 After 12, so why don't we go ahead and get started? It is my great privilege to welcome everyone to today's event, which, fortunately, we are able to host Minister Tang from Taiwan, who's joined us today. I should note today's event is being not only held in person, but also being live streamed. And actually, what you see up here is the minister has very kindly set up as part of the live streaming the opportunity to ask questions and then questions online. So either please scan the bar code or go to slido.com and have your questions coming in during the presentation. And at the end, when we open up to Q&A, we'll take some of those questions online. So my name is Professor Ben Hopkins. I'm the director of the Seager Center for Asian Studies. We are the university center for Asian studies. And we have a long, long stay in close relationship with Tech Row and a great interest in Taiwan. And so it's a great privilege today to welcome you all to one of our annual Taiwan events. That's really all I have to say except to introduce Deepa Lakali, who is today's moderator, and we'll introduce the minister. Good morning, everyone, and good afternoon. I'm really honored to be able to do the introduction for Minister Andre Tang. When I was looking at her bio, there's so many things that one could talk about. The first word that came to my mind was wow. So here's somebody who has that wow factor, if I may. Minister Tang is the first digital minister of Taiwan. And I would say one of Asia's most innovative and exciting thought leaders and activists on governance and the use of digital space for that. Minister Tang serves on the Taiwan National Development Council's Open Data Committee, the K-12 Curriculum Committee, and she also led Taiwan's first e-rulemaking project. Minister Tang works on a variety of consulting with Apple, works with Oxford University Press on proud lexicography, and with social text on social interaction design. Also actively still contributes to Gov Zero, a vibrant community with a call to fork the government. And I want to make sure I didn't mispronounce that word. Careful to say that. Let me just say a few things about Minister Tang that I found particularly interesting. Minister Tang started her work with computers at a very early age. I think the first thing that she did was create an educational game for Minister's younger brother. Also showed, I think, a lot of personal courage because at 15, left school with the blessings of the headteachers and went on to start a company of many companies along the way. And at the ripe old age of 33, I think, decided to retire from private sector and focus on the public sector. And so really wanted to, I think, what the minister has called deliberative democracy to start that kind of movement on that. And finally, in 2016, when the minister was asked to be the first digital minister and joined the government, a candidate was asked to write a job description. And I happened to read the job description online. It was a poem, which was, I think, very innovative, very inspirational, and very intelligent, and kind of irreverent and fun. And I had a feeling that those words probably describe the minister herself personally and professionally. And so with that, I would invite you to come up. And just one small thing I just also wanted to mention that I haven't. If you look around the room, there are some very interesting photographs that Chetra has kindly brought with them. These are in the back, on these easels in the back. And some of them have photos of the minister as well, engaging in dialogue between US and Taiwan on things that some of you may know about, the GCTF, and so forth, which has been in the forefront of fighting fake news, which certainly in Washington it would be very welcome. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. It's really a pleasure to be here to share with you some stories. And I see that people online, even in the room, have already started asking questions. And so many of my people do like each other's questions. The question is the most number of likes flow to the top. And top questions get answered like this one. So whether it's for the government, even many. So in computer programming, for it means taking something that's going to a direction and changes governance model by splitting the governance committee and developing it in the other way. But it doesn't actually destroy the original work. It actually creates a copy. And so you hear it in Bitcoin, blockchain governance, in other ways that basically says, you know, take something and run to a different direction with that hope to merge in the future. And so the GovZero community does that professionally. GovZero is a domain name that is literally g0v.tw. And for each of the government's services that the GovZero activists doesn't like, or think the government should do, but haven't been doing, the GovZero activists does a shadow government website. So for example, the legislative is ly.gov.tw. And so, predictably, the shadow legislative in GovZero is ly.g0v.tw. So it solves the discovery problem. You don't have to Google search for anything. You just take an existing government website, change it out to a zero, and get to the shadow government. And the government that's built by the GovZero always relinquish copyright. So by the next procurement cycle, the government can just merge it back right in. And I'll show a few examples of the GovZero project that became national websites and national services. And so it's a way to gently push the government by creating, essentially, a standby version, that is the fork of the status in the state intention to be merged back. So keep the questions coming, because we're now at zero questions, losing one ordinarily programmed slides, which is my talk. All right, so today I would like to talk about the shared values in the US-Taiwan relations and strengthening democracy through urban governance. Now, just to begin things, when we talk about crowdsourcing or crowds collective intelligence and things like that, usually what we say is that it's a consultation about a specific domestic matter. Very rarely do we share the real agenda setting power of what exactly are we going forward, why we're going forward, the important priorities, and so on, in an online way, and mostly because of trolls. Now, in Taiwan, we've been perfecting the tool that was originally developed in San Francisco, I think, in Seattle, called Polis. And Polis is basically AI-moderated conversation that lets people resonate with each other's statements without the possibility to troll. And so just last week, actually, we launched with the AIT, the first of its kind, a digital dialogue of how Taiwan's rural and global community can be promoted, and we just crowdsource people's ideas and your zero trolls. So far, just hundreds of very useful suggestions. And so if you go to talk2.ait.org.tw, you can see the system. The system, very simply, is that when you get there, you see one statement from a fellow, for example, Dr. Chris Templeman from Stanford, and you can either agree or disagree with that statement, but there's no replicant. And as you press agree or disagree, the next statement shows up, and you can just press agree or disagree. And as you do that, the avatar, this blue circle moves along the axis of different camps. You can see how close you are to your social media, for instance, or, and it produces automatically a chart that lists the divisive statements as well as the consensus statements. Now most of the social media and the mainstream media over-focus on divisive