Thank you.

In terms of school, reconstruction, in terms of additional layers, truly the sky is the limit. Now that we have our delegate, my colleague physically in Ukraine, we can open more doors. As I said, we stand together in our common struggle against autocracy.

Yes, they’re literally in the front line.

Yes, it’s a resounding success, and I look forward to more collaboration with Lithuania, but also with other DFI countries that are on the front line.

Yes. Also, I would like to thank our Taiwanese representative office in Lithuania for facilitating this travel, and also in a joint project to help Ukraine, our representative office in Poland also did a lot.

That’s what the moda staff is currently working to ensure that those two very digitally powerful systems can interoperate with one another.

Their official documents are all electronically signed and verified. Across these two jurisdictions, most of the actual documents as exchanged are still based on paper, because we don’t yet cross-recognize each other’s electronic signatures in many critical commercial transactions.

Maybe not starting a company because I’m still a public servant, but simply signing documents, because previously, we have in Taiwan pretty good electronics signing capabilities. All my official documents could be electronically signed. In Lithuania too, they’re tax filing for personal tax like Taiwan also take a couple of ...

The E-residency idea transcends borders and it allows us to in addition of signing MOUs electronically, also potentially opening bank accounts, starting companies, drastically lowering the transaction costs when it comes to doing business between Taiwan and Lithuania.

No. I’m the first minister to become a Lithuanian E-resident. There’s several Taiwanese that was already curious enough to be a Lithuanian E-resident. They’re like our citizen’s digital certificates which we also issue to residents from abroad.

Also, we’re looking forward to more MOUs signed — may be on paper, maybe electronically — between our ministry or NICS or the democracy network with our Lithuanian counterparts. More news in a couple of months.

It’s expected that later this year, the Startups and the Unicorns, Fintech, and also cyber security-related companies from Lithuania would visit us here in Taipei to suss out the details.

This is our goal in joining our investment together in making sure that the latest and the greatest ideas can propagate throughout the DFI network.

It’s not that we’re going to tell them how to use those technology, but we can share some of the research and development with them. They also have their own research and development capabilities, so once they learn something in terms of resilience, they can also feedback.

These countries share the same values when it comes to democratic resilience, and some of them are also in the frontline so to speak and have to plan their cyber defense for the worst. To these democracies, we say that first, the NICS when they’re doing the research, awareness on ...

As a chair of NICS, we have recently in our board meeting discuss our ways to invest with countries that have signed the DFI — the Declaration for the Future of the Internet — along with Taiwan, along with the US, Ukraine, Lithuania, they’re all DFI-signing countries.

To demonstrate to the world, through Starlink…

These two concerns the public cloud backup, as well as the cyber resilience via satellites are also our priority areas and is within moda’s purview. I sincerely believe that we do not need to reinvent the wheel — so to speak — and can share our no house and our ...

To that end, they are also working to modernize their data storage systems and communication systems to focus on a secure use of the public cloud for backup purposes, and also the non-geostationary satellites in order to maintain connectivity even when the fiber optics and audio landlines are cut.

Sure. For example, Lithuania, as Estonia and many other jurisdictions in that region is constantly planning what could happen and what would happen if there’s a disaster affecting their data storage.

That’s sharing know-how. The E3 was and still is the incubator of much of Taiwan semiconductor supply chain. Sharing this know-how is very important as we are sharing our cyber resilience, no housing with Lithuania.

Whether they’re interested in design or coding or anything that can be delivered over the Internet, it means that they can still earn a living when they finish education with the global economy.

When the children are competent in terms of co-creation, they naturally get access to a wider global digital economy. That is to say, their work even when their homeland is still under reconstruction, is not limited to the physical neighborhood, but rather has the potential to extend to a global ...

Now, because we have plenty of experience building that kind of education systems on a digital layer, we want to help Ukraine, and Lithuania is a great partner in this because they are closer to Ukraine and also understands their actual needs on the ground.

This provides not just resilience on connectivity but also makes what was used to be literacy, that is consuming standardized material into competence that the students can co-create with each other with the tablets or the notebook when they get older as a co-creation device.

Certainly. I talked to the Minister of Economy and Innovation, Armonaitė, in Lithuania. She believes that Taiwan can help to provide jointly with Lithuania a digital layer when it comes to digital education. Certainly in Taiwan starting last year, all our schoolchildren have tablets when they learn anything in school.

