In 2006 he became Estonias fourth president.
And we talked about his work spreading the gospel of civic digitization.
But no fucking way.
Tell me about your background and how you got to where you are now.
At my age its kind of a long story.
I went to school in Leonia, New Jersey, and there a seminal thing happened to me.
She taught us to program in BASIC.
Which is sort of baby Fortran.
So I learned to program in 1969 as a 15-year-old.
I was, by 20 years, the youngest service director.
I guess I was 34.
I completely redid the service.
Then [Estonia] became independent.
I drove myself to the embassy, we had a 10-year-old Mercedes ambassadorial limo.
Sometimes Id go to receptions and the valet would say Wheres the ambassador?
and Id say I am the ambassador!
Then there was a breakdown in the government.
I said, I dont want to be president.
They said Dont worry, you wont win anyway.
And then I ended up being elected.
I won again, I was president until 2016.
Then I was invited to come to Stanford and thats where I am right now.
What was the situation when you began your term as president?
When Estonia became independent and I was the ambassador in Washington, Estonia was extremely poor, extremely backward.
Fifty years of Soviet rule had left us way behind.
The per capita GDP for Estonia was twenty eight hundred dollars.
There were all sorts of ideas about what Estonia should do.
For me two things came together.
I knew how to program, and I thought that was something people ought to do.
And then Mosaic, the first Web surfing app, came out in June, July 1993.
You had to go buy it.
I said Well, this is one place where we are on a level playing field.
Whereas in everything else we had fifty years of backwardness to overcome.
All the roads and bridges that werent built, all the schools that were falling apart.
It was like Zenos Paradox; Achilles runs after the tortoise but he never catches up.
But this is one place where we were starting at the same place.
I said we should put computers in all Estonian schools and connect them all.
Fortunately we had a minister of education who really liked the idea and pushed it through the government.
But this thing took off.
And by 98 or 99, all Estonian schools were online.
Meanwhile the banks saw this as a great opportunity.
Theyre always looking to cut costs.
It was a huge cost.
Part of the project was to put computers in all municipal centers, town halls, and administrative centers.
People didnt own computers yet because they were expensive and people were poor.
So you could go there and do all your stuff for free.
Then we realized, OK, we have to create architecture for this that guarantees security and privacy.
By this time we had broad support, [though] not a majority yet, for digitalization.
I mean, we always had Finland there, which had Nokia.
By the early 2000s we had digitized almost all citizen-government interactions.
Plus 99 percent of bank transactions were done on the secure internet.
In 2008, 2007 we put all key data on the blockchain.
The main issue was data integrity.
If someone publishes your bank account, you might feel annoyed.
If someone changes the record of your blood bang out it can be fatal.
What was the major opposition to digitization?
All the Luddite arguments.
Now Estonia has, per capita, the highest number of Wikipedia pages.
Theres a crazy Wikipedia that keeps churning stuff out.
Estonia has adopted this as a good thing, with high popular support.
And thats an obstacle to the kind of civic digitization youre talking about, right?
And thats a hard one politically.
You cant do this without a strong digital identity.
People [in the U.S.] say Oh, well never have a national identity.
You dont need a national identity, its a federated system.
And you already have an I.D.
in every state for anyone over 16 or 17, which is your drivers license.
All youve got to do is put a chip on that.
Thats the technical basis for secure communication.
Its a federated system but you might connect these up.
Mostly its elsewhere, in countries that are hungry to move ahead.
Im astounded by the degree of complacency in much of Europe.
Same thing here [in the U.S.] Were the most advanced country technologically because we have Apple.
We get together every couple weeks and [discuss it].
To prove I live here.
All right, I did that.
[I needed to give] permission for her to go to the regular [non-ESL] class.
I get there, and theres a line of fifteen people.
I said Oh, I just have to hand in a piece of paper.
And then the last person in line turned around said Wealljust have to hand in a piece of paper.
I said Whats the problem?
Well, they have to make a photocopy of them.
This was the first indication that it was not strictly the 1950s.
Because in the 1960s the U.S. school system began to acquire Xerox machines.