statements and essentially waste people's time because people are not going to agree or deny down the divisive statements, but actually letting people have a reflective view of what people's really consensus are gives us a pointer of which that we can say most of people do agree on most of the things, most of the time. And that enables the US-Taiwan relations to go forward because by the end of each two-month cycle, the AIT will run a public forum that invites live experts and AIT personnel to discuss the top resonating statements and how it may be integrated into the US-Taiwan relationship. And so the four commitments is going to be the four topics, the next eight months or so, and I welcome everybody to participate. And one of the most resonating statements colored red here is from Dr. Templeman here, so I'll just read it out. Taiwan is on the front lines of global confrontation with our authoritarianism. So I can lead with the view as to promote our shared values of protection of rule of law, freedom of speech, and assembly, religious tolerance and pluralism, and the voice of ordinary citizens in government. And I think this kind of system explains the part about the voice of ordinary citizens in government. But of course the other shared values are very important as well, especially that we're really in the front line confronting authoritarianism. This is from a website called the Civicus Monetary where the human right activists use to monitor how free any given country are and is in the level of open, narrow, obstructive, repressed, to closed based on how many human rights violations or violations on freedom of speech and assembly and incidents and so on. And as you can see in our part of the world, Taiwan is really the only place that can be called fully open, meaning that there's no obstruction whatsoever on people's freedom of speech and assembly. And so this is in direct contrast with a nearby jurisdiction, the PRC, which is evolving very quickly to a different direction. And so I'll just make a couple of quick contrasts. For example, with the relationship between the state and the citizen, people have perhaps heard of the social credit system that is coupled with a mandatory education app. And that is in the PRC and people are blocked of freedom of traveling and of assembly and so on because of their lack of confirmation to the social credit system. Whereas in Taiwan, we use exactly the same internet technology that the other way around. We make the government transparent to the people. And this is the inaugural GovZero project actually. It starts at budget.govzero.tw. This shows a interactive chart of all the different budget items in the national budget and people can drill down to each of the thousands of year long projects and see all the KPIs, all the procurements made, all the different assessments that the National Government Council did and so on and the real-time commentary. Now, while back in 2012, the commentary is mostly people chatting among themselves. Now, it's part of the national regulations. So in the E-participation Center, join.gov.tw. Not only you can see the budget, but you can also participate in the agenda setting. And once people will comment on any piece of budget, the Korea Public Service dedicated to just respond immediately without actually going through middle persons like the MPs or the Ministry of Media. And that actually enabled the MPs and Ministry of Media to have a lot more open source intelligence and to work on top of that to give more good investigative reporting. And the public service doesn't have to pick up 30 phone calls one after another asking about the same thing, essentially. And so while there was initially some resistance, now all the different ministries have adopted. And so you can see literally our budget's there. And so making the government transparent to the people, not to the other way around. And another contrast could be made between the state and the private sector. Whereas, as we understand, that's now even in Hong Kong, but mostly in PRC and in company, above a certain size need to have a CCP or party branch. Now in Taiwan, it's the other way around. Our regulatory co-creation system or a sandbox system is designed so that instead of the party or the ruling party or the state directing the direction of the companies as those party branches are want to do, we asked the companies to essentially break regulations and let us know about it. The sandbox system is this design so that anyone can work with any municipality and say, hey, I want to experiment in platform economy, AI based banking and self-driving vehicles and whatever that our regulators do not think about. And so we've agreed to not find them or punish them for a year. But in return, they must engage in opening innovation and share all the data and assessments with their wider public. And so by the end of the year, if the public thinks this is a good idea, then it becomes regulation basically. And if the public doesn't think it's a good idea, well, we think the investors for paying the tuition for everyone and the next innovator need to start somewhere after that, right? And so this is basically having this sort of innovation leading regulatory innovation. It's coming in the UK with FinTech but we're now really using this model for pretty much everything. And so as the last president said last October, I believe, powers embrace of democracy shows a better path for all the Chinese people. Indeed, I would say all the people. But on the other hand, this actually creates a contrast to the kind of legitimacy or lack thereof of the PRC and which is, I think, partly why the PRC have been kind of aggressing lately. And this background is kind of an inside joke. It's a censorship of a pretty harmless, popular game called Devotion on the Steam gaming platform just because the red CEO there happened to contain the name of the president, Xi Jinping. And that's the only reason. Otherwise, it's a really harmless game but they get censored nevertheless. And we see a lot of such kind of rabado and all sort of different confrontations and even flying the jets over the middle of the street and things like that. And I think none of these are projections of power. None of these are power projections. They are projections of insecurity. And so, of course, Taiwan is not alone in facing such aggressions, especially around the AIT at 40 events. We have many, many supporters coming from the US and we launched a digital dialogue even though what the day we launched a digital dialogue there's large-scale military action in our surroundings by the PRC. I think that again shows the insecurity. But in any case, we are very welcome, our international like-minded countries in support of furthering our democracy. And so, I'll just say a couple of things about protecting the security of our democracies that we've been developing in the past couple of years. First, we're securing our elections against foreign tampering and tampering. It takes many, many forms. It could take forms of precision targeted advertisement over social media or regular media. And this is actually something that we've seen worldwide that's people basically weaponized social media in order to influence elections. I think that is also, because Taiwan has one of the world's most advanced campaign donation laws, the most transparent one, so that all of the donation record is actually going to be released, I think this June, for the previous election in machine readable format, essentially excel spreadsheets and individual records, not just the summaries and so on. And