Thank you. Really good questions. Thank you. Live long and prosper.

So, there’s a lot of work in my ministry on this communication resilience, working with not just microwave stations, but also low-Earth orbit, like OneWeb; mid-Earth, like SES, ensuring that our three major telecoms, if only one is left in a region, then there’s a seamless mobile disaster roaming. So, ...

So, I think communication resilience, although we didn’t talk about this, is equally important because if, let’s say, somebody received a foreign information manipulation or interference and right afterward, the internet is down, then that actually is another of those hybrid or coordinated attack scenarios that we didn’t get to ...

Yeah, I understand you asked all about the information layer, but we have also been preparing for earthquakes and very large earthquakes and so on, the kinetic layer. And earlier this year, the subsea cables between Matsu and Taiwan, both of them were cut within the same week by vehicles ...

So, no, I think we’re very much about resilience. It doesn’t quite matter if the adversary mounted a successful attack or a successful breach and so on, as long as we have three or more layers of defense, so as to stop them from laterally moving and they would then ...

And because that is the main battlefield, so to speak, the fear, uncertainty, doubt is designed to keep us up at night so that we don’t respond to novel threats with novel defenses. Because if someone doesn’t sleep well, then they don’t learn, the short-term memory doesn’t write to long-term ...

The key performance indicator that I gave to now head of the administration of cybersecurity, previously director general of information system management, Dr. Hsieh, was that she sleeps sufficiently every night and she needs to, at a time, report every day to me how many hours she slept.

So, I think the main idea here is just to stay agile and to make a good threat indicator sharing, joint defense, and so on with other friendly democracies. And so, because we’re just the first among many elections next year, so I think what we have learned is of ...

Yeah, I think it’s just about agility. During the pandemic, we take pride in getting the newest information from each and every one who want to call the hotline, 1922 at the time, and respond to it in the everyday 2 p.m. press conference. And the new suggestions to the ...

Now, with that said, our main focus now is just to ensure that the official accounts of our ministries, our government officials are of course not taken over, but also have a shared presence when it comes to say the 111 SMS platform, a shared short URL at gov.tw so ...

So, although, as I mentioned, the campaign politics doesn’t use X.com that much, I think community notes in general, not necessarily the specific implementation, but this idea of collective intelligence contribution into clarification is widely shared with the Taiwanese civil society, specifically Cofacts project, which is now also collaboratively training ...

Yeah, so I want to give x.com some credit because I sounded a little bit… So, X.com does have a very good idea, that is community notes, partly inspired by the Polis algorithm that I worked on throughout the past few years. Community notes highlight the bipartisan bridge-making, contextualizing narratives, ...

Of course, I use Twitter all the time, but maybe it’s just me.

Yeah, I would say X.com is not having a very big presence in Taiwanese politics. Mostly, I think in Taiwanese politics, some politicians do have an X account, but if you count the posts and the reactions they get versus, say, Facebook, or YouTube and so on, it’s minuscule. This ...

I would say it has grown on specific areas, especially around investment fraud and scamming, which was a real issue in Taiwan and in other countries. And every time there is such a strong societal pressure, they have reacted quite positively, I would say, to the new amendments, to the ...

So, I think Taiwan is one of the first places, if not the first, where Facebook implemented this full civic integrity measure. I think partly because of a very clear consensus between civil society, journalists and the government, and also because of the real threat of social sanction at the ...

And so, that was during my service as administrator of a portfolio, so not MODA, just to say it up front. So, at the time, I think those major platforms faced real pressure, as in social sanctions and so on, if they do not comply to the campaign finance norms, ...

I wouldn’t say so. I think their commitment was renewed in 2018-19, right after our mayoral election slash referenda. At that time, there’s a lot of civil society pressure on them because it was well known at the time that a foreign actor, although they cannot pay campaign sponsorship, can ...

And of course, this is not all encompassing, it’s just three very specific things. But I hope this financial investment scam is a good example for other countries to follow.

So, just use the last one as example. Currently, say Facebook or any other major platform, if they have this advertisement that is deepfake or shallowly fake to be an investment scam, and people tell them that, you know, this is not me, this is a scam and people flag ...

Yes, so we have amended three acts, not the ministry, the Taiwanese government have amended three acts, respectively around election interference, about non-consensual intimate images, especially synthetic ones, and around investment scams and fraud.

And again, this recontextualization helps the civil society to both point out our mistakes and suggest better improvements, but also more fully understand the policy landscape. So, as not to be captured by an oversimplifying message or rage or things like that.

So, this is a general idea. And of course, in my ministry, we also actively work with civil society to ensure that they have the same access to the policymaking context. So, like all my monthly ministerial meeting transcript is open. We open the transcript of not just this interview, ...

So, although, of course, journalism is not civil society, of course, but actually it points to the right direction where both the government and civil society should look at, which is journalism to the infodemic, is like epidemiologists to the pandemic, right? It is information integrity work that’s actively not ...

So, everyone can participate in information integrity work, chief among them, of course, is the professional journalists. So, we work with professional journalists in ensuring that they can access to the digital transformation resources. There is a fund specifically for that set up at Google, where in the talks with ...