And everyone thought this was completely normal!
What are you doing to maintain and develop the legacy of your work in Estonia?
The problem is that [a lot of countries] want to buy a lot of stuff.
They think they can just buy it.
And of course thats completely wrong.
Then you have to create the regulatory framework.
And how much of the time are you traveling?
It goes up and down.
But Id say maybe three or four days a month depending on whos inviting me.
Which countries are looking into digitization?
NetherlandsSingapore, its a very different system but they are digitized.
The people talking to me are the ones who dont have anything.
Latin America, the Gulf States are very keen on it.
What are their challenges?
A lot of countries simply have to deal with the connectivity issues.
Thats a set of problems that we had solved already.
Wed digitized all telephony.
These days you dont have to build landlines.
You need the broadband to [deliver] the wifi.
The point is, a lot of countries cant handle digitization for strictly infrastructural reasons.
Once you go beyond that, it comes down to political will, policies, laws, and regulation.
Tell me about Estonias e-residency program.
Who is this for?
Its part of a broader context of rethinking things that are enabled by digitization.
The most fundamental aspect of digitization of society is, how governance is turned upside-down.
Bureaucracy has always been a sequential process.
Digitization allows parallel processing.
Bureaucracy has always been a sequential process.
Digitization allows parallel processing.
Then you better file for the business.
Has everyone on the board paid taxes, their speeding tickets, their alimony?
At least in one country, it took a year and a half to establish a business.
So you’re able to speed things up.
So in a parallel processing world, a lot of things become possible in governance.
The first and most notable is a once only regulation.
It means that the government may never ask you for any information it has once already obtained.
You just ID yourself, and you dont have to put where you live.
Then I realized, Oh, my son is no longer a dependent because he turned 18.
All that is done [automatically].
You get in this mindset, once you get out of the 5,000-year history of a bureaucracy.
In a digital world, [identity] is not necessarily tied to geographical location.
We take your fingerprintswhich we dont do to Estonianswe do our due diligence.
You dont have any criminal records as far as we can tell.
Why cant you open a bank account and start a company?
Now who would bother to do that?
Its not a problem in the EU.
So you establish e-residency.
Say youre in the UK!
As of November 1, youre no longer in the EU.
Youre going to be faced with tariffs.
You do not have political rights, nor social rights, no welfare or unemployment.
You do however pay taxes for your company in Estonia.
Thats the benefit for Estonia.
Has there been any international pushback?
Countries feeling like youre stealing their taxes?
I havent seen any pushback on [taxes.]
The only real problems have been that the West banking authorities dont always get it.
Which is kind of bizarre, because this is a country that allows anonymous shell companies to buy property.
Whereas we really do our K.Y.C.Know Your Customer.
We even have their fingerprints.
Its pretty hard to launder money when you know who exactly is doing things.
We dont give you anonymity.
And other countries are trying to do the same?
Getting some of these big countries in Europe to move is hard, because theres not enough political will.
What were your other duties and initiatives as president?
And various studies have shown us as one of the strongest civil societies of the post Communist world.
Up at the same level as Western Europeans.
And what do you credit for that?
Its a competition between us and the Finns.
The United States, for example, is fairly dismal in that study.
Basically [the score] overlaps with high-income countries.
And youd be surprised how badly countries like the United States and UK do with that.
[Estonia has] a non-executive presidency, so youre more of a moral soundboard than anything else.
The worst situation I faced was in 2007, when we had a massive cyberattack from Russia.
I had to go and calm people down.
And there were issues that the government didnt want to touch because they lacked the political will.
One is the Greek bailout, where I understand the government.
we were supposed to ratify the EU agreement to help bailout Greece.
The Greek retirement age was like 50, and ours was 63 or 64.
And the average Greek pension was very high compared to what we got.
Obviously this was not an easy sell.
But it was not popular, and I was lambasted for that.
I pushed thattalked about why this was necessary and a good thing to do.
To this day Im vilified for that.
Now we have a strange government thats way out there, and Im abete noirefor them.
Is that something that you still engage with?
That some of these ideas still dont the appreciation that a lot of your other work did?