because we're that transparent, that means that people, and of course, only domestic people can donate to campaigns. And so, people with other means of influence usually choose advertisements over campaign donations in order to support their candidates. And so, we're changing our laws, quite a few laws, to reintroduce the equivalent of the Honest Act here in Taiwan's legal system. It's currently in the parliament, going to be passed soon, that we vote campaign donations and advertisements over social or any other digital media to the same standard for radical transparency. And we're making sure that any disinformation campaign, the narratives gets exposed. And we develop a notice and public notice system partnering with the V2E encrypted chat application vendor in line in order to put digital accountability so that when people see us spreading disinformation here's a counter narrative showing in the same tab, in the same app, and that we attach such clarifications in real time in partnership with our civil society fact checkers. And in this, I think the US has played a really good role, a positive role through the GCTF training framework. I think I'm in that photo. That's why we train the journalists in the Indo-Pacific region, not just bilaterally, but everybody in the region about how to expose disinformation, how to basically communicate effectively when there is a information manipulation campaign, and the GEC Global Engagement Center has also provided a funding opportunity for the civic tech and other developers in the private and social sector to develop common matches of the furthest regard, and we're very grateful about that. And of course, we're also working on cyber security. You may have heard that just last week we published the so-called blacklist of non-security devices that use any government properties and other government personnel and people working in critical infrastructures. And this is actually just the latest of the progression of development. I remember around six years ago, where we're just deploying the 4G networks, there was a question from one of the communication vendors that whether they can use devices from the PRC and our National Security Council and the National Communication Commission at a time decided that while they are market players at that point, when there's escalation, everybody knows that in PRC, market actors become non-market actors through one mean or another. And so because of that, during the 4G deployment, we said explicitly that nobody in critical infrastructure or communication infrastructure in 4G should use PRC components, market actor, or otherwise. And so, of course, we continued this into 5G and now people are waking up to it. We're really happy that people are waking up to it. And so we, of course, again, work closely with the US, automated indicator sharing, US cert as a computer emergency rapid response team and things like that. And we also share our training frameworks. But of course, protecting the facilities and institutions of democracy, the basic cybersecurity and election security is really so that we can do innovation. And the innovation that I'm particularly in charge of is called the Open Governments. And the US, of course, is the founding member of the Open Government Partnership currently at the fourth national action plan from the Trump administration. And we use the same ideas of Open Government internally in Taiwan as well as to say to make the government transparent, participative, accountable, and also inclusive in the sense that we bring the technology to the space of people rather than asking people to come to the space of technology. And so perhaps unique in the world, we establish what we call the Participation Office and Network. I think Italy is coming to this network with their ministry for direct democracy. But the idea is very simple. In every ministry, there is a team of people just like officers talking to media or officers talking with the parliament. There's officers talking with emergent issues that are going to be networked collective action. And so basically, we meet with the protesters before they actually go to the street because maybe they just want an invitation to the kitchen, so to speak. And so we co-create solutions on any and all emergent social and cross-ministerial interagency issues. Indeed, my office is like 22 people. And in Taiwan's 32 ministries, I can approach at most one person from each ministry. And so this is an entirely horizontal cross-cutting interagency digital strategy. And appeal network, extended network, is about 100 people strong in each and every ministry. So whenever there is a, for example, e-petition, and so on, we work on collaborative meetings that invites all the stakeholders together. And we indeed travel to the place. For example, this is Hongchun, the South of Taiwan, a popular tourism place. They petitioned, many thousand people petitioned for the deployment of Black Hawk helicopters to their local airport to serve as ambulance cars because they're like 90 minutes away from any major hospital. And I think accidents are sometimes quite fatal because of that. And by the Ministry of Health and Welfare has said, OK, we apply for a larger hospital and a different deployment. But there's no funding from the NDC. Maybe the NDC can consider working with the Ministry of Transportation. And the transportation set, building a faster highway. We're still evaluating on that, maybe not this year. But the budget is really not there. Maybe the aviation committee can say something. The aviation committee says we don't have extra Black Hawks in the Ministry of Interior. Maybe the Ministry of Defense can say something and so on. And this is the usual shape of interagency. But because of participation, officers now with the PO network, we have on the regulatory level, what we call the ice bucket challenge clause. That says if an agency or Ministry A thinks B should allow it, if B thinks D should allow it, and C thinks D and D thinks A should allow it, then I'm sorry, but everybody travels to Hongchun. Everybody owns it. And so like six, seven actually, ministries all traveled with me to Hongchun. And we met with all the local stakeholders using exactly the same live stream and slide up. And so on, technologies to pinpoint exactly the common values across all those different positions. And we wish to finally that people want to trust their local clinicians more. And at that time, they don't even have the place to serve as dormitory or to do training. And so things like that. And so we settled on the plan that is actually what could be the improvement that leaves nobody worse off and improves people's life generally. And because of this live stream, so the legitimacy is really, really high. People can really see that all the different factions locally have, after summoning us to Hongchun, agreed on this solution, is that I talk with the premier. Every couple of weeks we do a collaboration meeting. And the next one day I meet with the premier and send a synthetic document to a premier's office. And so they committed like really a large amount of money, I think $400 million or something to really drastically rebuild that local hospital facility and fly over the doctors from Galsheng to train there instead of flying people to Galsheng, which, of course, this new solution is much safer. And so in OCP, the SW can see all the 40 or so cases that we've done this in a radically transparent manner. And so actually I joined the cabinet to work with, not for the government. And so there was three conditions of me working