The best counter move for us is not escalation, but to simply prove that democracy can deliver, and sometimes better when it comes to large societal challenges.

As I’ve told BBC HARDtalk: Strategic clarity is not escalation. We’re certainly not the escalating party. The main propaganda if you will, was basically that only authoritarian models are effective in terms of responding to the societal challenges such as pandemic or the infodemic.

Exactly. They feed into one another.

Both cyberattacks in terms of denial of service and also information manipulation combined in a hybrid way, and that is what we face on a daily basis. It’s basically a multi-pronged approach to destabilize our trust in democratic institutions.

The height of which, in a single day, 23 more times than the previous peak of the denial of service. Now, to keep a website busy, like keep dialing to keep a telephone line busy, doesn’t do by itself much. When coupled with disinformation, with harmful information that says, “Oh, ...

Before we even formed as a new ministry last August, early August, there was a military drill if you remember, following the US speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit. It’s not just a military drill, it’s also a cyber drill. We have seen, for example, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the President’s ...

That dialogue platform is also our purview. Also on the National Institute of Cybersecurity or NICE, our role is to ensure that all the governmental agencies, critical infrastructure, and so on, upgrade to the latest versions of the cybersecurity strategic system, including the zero trust architecture and also the T ...

Making sure that the journalists get a fair coverage as well as reasonable pay from the global multinational social media companies to ensure that they could prosper instead of just the global multinational companies dominating social media, taking away their journalists.

Sure. The moda’s call is to enhance the digital resilience for all. By resilience, we mean, for example, communication resilience that enables us to still communicate over satellites even when our submarine cables are cut by large earthquakes, natural, or the societal resilience.

From Taiwan, our work along with Lithuania and many others in the democracy network, is to show that democracy can deliver even better than authoritarian models.

A couple of years ago, we heard many ideas such as “only authoritarianism top-down social control is able to overcome the pandemic.” Nowadays, we know it’s not a fact, [laughs] but it’s been the rhetoric we’ve been hearing for quite some time now.

Freedom is never free. We have to keep innovating to make sure that democracy resonates with not just our people, but also with the democracy network — that is to say, people who believe in democracy and now connected through digital means, so that we’re in a sense neighbors, even ...

Because of that, the world over supported them in their resistance. I would say that it resonated with our own experience in setting up communication resilience for Taiwan.

Yeah, definitely. Just like us, they were facing overwhelming odds at the time, but the ideas of societal resilience, that is to say, nonviolent resistance coupled with communication technology — they were defending the TV tower. There was real-time satellite coverage that took the image, the video we just saw, ...

Still a hacktivist.

Live long and prosper.

Thank you.

Instead or in addition to that, think about your neighborhood in a worldwide community that really cares about what’s happening in Ukraine and your unique experience of both strength and vulnerability is of tremendous importance to the communities worldwide, who would join you in co-creation for a better future together.

I would say that your neighbors are the people who share the same values as you. With the communication infrastructure, with the laptops and notebooks that Taiwan can help provide, I wish that you think beyond the immediate neighborhood, which is, as you said, captured by a feudal era war.

This is why worldwide co-creation is native to the digital natives. We’re very happy that in Taiwan, through lifelong education, through reverse mentorship by young people to the older people in the cabinet, and so on, we’ve been able to share the wisdom of the elderly generation with the agility ...

Indeed, people who are aligned value wise, despite their timezone differences, rapidly identify one another and start new projects like Wikipedia and so on that breaks the previous preconceptions of what was possible for working with essentially people you have never met face to face across a large distance.

Intergenerational solidarity is very important. The young people who are digital natives are like ambassadors, I guess, that helps the digital immigrants, such as me, I migrated when I was 12, to be acquainted with the digital world, which by default knows no borders.

To overcome the danger, we need to commit to build the digital equivalent of town halls, of public parks, of university campuses, of museums, libraries and national parks outlined so as to promote pro-social conversations that furthers democracy. This is every bit as important as the public constructions and infrastructures ...

On the other hand, if, as I mentioned, in the digital public spaces, we hold ourselves to account as government officials, the rough consensus co-created by people’s petitions, by the deliberative democratic town halls, and so on, then the same digital spaces may be repurposed into something that is a ...