Certainly. I think the idea here is very simple. It’s that competence when it comes to media is more important than just literacy. Literacy is when you consume information. Competence is when you help recontextualize to instill contextual confidence to the information, ensuring its integrity.

So, yeah, I would say that is just more coordination and more joint drills and defense and so on on our end and in anticipation of even more coordination on the attacker’s end.

But back then, I think it was a wake-up call to many. So, I would say since last August to this year, we’re also coordinating much more closely within, of course, my ministry, but also the new Cybersecurity Institute, the NICS, or National Institute of Cybersecurity. The NICS works closely ...

So, of course, we very quickly upgraded our system and mitigated that. In fact, the first official document I signed was a public consultation for how should we just bring in the signboards in the public areas run by, say, the rail station and so on. And so now they’re ...

So, for example, when the foreign cyber-attacks have changed the signboards outside of the Taiwan Rail Station to a hate message against Speaker Pelosi, naturally, the journalists would want to check the ministry websites to see what’s going on and to maybe clarify the rumor about the ministry has been ...

Well, I mean, last August was, to me, the first time to see a highly coordinated both information manipulation and also cyber-attack interference. Previously, these two are not as tightly coordinated as last August.

And so, I think in general, this threat sensing part, we are a contributor to the international conversation about those emerging technologies. And we can also help doing the testing and certification and evaluation, which is going to be an international effort as well.

So, when it comes to implementing what we call digital public infrastructures or DPIs, we are more nimble. We can switch to passwordlessness quicker. We can implement zero trust quicker. We can do a comprehensive FidO rollout nationally. We can do a lot of AI evaluation and certification. And in ...

I think one of the contributions we make is that because we’re more agile and we have co-leads, the teams that we work together very closely during the pandemic, into a new ministry. That’s the Ministry of Digital Affairs, which combines not just cybersecurity, but also platform economy, especially around ...

As you correctly mentioned, it’s an ongoing effort that has been going on for quite a while. We have the Digital Economy Forum, we have the ongoing US-Taiwan Initiative on 21st Century Trade, and many other venues where we share the best or at least better practices.

And so, in addition to finding vulnerabilities and sharing joint defense strategies, I was also in the US to basically push for this idea of race to safety, meaning that the frontier AI labs, in particular, META, but also, of course, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and so on, need to adopt ...

Yeah, definitely. So, it was right before this October’s cyber offensive and defensive exercise or a code, which we organized. And there’s 18 friendly countries, experts who join us physically in Taiwan. And we’re happy that the US team also worked with us as a red team, meaning that in ...

So, I would say at the background, of course, the ongoing threat of foreign cyber-attack interference is always there. It’s just that depending on the specific events and so on, it may spike.

So, I think the point I’m making is that the NSC, our National Security Council Secretary-General Wellington Koo, said quite publicly that every day there’s millions, I think he said around 5 million, cyber-attack attempts every day. So, when we’re talking about a normal day, we’re talking about like 5 ...

Well, as I mentioned, the 23 times more than the previous daily peak last August was not the only time that this happened. Actually, earlier this year, when Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, our president, visited the US, there was also a very comparable foreign cyber-attack slash interference that happened. The reason ...

And so, I’m cautiously optimistic that even though the cost has massively lowered for someone who is not versed in a local culture to imitate someone else persuasively under the target culture, we can still have the awareness and societal resilience to counter those operations.

And so, yeah, recently, I think there is a societal recognition, there’s some news about essentially using VPN to fake basically a threat to a certain opinion leader. But it turns out that someone threated themselves via simulated persona online and so on. And that is actually quite a big ...

Yeah. So, in terms of scamming, this has already happened, including voice cloning and messages and so on. Whether it is used in the election context or not depends on the countermeasures that we’re taking. Because after all, while the cost has lowered, it is not zero, it is not ...

This is the kind of supernumerous threats that I’m describing here.

But now what this generation of AI tool does is not to markedly increase the quality of such scams, but rather to massively lower the cost. That is to say, as long as you have one domain expert and have the expert training the model, then you get maybe 80% ...

As I mentioned, this is mostly about lowering the cost. Previously, if you want to do precision persuasion or scamming and so on, you need someone who is versed in the local culture to do that. So, you can’t always do spear phishing or to do very elaborate scamming calls ...

And so, yeah, I wouldn’t use the future tense. Of course, all the frontier like GPT and so on have safety measures, but it is actually, if you look at the latest model like Mistral or Zephyr and so on, it is already exceeding the free ChatGPT in terms of ...

On the other hand, the technologies I talked about, the voice cloning and so on, many of which are just, you know, in the wild. That is to say, anyone can download and use them for free. And there are also open models with like on Hugging Face and so ...

Well, I mean, if you mean AI just as in ChatGPT or Claude or Bard, of course, maybe none of them are explicitly a reseller of these frontier AI models, because these have safety measures that prevents them to be used for such purposes.

There’s no robocalls or fraud calls in the US?