in the cabinet and that are radical transparency, everything that I hold as a chair, every meeting that I convene, we publish the entire transcript, 10 working days now to the internet and location dependence. I would get to work anywhere. And so this is my office in social innovation lab in Taiwan and anyone can apply for 40 minutes chunk of my time. It's my office hour every Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. And the only conditions that you need to agree for me to publish our conversation online and so that's my office hour. And finally, volunteering as the agent, as I said, I don't command my colleagues, they come literally from each and every ministry. So we use pure horizontalism to make sure that we figure out project are of use of everybody. So the regional social innovation organization tour, which we re-index all of it using the sustainability and the tools that we really put everywhere on the incarnate t-shirts and whatever, we make sure that we travel to the local social innovators working on one or more SDGs and telecommunicate back to the social innovation lab and making sure all the 12 ministries are there and so people see each other across the screen and can really solve across ministry of issues that are related to original revitalization. There's many, many other networks internally that were expanding outreach and even city-wide participation office in LAX. And so this methodology, we of course publish on the socialarchive.org as papers and also as comic books. That's our training material in six languages, including indigenous. And so because everything is publicly online, we do get a lot of inquiries from the civic tech and the tech communities in all these great cities that are experimenting with this kind of open governance. And so we have lots of allies, we run workshops and we're very happy to share our open governance approaches in the Indo-Pacific and also abroad. So I would just like to conclude with the new consultation platform that AIT and Talman has established together, the Indo-Pacific Democratic Governance Consultation. I think the first one will be in September around human rights and other issues concerning regional democracy. We're very happy to share what we have to run to regionally and do whatever we come to assist others around the world for a person in progress in their own countries. Thank you very much. Take over. Thank you so much for that really vivid talk. All I can say is that it's too bad we've had clone you and sent you across the globe to start this kind of a movement. Well, following the minister's talk, we have two of my colleagues from George Washington University to give a short commentary and some reflections on digital space and governance issues and their own views on some of those and their own findings to round out the remarks. So first we will start with Dr. Susan Aronson. She's a research professor of international affairs at the Elliott School. She's also a senior fellow at the Think Tank Center for International Governance Innovation in Canada. She's currently directing projects on digital trade and protectionism. Also works on artificial intelligence and trade and a new human rights approach to data. So she will, it dovetails very nicely with what the message is laid out. She holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Following Dr. Aronson, Dr. Scott White will give his remarks. He is an associate professor here at the George Washington and also he directs the new cybersecurity program and Cyber Academy, which is a very interesting, a new educational platform. Dr. White holds the Queen's Commission and was an officer in the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command, so he brings a securities background to this discussion as well. After he did his PhD, he was an officer with the Canadian Security Intelligence Agency. He has consulted with a variety of law enforcement agencies across the globe and healed a PhD from University of Bristol in the UK. So with that, let me ask Susan to lead off. Hi everybody and nice to see you here and thank you Minister Tang. It's an honor to follow you, give them all the good you've done in the world. So Deepa asked me to try to focus my presentation thinking about this in the context both of my own research and also China and China's thank you, I should know this by now I don't need a mic. But I've decided to do something different from what Deepa asked, which was and what I'd like to do is put it in a larger context of the world in which we live today and the world of technology and then what can the United States in aging democracy learn from this vibrant and new democracy and the reason I'm saying that is because I used to teach corruption and when I taught it, I learned that attacking corruption is all about trust, it's all about building trust and forging anti-corruption counterweights built on trust and so it's in that context that I'll comment on some of the innovations that Minister Tang has done. So thinking about this in terms of technologies, we can be techno-optimists, so we can be techno-pessimists and I'd rather be me there because I think technologies, especially data-driven technologies have given us both the best in the worst of times and I would say today, almost every democratic society from Sweden to Taiwan to the United States is threatened by corruption, inequality, terrorism and technology tools that both improve our lives and threaten our quality of life and one reason I think is that these new technologies contributed to a decline in trust and arise in distrust, right? They're not the same thing, two very distinct things and trust is the social capital that enables good governance and the rule of law but no one knows how to build trust once it's lost and that I think is a key problem if you wanna achieve good governance. So let's compare the United States and Taiwan. Trusting government has been declining and in institutions in the United States has been declining for a really long time. In Taiwan, it seems to be, obviously in some areas it's declining but in other areas it's on the rise. So Minister Tang has said her approach builds on trust and her premise is from what I read that you wrote is that if the government trusts the people with a gender setting power then the people can make democracy work, right? And so what has she done to achieve that objective and that again, I'm not criticizing it, I wanna highlight it. So she's created a multi-pronged strategy and infrastructure for a more effective feedback loop, right? So individuals can influence government and government hopefully hears what the people are saying and responds to it and I think her idea of participation officers is really quite brilliant. The problem is it does nothing to really build that trust and I think that's something that you need to figure out how to do in a time of disinformation, misinformation, right? Which is another different thing in alternative facts. Another thing that Taiwan has done and the minister spoke about this is using crowd sourcing to improve law and regulation and a lot of governments have been experimenting with this. I'm ambivalent about it because it tends to be special interests that care about this that are involved in it. Nonetheless, I think it can build the trust. So that's why I'm ambivalent. On one hand, you don't get average people but you do get them to see the government's response and then you get to move off. So I think that's a really, really good thing. But, and I think it also seems like it started to work on issues in Taiwan. That is