Great to meet you.

Yeah, I am as well. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Thank you.

Yeah. And I certainly worked with a number of people much smarter than me in that space and learned a ton from them. But yeah, if I can be helpful, even in just connecting you to the folks who, the TAC product center, the acquisition experience program manager that runs ...

Oh, is there really? Okay yeah, so the Snowmobilers in Canada is one of the most active groups on our open-source page when we pushed it out there. But what I really love about the TAK product family is that that software has about eight vendors who regularly contribute to ...

And so, one, it allowed us to work a little bit with one vendor and then move over to a different vendor. Maybe this one had specialization in building the identity piece of a solution, and this one was really good at authentication. So, that was one scenario we used ...

The second space that I think is really useful, and you talked about sort of cheap and cheerful… Oftentimes, I made an effort when we were awarding contracts to have a number of vendors that were working well together. And we often advocated for what’s called in the US was ...

And what we found is, one, the DoD represents a quite significant market for many of those companies, and so they were willing to be participants. But the second is, for many of them, they actually were just looking for someone to be the convening function, because outside of the ...

But what we used it for as well was a bit of a bureaucracy mechanism to get various vendors to play together and their technology to work seamlessly. So, the idea of the program was intentional redundancy of every point of security. So, if you have one layer of encryption, ...

Yeah, no, I think that’s a space when I was working in our Department of Defense, I was incredibly passionate about. So, we have a program that’s called Commercial Solutions for Classified, right? But the idea was taking a number of commercial technologies and layer them together, and that provides ...

Yeah.

Yeah, I plan to come back again later this summer and have a number of teammates who’ve been spending time here trying to understand places of need and areas where we can help.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. No, that makes good sense. And you’ve given me a lot to follow up on, so I will do my research and revert.

Okay. Yeah, so I guess my really my last question, and I really appreciate all your patience with my hundreds of questions. But for a small company like ours that works with the US government, works with international governments and is really passionate about many of the topics we’ve talked ...

Oh, that’s great.

Do you think we’ll get worldwide adoption or broader adoption?

I mean, particularly the trend in autocratic countries seems to be the opposite direction, right? Incredibly invasive, which is hurting the disenfranchised and underserved populations even more than they already were. And so, I like this swing in the opposite direction.

Yeah, I mean, that’s a space I’m really interested in because I like the idea of being able to have a verifiable identity that is also protecting an anonymized persona.

Really? Oh, wow.

And as we looked at it, he came up with what I thought was pretty clever. He calls it the 1-9-90 model, where you have about 1 percent of people on social media who create content, about 9 percent of people who amplify it, influence it, direct it around, and ...

Yeah, that’s interesting. So, my company, Orbis Operations, we’ve spent a lot of time looking at that, particularly trying to understand malicious efforts to influence a population. So, one of the things that a really bright analyst who works for me talked about, it sounds very similar, is our need ...

The other topic… It’s sort of a broad topic, but sort of thinking about disinformation and malign influence having an impact on a population. I tend to look at the sort of young population, but sort of across the spectrum. Is that something that falls under MODA’S remit? And if ...

Wow, that’s an incredible program. I’ll have to take a deeper look at that and see if that’s something we could do in the US. That’s great.

Do you find that after the T-ambassador program that many of those other majors end up going into technical fields?

Wow, that’s great.

That’s really neat. Okay. And those T-ambassadors, is that a voluntary program?

How do you think about helping them along their journey of creating a successful business and maybe providing some of those capabilities or services, where it doesn’t, to use an Americanism, to break the bank, where it doesn’t cost too much money to get started?

One of the things that I understood to be under your remit, but please correct me if this is wrong, is sort of creating an incredible digital economy here in Taiwan. And in particular, I think about the small businesses or individuals who are just getting started, where cybersecurity may ...

Yeah, that’s great. That’s a great… I love the “why”. That’s a fantastic reason!

How are you thinking about driving that? Is that something you think your colleagues are going to adopt over time as well?

They have. Wow, that’s wonderful. Yeah. I guess a couple of other questions, and certainly happy to take the conversation wherever. But I was pretty excited to hear, yeah, even that this is going to be publicly posted. I love the idea of transparency and good government.

Yeah, that’s neat. I will be watching from afar and cheering on those efforts. I think it’s incredible. And it sounds like you’ve had 100 or so people go through them so far, and many of them chosen cybersecurity as a career path.

So, I came away from it as maybe it was a great way to find talent, but it was also a great way to build a community. And I’m really passionate about attracting people who hadn’t otherwise thought about contributing to the public sector. And so that’s one that definitely ...

The other was that we found it to just be this incredible community of people. I think there was this fear in the Department of Defense at the time that hackers were sort of this nefarious group. And we found it to be an incredibly honorable, thoughtful, very, very meticulous ...

And I used that as an opportunity to go and recruit some incredible talent, people that might not have thought about the civil service as a career otherwise. And so, we made a point to identify those people and provide pathways and opportunities, which I think was one really great ...

Yeah, so two other things I’d mention there that I think are interesting. One was, we had a number of very young participants who came to participate. I think the law at the time was they had to be 18, because it was considered work. But we had an amazing ...

I believe the State Department and Treasury also had a version, so maybe the program didn’t directly scale across the Government, but the idea did, which I think can be just as powerful. And with many of those agencies, they took a slightly different take on their approach, because it ...

So, three, and I think it’s now four. But we also worked with a number of other partners across the government. So, I don’t think there’s one program that’s a bug bounty across the departments, but the Department of Defense team worked with the Department of Homeland Security team, and ...

Yeah, so at the time, we used the first iteration called Hack the Pentagon 1.0. We used a single bug bounty vendor, and then we eventually made it a larger contract and had multiple bug bounty vendors involved, which is pretty interesting.

But the other thing that I found to be really interesting through that whole process was how most of the time when we were using open-source software, because that was getting patched by this broader community on a regular basis, it was rarer for them to find vulnerabilities. And when ...

I’m sure.

Yeah. And that’s, for many of them, it wasn’t even about the money. They just wanted to help give back to their country.

And initially we put a small amount of the Department of Defense’s IPs in range. Eventually we expanded that over time. And in some instances, we actually asked small groups of international hackers to come in and apply their skills to very sensitive assets. But what I found to be ...

Yeah. I think that makes sense. The other interesting conversation around open-source is security You talked about being confident that open-source software is secure, and I agree. One of the programs I got to be involved with when I was at the Pentagon, we called Hack the Pentagon, but it ...

And so, we had to provide alternatives at the time. Eventually working with Slack, they released an enterprise edition to help solve that problem. But it reminded me, it was sort of twofold. One was, I was amazed how many companies who weren’t the market leader were willing to be ...

Yeah. So, it’s funny you just reminded me of when I was at the White House and we were rolling out modern technology to the president and about 7,000 staff. At the time, Slack was really popular and particularly popular amongst the tech crowd that had come in to modernize ...

Yeah, right. Good point.

And you’ve seemed to make that change happen overnight. Do you feel like it’s been adopted sort of across the government? And are there any places where it’s been more challenging?