretty much all the electronics they need to further their skills. I don’t know that much about going abroad, though.

Audrey Tang: The case you mentioned, I am aware of this but it never occurred to me that it is particular to Taiwan. [laughs]

Nicola Smith: It’s just something as an outsider coming here I notice it. Maybe it’s me not getting used to it, actually.

Audrey Tang: Of course, there is mobility. Cybersecurity is one of the skills that if you have it, you can find employment pretty much anywhere in the world. It contributes to the mobility. Other than that, I don’t know. I haven’t thought of it this way.

Audrey Tang: Cybersecurity is an interesting, economically sustainable skill. I don’t know that much about the foreign aspect.

Nicola Smith: How should the government respond then to these events? Because a lot of these young people who have gone abroad, they are hacking then being extradited to China. How should the Taiwanese government respond to that?

Audrey Tang: Through its normal official means. It’s a matter of our mainland affairs commission. I think the mainland affairs commission is working very hard to get some sort of friendly collaboration with the mainland.

Audrey Tang: We mean very well when working on matters like this. Other than that, I don’t know.

Audrey Tang: About the fact that Taiwan is not party to the international court of justice... Well this is just a reality; I don’t have any more comments.

Nicola Smith: OK. Thank you so much for your time. I’ve taken up a lot of your time. It’s been really interesting. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you for interviewing.