really impressive. A consensus approach built on dialogue. Okay, it's interesting to see I did, okay this is a lie, my research assistant did it, but we looked at where is Taiwan in terms of open governments, governing data and honestly, to my amazement, Taiwan, if you like beauty contests, rankings, perception metrics, Taiwan ranks number one in the open data governance index score. And that's pretty impressive. So all those things are things that Minister of Time has achieved and Taiwan has achieved. But I wanna just put it in the larger context and the logical things and then I'll shut up. I think misuse of data is forcing us to rethink a lot of things that we took for granted as goods. And good number one is trade. In terms of trade, every government, and believe me I've been looking, I've spent two years looking, every government has some degree of what I call data nationalism. They wanna control certain types of data and they have all sorts of excuses because it's personal data, because it's secret data, et cetera. And that challenges us to rethink whether or not openness is an inherent good and trade is an inherent good. And we have to think what is a barrier to data openness and what isn't, what is necessary public policy? So that's just something to think about and I don't know if Taiwan has thought about that. Number two, more and more companies, and I'm strangely not, these companies happen to be U.S. and Chinese, are organizing and owning more and more of the world's data. And I find that deeply scary and I don't understand why more and more scholars are not thinking about this. So Google's mission as example is to organize the world's data. That's the mission statement of a company, is that appropriate? And that company, which I think aims to do good, but certainly doesn't in everything, has so much of the world's public, personal and proprietary data. And just so that you know it, anytime a company takes your personal data and creates an algorithm and tries to come up with whether it's an ad or it's a solution to a problem, that company owns that solution and owns that data. And so all, so so much of our data and so much of the solutions to many of the world's problems are gonna reside in companies. And that's gonna have huge effects on democracy, but it's also what we call information symmetry if you study economics. And other nations and companies can't effectively challenge the market power of these firms. And then finally, we have seen some of these firms such as Facebook and Twitter have become tools that both on one hand support democracy and undermine democracy. And more and more these companies are being asked to do the good job of government. What do I mean by that? That is to make decisions about data. Can your data and my data, but also data that is essential to knowledge. They have to make decisions as to when to take it down and how to take it down and what to take care. And I find that deeply disturbing. In the future, we're gonna need strategies that better help the public govern these companies as well as our governments. Better understand data use and misuse. Better understand the mixing of public, retriotary and personal data process. And how will democracy slip the United States into Iran, educate our citizens about this? I have no idea, but I do know this, that that is going to be an essential for the government's and open governance question. Thank you. All right, thank you. This is for the broader context and for touching on your research at least. And now to Scott White for further context and however he wants to contextualize that. Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you, minister. They were lovely words. These are challenging times for me personally. They're challenging times because I've built a career on secrecy. I was in the intelligence services and secrecy of information is what we do and what we collect. But ultimately somewhere along that chain, you have to disseminate that information. Intelligence officers realize that at some point along the continuum, that information that's going to be of value must be disseminated to other partners to share and then operationalize. So that in itself is a dichotomy for me, having spent my career in secrecy to now find the optimal path is one of openness. You're challenging me, minister, at my very core. The problem we have is governments need to confront the challenge of cyberspace whilst being equal and just, preserving innovation and honoring the social contract that it has between the citizens and the state, whilst at the same time, maintain security. Responsible governance then is new to cyberspace but ultimately imperative. The model that our friends in Taiwan have expressed one of openness and accountability is a utopian state for us. But how do we get there? How do we get there, sir? How do we map? Ladies and gentlemen, how do we get there? How do we get there whilst at the same time have security? We are confronted by a government, madam minister, we're right beside you that has spent a great amount of time and a great amount of money in creating probably the most dynamic social security force that we have seen. China has been very open with its concept of cyber sovereignty and the desire to extend its own ideas and its own ways of social governance to the cyber world. In there in the midst of building the most extensive governance regime for cyberspace and information telecommunications that any country has seen in the world, recognizing that technology and the advances that are being made so quickly cannot be controlled relatively easily by government. So as we have the expansion of technology, the growth of technology, so too do we have the desire to control in China. This leads us to a variety of issues that we have to deal with. How do we in democratic societies advocate for openness whilst at the same time one of our large adversaries is moving mountains to create an environment of security and dare I say even social oppression. When we do an audit in a security audit for Beijing we find that the extent to government is well beyond that of just the society, just beyond the local governance through to companies. And we see this presently in my own country of Canada while the Americans asked for the arrest and detention of the vice president of Huawei. Huawei has just moved to 5G. We'll meet them there. Against this challenge then, against this challenge we have a government that is expansionist. We see China mobilizing in much of Africa now to assist the developing world in large projects whilst at the same time we see Chinese government control in those societies. The social contract is there for China and its people. The social governance that they extend through the Communist Party makes it very clear the ambitions of the Chinese government. How then do we confront this government whilst at the same time as the minister has said create an open, honest environment for the people? That's not just an academic question for us. It is a real life question. It is a real life question because democracy is being challenged around the world today. In fact, dare I say it is being even challenged here. Dare I say when we have the president who on occasion will ask members of his cabinet to engage in activities which we would deem not prejudicial to the best interests of democracy. I know that we're going to go to questions so I won't spend too much time. But the challenge again for us is how do we create a secure environment? We know that model. Our friends in China are very cognizant of the model they use. It is the largest model that we see. Taiwan and India have introduced a new model for us. The Taiwan model, one of openness, fairness, accountability. All the things that we would like to see. And yet on the other hand we have a very aggressive state moving equally as dynamically throughout the world to impose a different system. How do we engage in the cyber world, commerce, democracy? It is probably the greatest democratic tool we have right now. How do we engage there whilst at the same time protect our national security? And therein protect the values that we share here in the United States. We share with our friends in Taiwan, openness, justice. All of the things that we were raised on, all of the things that our security forces spend a career maintaining. This is the dichotomy. This is the problem that we are confronting. This is ultimately the challenge for security services. I believe you with that. And we will look forward to taking questions. