When I went into the Cabinet, one of the conditions of me joining is that I will look at no confidential information. No national secrets, not even things marked as confidential, secret, or top secret will ever be seen by me.

Snowden is instrumental in mainstreaming concerns in early hacker culture. Some of the concerns, anyway.

There’s always this tinfoil part of the previous conversation around Database Nation, and so on, but after Snowden the argument shifted so that the privacy and all the values that we upheld as the early hacker culture are now mainstream.

To me, it’s not that much a shock of what Snowden has revealed. Being part of the early cypherpunks, seeing and participating in Freenet and P2P cultures, none of this is news. I do think Snowden makes it much more apparent, and he makes the arguments convincing in a way ...

It’s hard to say. I haven’t went through the entire Snowden revelations. For Taiwan, many of the things that he revealed are not news. Around 2001, 2002, when the Golden Shield project begins in Mainland China, we became acutely aware of surveillance, Internet censorship, and all these things that Snowden ...

No, she doesn’t mean that I was convicted or anything.

There’s this Aaron Swartz, Snowden, Julian spectrum. There’s no clear line where criminal activity begins. It’s all a very gray area. But I’m firmly on the Aaron Swartz end of the spectrum.

The line’s very blur now. What Julian is doing is not black‑hat hacking either.

In the Kevin Mitnick sense? No.

I’m much more active in the regulations, the policy‑making, and so on.

I am. I don’t get to program as much after being the Digital Minister. That’s one of the things that I miss. [laughs] I still engage in coding jams, hackathons, and hacking sessions, maybe once a week for an afternoon or so, but I wouldn’t say that I’m a career ...

No. I have basic understanding of info security, but it’s not my special field.

A black hat will use it for nefarious purposes. I’m a hacker without a hat, meaning that I tend to create new systems that doesn’t suffer as much as the old systems was, so a creative hacker, the Richard Tomlinsons.

Someone who will immerse themself into a system and making creative use of it. If you immerse yourself into a system, you tend to see the loopholes. Now, a white‑hat hacker will inform the person and patch, fix the system.

I did see that. Ex‑hacker.

That’s right. 35, turning 36.

There were nine ministers without portfolio. If you write "Digital Minister," everybody knows it’s me. Otherwise it’s one of nine. That is accurate.

This is a very interesting part. Thank you so much. Here it says "minister without portfolio," but if you flip it around, it says "Digital Minister."

Let me get my...

That’s right.

You’re just fact checking.

Anything I can help with or talk about?

...before we publish it.

You can find it at track.PDIS.tw maybe a few days afterwards. I will send you a draft, so you can fix my typos...

As is our customs here, are you OK with us publishing the transcript of our conversation?

Thank you. Perfect.

That’s great.

That’s all I have here. Anything you would like to ask? [laughs]

Exactly, asking the right question.

Or even experience design. These very soft kind of science.

Exactly.

It really is imminent for all the existing industries to embrace this kind of data‑based decision‑making. I’m personally very interested in seeing this happen.

One part because, of course, a decade ago mainland China was not yet this all‑digital marketplace. Now, mainland China is being digitalized rapidly itself. Also, now that we have this new south‑bound strategy, where we need to link to the other Asian hubs, which are all aiming to become data‑first ...

This, I think, we haven’t yet finalized and that we will welcome advisers. Actually, we should follow‑up over email, because I do have another meeting now. This is something that I am personally very interested in, because for a lot of existing industry here in Taiwan, for the past few ...

In the Digital Nation Plan, we are working on solidifying the implementation. Is it per industry sector? Is it better to have, as you said, some aggregation within a larger sector? Or whether it is actually better to have some cross‑sectoral training workshops, as you mentioned?

Of the digital disruption training for people who already are in the industry, in addition to some key metrics, like saying 5,000 people a year, they actually need to be in one of those ‑‑ I think we target 100 companies per year ‑‑ to identify about 100 companies a ...

Instead you often have a lot of ad-hoc dashboards.

10‑20 people?

That’s great. So it’s one or two of your facilitators and then a workshop of how many, 20, 30 people?

We’re still formulating the detailed projects, but that’s the three main cross‑disciplinary angles of the Digital Nation Plan.

We do also want to offer training courses for them. This would not be like pick a greenfield project, but how to digitally transform your existing business. That will be a much shorter term, much more focused, but that also requires a higher level of expertise from the lecturers because ...

That’s the problem‑solving part. The other part, the third part, is for people who are already engaging one of those industries which are undergoing digital transformation, that’s the polite term, or being destructed.

Those vertical open‑source stacks, we would want people to make real‑world projects around those instead of just learning one part of the stack, which doesn’t really do anything.

For example, we have four levels from being an open‑source user all the way to a contributor, to a maintainer, and so on. Then we focus on some interesting packages that we think are very foundational, like maybe the Docker ecosystem, that’s one of the stacks, and then TensorFlow, that’s ...

I think there’s a lot of room here. In the Digital Nation Plan, there’s three different levels. One is the K12 level, which I have talked about a little bit. Then there’s the bachelor and master level in which we try to focus on a lot of open‑source and open‑data‑based ...

Have you worked with the K12 level, or it’s always university‑level people? Or you don’t?

We don’t say anti‑disciplinary because that will offend some professors, but we do say cross‑disciplinary will be the default education mode going forward.

Good to know.

Doesn’t that add a lot of overhead to your work?

You, of course, want to own your tools, and know how it develops, and work with the wider open‑source community, but you also want to be agnostic so that when people really want IBM or really love IBM, you can still operate within their organization limits.