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Scott. I think I'm delighted that we have two commentators who want to have, coming from much more radical openness to a more tempered set of views that are necessary to raise, I think, at this forum. So I think, Minister Chang, you've opened an extraordinary conversation here that we have now a variety of ways in which to address it. And I know there are many questions. I don't know what the, I can't see behind me, but what kind of questions we have coming up. But if you don't mind, I would actually like to take the first question, although I know there are many questions out here that can't resist. And it's a sort of a straightforward question for you. And that is the fact that this kind of open governance and your innovative system that you've introduced provides, I think, Taiwan a very important, what I would call, soft power in the international arena, regionally in particular. Especially when, as you lay out the difference between the PRC and Taiwan, there is that huge asymmetry of soft power, I think, in your favor. How does one, because I teach, you know, you look at these things, and how important is soft power at the end of the day? And I have some students here. How do you, Mr. Chang, how would you formulate the use of soft power in projecting Taiwan in the international and regional setting? Certainly. So my name card literally has a picture of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which I have here also, and prints underneath it the slogan, Taiwan Can Help, which is a trending hashtag in Taiwan occasionally. And so Taiwan can help, I think, summarize this, how we're posturing to the international community, basically saying that in the UN Sustainable Development Goals because it is collectively agreed by PRC, like by the year 2030, we're going to focus on 169 issues in 17 categories. But mainly, the issues are structured and they can only be solved if the cross-sectors, people have reliable data, people can build partnerships on the reliable data, and then the innovation is open. And Taiwan starts to offer in medical governance and the air quality and water quality and what we call the SEGO IO2 system and so on with all built in an open source way system that people can gradually use without getting controlled by people in Taiwan. So you don't have to be subservient to our innovations and know-how to use and contribute to our open collective innovations. So this is actually the main message during the UN GAOs in New York that is sent to our partners in my counterparts in our countries that, you know, in any and each Sustainable Development Goals, there is models in Taiwan that we can offer to help in a non-colonial way. Okay, thank you so much. All right, the floor, I will now open the floor to questions as well as to virtual space here. Anyone from the audience? In the flesh always takes priority. Yes, and when you ask the question, please do identify yourself. Yes, I think we have a... Thanks, Neil Bosner, I'm a disaster researcher during work in Taiwan and Japan. My question for Dr. Aronson, I think, how do we deal with this conflict I see between soft power and trade when President Trump just put in the terrorist against China there was a big article in the paper about a swimming farmer out west who's really upset because now he can't sell his slide beans to China and get the money he wants. And it seems like that fellow really doesn't care that China is throwing Muslims into concentration camps or undermining universities around the world. He just wants to sell his slide beans to make money. So how do we deal with that? How can that be addressed but this way that trade in a way is undermining the whole democratization and soft power business? Our quote is, I think, Levin said, what do you say the capitalist side of the road that you've been dealing with so much? Actually, my true area of expertise, the bulk of my research has been on the relationship between trade rules and human rights. And it's very difficult to measure how trade affects human rights, right? And I think your question is such an important one. I very much appreciate it, but I think you're conflating two very different things, if I may. First thing is, should this... Is the problem the farmer doesn't think about the connections between trade and human rights? Is the problem that George, excuse me, that Donald Trump doesn't care about human rights and is using trade policy as his main tool to bash a wide range of countries, including our allies? Is the problem that we all don't understand how trade can enhance human rights and it can do so directly, indirectly, and over time, right? And I would argue that China teaches a lesson that you do have more leverage with more trade, but I think we're losing that leverage, but that doesn't mean that it will directly enhance human rights. And in fact, it can have simultaneously terrible effects on many human rights. But it doesn't seem to me that the problem is with the farmer, the problem is us, that we do do a good job of educating the farmer about the relationship between trade and human rights, which is complex and not so black and white. I have strong views on it, which is I think more trade over time tends to have more human rights, but it depends on the human right. And we just can't bully China into changing its, you know, that authoritarian regime is determined to stay in power, more trade, less trade, whatever we do. Given that that's a reality, how do we have more leverage over China on these issues? I believe it's by partnering with other nations to work together to change the behavior of China. But we're not doing that. And I think that's the more worrisome problem. I think it's very hard. As more, I mean, I was recently in Switzerland and it looked to me like I saw an awful lot of Chinese tourists. So more Chinese people have the right to freedom to see other countries, to get educated in other countries. I hope they'll learn something about democratic values. That's new more trade. What a long-winded answer. Thank you. Yes, gentlemen in the back. And then let's take a question from the media. The retired government. I wondered, in Taiwan, are they addressing the situation and transportation, such as airbag issues by using digital technology to track and follow problems like this and require repairs to the vehicles? It's an international issue. We have the problem here. We have myths of it. And the process here has been generally fairly decent, I understand, according to deal repairs. We now have a new situation with problem with aircraft repairs and issues on a new aircraft. This in Taiwan, for the U.S., Toyota and Lexus vehicles would have suffered many problems with unintended acceleration has that been addressable? And I think digital is a way of qualifying. So, yes. But I don't have many specific details, but I do personally work on two cases that may be relevant. One is we do use distributed ledger technology. People call it blockchain. Feel free to continue calling it blockchain. But I'm going to say it's a distributed ledger. We're using DLTs to track supply chain. But we, honestly speaking, we start with data that is not in the private sector, but rather like people's measurement of air quality, water quality, like atmospheric, free of privacy, concerned data. But still, that is very important because when Dr. Aronson said that Taiwan is number one in the global open data index, I want to emphasize that open data in Taiwan doesn't really mean open government data. It means open data from the citizen scientists, from the private sectors in a true collaborative, data collaborative way. And so how to generate trust between a supply chain of any manufacturing of a shipping line of the so-called the code storage between a manufacturing of food to its final safety space and organic food and things like that. All of these needs, people who don't have implicit trust in each other to contribute data to a common pool that people trust cannot be mutated by any other party. And when it makes sense to use distributed ledger technology, we do use the distributed ledger technology. And so Taiwan is, I think, one of the most advanced place in used blockchains for governance. Maybe behind Estonia, who retroactively renamed their EID system to say that they were on a block chain before the term block chain appears. I think we'll kind of really fight with that in the case where we're really progressing using distributed ledgers to give accountability across the different sectors. The other thing that I mentioned about a sandbox system is really the sandbox system is a data collaborative system designed to have trust of the entire, for example, self-driving cars in our, just like the MC, we have a proving ground for self-driving cars and other kinds of vehicles. And again, the data arrangement is such that people who partner in such a data collective do have not just the visibility to each other's data, but for private data, they also have the ability to ship algorithms to one another and run out of algorithms locally by the data operators and give out statistics that we can mathematically say is provably true or true to a reasonable doubt that people did not fake that during their proving grounds experiments in a sandbox. So that's a lot of technical detail. But basically, it's incentivized by giving essentially one here monopolies free from penalties, from law in exchange for such data collaboratives. And so that's the two cases that may be tangentially related to the question that you have. Also, this is quite a bearish question. Okay. Scott White has a question. Madam Minister, how do you, again, the bravery is so apparent to me. How do you address the openness, the trust that you hold so true with your own security services? Well, very carefully. What is the solution? Well, the solution is really a hack. So as part of my radical transparency working condition, I don't even look at State of Security. State of Security is my office. My office is a dedicated personnel to handle confidential information regarding any State of Security whatsoever. And when there is a military drill where the cabinet members are asked to go to the conference, I just take a day off. This is called physical isolation, right? So basically, I don't know anything about State of Security. And therefore, I cannot accidentally compromise them. I'm not advocating that everybody is going to be people working on national security. But for example, I don't know if that's ever happening. So I'll work on the general outline of going into specific cases, which actually gets pretty far on OSN 11. Okay, thank you. I'm going to ask Richard to read off one of the questions. I think the second one on disinformation looks particularly interesting. All right. So a threat of disinformation is that people could be persuaded, not necessarily that they are. But I'm going to go through how to reveal how influential disinformation actually is. Okay, so I get to where my civic hacker tack because the question asks if I've got zero on the development, which gives us a much wider range to talk about. There are certain limitations to what the State can do for disinformation without going into State propaganda or censorship of information and so on. But it goes zero community and it's called co-facts or collaborative fact checking. And it's a bot, called vocab, co-facts bot. And so many people go to the co-facts website, which is co-facts.gc.eu. It's not a government website. They basically ask people to install bots, basically add bots as friends. And whenever they see a WhatsApp-like channel, it's called Line, right? It's an encrypted service state. It doesn't get to view what's inside the envelope. Nevertheless, whenever people feel unsure about any information that people have passed to them, they can just simply forward to that bot. And that bot will forward it to a group of co-fact checkers that basically use two things. First, anything that's flagged by two or more people gets a positive URL. So that basically anything that's trending before they get weaponized, it gets exposed. And so people inoculate against that's potentially weaponizable and so that it doesn't actually turn into disinformation. And the second thing is that once the co-fact checkers adds up the materials and write a clarification message to fact checkers that's false, partly true, or things like that, the bot gets back to everybody who forwarded that to the bot. And so it adds to the conversation without censoring anything away. And there's many derivative projects. There's one on BBC, and I think CNN and Codemany bot, then basically you can invite to your family checkers and channels. And basically it takes every incoming message, it doesn't store it, but it compares with the entire database of co-facts. And if it's a fact checker that's false above a certain similarity, it just says on the family chat channel that this is a fact checker that's false. And things are not what the status are, and please view this to no more. And so I think the idea is that people from the effort to correct their parents and their children's bot does that for them. And it's so effective that we can literally see the trending map of disinformation or disinformation campaigns, and also the added line accompanies. So after seeing the success of this civic technology now agrees, I think by June or so to basically have this as one of their built-in features so that for anything any home press and forward it to the co-facts and other fact checking community is a built-in function of the line app itself. And they're going to dedicate a time for real-time clarification so that there's a balance of views for everybody using that into an encrypted system. And so the beauty of this is just as how we soft-spun we don't soft-spun by forcing everybody to use this close people's email content to the government rather, we ask all this email agent what we say to the user agent which is that vendors to put a flag button too so that people can flag something as fun and they voluntarily contribute to the International Spun Blocking Network, the Spumhouse project. And once it's rated as fun, it doesn't, it's not sensible, right? It still goes to your mailbox, it's just go to the junk mail folder so that you can check it when you have too much time. So it doesn't waste people's time on average and this is the kind of agreement we're reaching out to media companies such as Facebook that's going to dial down the virality of things that are fact-checked as well by the International Fact-checking Network of which Taiwan is in that book. Thank you. If you could just follow up and ask to what extent that is being adopted by other countries because it seems like such a widespread problem especially during elections which especially in India right now there's a lot of disinformation. That's right, so I don't actually manage the compact project but from what I've seen on GitHub and the public development that it's being adapted to WhatsApp and I think any local because this really is a social construct we have received a lot of interest from like the Code of Japan and the Code for Honor internationally as long as there is at least like three or four people who agree to meet every week to look at people's flag as rumor messages you can get this crowd sourced fact-checking going and so I think there's many early attempts at the moment but I don't have any numbers as of whether it gets to the same degree as Line in Taiwan. I think that's also because Line is not operating in the entire world, it is entirely within the Asia region so it basically chose Taiwan as the pilot side and see whether this digital accountability design actually makes the disinformation issue at least more visible to the research community and if it does work I'm sure that other E2E encrypted channels like WhatsApp and so on will run from this effort. Other questions from the audience? Yes. I'm an intern at the USHON Business Council so I'm wondering Taiwan is complying with the sustainable development and has also complied with several other conventions like the USGDPR and the UN's two covenants so I'm wondering what is the rationale between why Taiwan is so committed to complying to these international conventions where you see this compliance going in the future? Well because we can help and I mean if we're not complying the way that we can help our diplomatic allies and like-minded countries and so we really SDG index like everything our CSR reports that are SDG index I think is ranked one of the highest in the world and also I think over 50% now and our university also indexed their work in social responsibility again within the SDG framework so if you look at our voluntary national report that only outlines what the state is going to do but if there's very comparable reports on a dashboard we're going to introduce a dashboard shortly that you can just select any of the goals and see the different sectors in Taiwan and what they're capable of contributing to and we're also giving out regional awards like the APSIPA the Asia Pacific Social Innovation Partnership Award that gives awards not to specific organization or individuals but to unlikely partnerships in advance of the sustainability program goals and so I think our top prize this year going to the SDG Gordewa Faction Village Lab that is part of the UN Creativity Network and so to answer your question first that we really have to be compliant because it's a common language that allows sectors to talk to each other it's just common vocabulary and the second thing is that because we're willing to help we also use this as an extended way to mark our existing R-V-N-R and how they're such a responsible to the points. Alright, any other queries? My name is Steve Draver I work mostly security issues related to Taiwan and of course our primary concern are physical kinetic attacks and making sure the countries prepare to deal with that but our discussion today gets to a whole the different sort of threat that we're very worried about in supporting our allies in Taiwan which is a cyber attack which we've brought up and I don't want to get into the details of nature of that attack and what might happen and so on and so forth but I would like to hear from someone who is advocating their life to working with the young people in Taiwan any kind of a sense from you do the young people in Taiwan have any sense of the threat that they're under and do they feel a sense of urgency and this is my question do they feel a sense of urgency in being prepared both individually and as part of a generation that's going to have to confront this thing thank you the answer is in equivocal yes but I wouldn't say that before 2014 I think 2014 really is the watershed year of our movement and the occupied movement where young people literally occupy the parliament for 22 days to put a stop to the cross-strait service and trade agreement that was just fast-tracked through the parliament because somehow constitutionally local makes that it doesn't have to be subject to the same process that all the bilateral agreements have to go through because Beijing is a domestic city of Taiwan but in any case in 2014 that constitutional local was viewed with some tolerance by general population but the occupy really brought it to everybody's mind that we do have this constitutional local going on and people are willing to go to the street have a million people on the street many more online and that was one of the persons who maintained communication framework during the occupying and so after the occupying I would say the younger generation do feel the sense of urgency of protecting our democratic way of life and also that it made for example cyber security a very popular choice of career for young people really being a white hacker in Taiwan ensure that you can get paid well like 5 to 7% of all government project procurement goes to cyber security that you get to meet with president and additional minister personally once in a while and so on so that they don't fall to the dark side which always has cookies but in any case it makes cyber security and general awareness a very popular time in a young generation and they do see PRC more as a conquering force they don't have any conception of the overlapping sovereignty and other kind of ideologies that basically still is in the mind of people who still remember the martial law thank you all right we've actually come to the end of the program I want to just make a couple of announcements one this is the last week of class so I want to thank those of you who I know you're very busy those of you who came to hear the minister and others speak I also want to say that the photo exhibit there are only 8 of them right here but we are working on a larger 40 plus set of photo exhibits in the future so stay tuned we're still working on trying to get that to have an exhibit here at the on that a kind of a journey of US-Taiwan relations some of the key elements here and also we are having lunch right after thanks for quickly right outside of the hallway we can sit outside we'll come back here and also thank you to IIIP for advertising the event and joining us and finally let me just say what a tremendous honor and privilege it was to have you to grace us with your presence and really I can see that you can ignite a movement almost on the sort of digital governance and even I'm so inspired and excited by someone who is a political scientist who shuns technology as much as I can but you have really made it so accessible and so exciting so thank you and thank you also to my fellow panelists here please join me for watching the live stream back to your slide of questions on slide of platform itself by this evening so thank you very much