None of it gets any appreciation!
Only abroad, not in Estonia!
Its the Bible: no prophet is accepted in his hometown.
Do you think the country will eventually come around and appreciate your work?
No idea if they ever will.
Of course, success always has a million fathers.
You just have to accept that.
What was the day-to-day of the presidency like?
Where are things taking place?
Its kind of a functional office building, two stories, built in 1938, called the Palace.
Eighty-five percent of it is office space, and theres this little apartment in there.
Everyone goes Oh, he lives in a palace!
Its like a hundred square meters.
My apartment was the apartment of the adjutant.
I couldnt even put a cable in there for a computer.
I couldnt use wifi for security reasons.
It was strictly ceremonial, where I would greet a guest, sit down with them.
But my office was just a room with my computer.
Wherever my computer is and I am, thats my office.
Who was on your staff?
A security policy advisor for NATO stuff.
I had a counsel who looked throughalllaws.
One of the prerogatives and duties of the presidency is to promulgate or veto laws.
I can veto laws not politically, but because they violate the constitution one way or another.
So you’re gonna wanna have very smart counsel.
Then there were people dealing with domestic politics.
I spent a lot of time visiting all the municipalities in the country.
For a while I had the former CEO of Skype as my digital advisor.
And then he moved to the United States.
So [then] I met regularly with the CIO for the country.
Was that the official title?
No, but functionally.
We collaborated on all kinds of things, because this digitization process was not always self-evident to the government.
I didnt have executive authority, but I had a bully pulpit.
Were there internal changes and digitizations in your own office?
I did ask to use digital signatures for promulgating laws.
In the U.S. the president signs a law, gives the penthe pensto people [who supported it].
We have the same thing.
But I said, ourthingis the digital signature.
Why dont I promulgate or reject the laws with a digital signature?
Is that more than a ceremonial change?
No, that was actually real change!
Digital signature takes a minute, but from that moment on it existsyou dont have to send it anywhere.
The extreme example is that two years ago I found myself in Asuncion, Paraguay.
I got this email from my bank, I had forgotten to sign a contract.
Like If you dont sign it in the next 24 hours, forget it.
In the paper world, theres no way it would have gotten there in time.
I would have had to FedEx it, at best.
You talked about calming people down around an unpopular initiative.
What does that look like, from a point of view of encouraging civil engagement?
I had this kind of crazy idea, I applied Fishkins deliberative democracy technique.
You get a lot of people together to discuss issues.
First all together and then in small groups.
You end up moving toward the center, toward more rational decisions.
Using the ID system, we asked people to submit their proposals for reforming governance.
Fishkin has done this around the world.
You bring in a representative group, around a thousand people in our case.
And then they discussed all these issues.
And came up within terms of opinion pollssome counterintuitive results.
These were turned into legislative proposals.
And I presented them to the parliament.
Parliament voted on them.
A familiar story.
Speaking of unintended consequences, you talked about security measures for citizen data.
Was the Russian cyberattack targeting that data?
Well, they never got in.
They never hacked into anything.
[It was just] a DDOS attack.
They were just trying to shut things down.
Forevermore, if you write a history of cyberwar, the war part would start with Estonia.
Would you say the result showed the strength of the system, or were any weaknesses revealed?
Overall it was a positive, it was a complete own goal.
We were pooh-poohed by just about everybody.
After this happened it quickly became obvious to NATO members that they had to deal with these issues.
So NATO ended up setting up itsCyber Defence Centre of Excellencein Estonia.
I mean, thats kind of funny!
Well, as long as you follow the rule of law, its not a problem.
All of it is highly regulated as to who can access what.
And no government with any responsibility would go that far, because the system is based on trust.
And if there is any break in that trust the system falls apart.
Estonia just becomes another former East European country that that is not digitized.
Unless people use it, its not digitized.
And of course we do have these built-in constraints.
We have two kinds of data, private data and public data.
Once a month the newspapers in my country would say Wow, what does he own?
and you could see it listed there.
The U.S. is behind us.
So Im not that worried.
Tell me more about your current work at Stanford.
My main interest is how democracy survives in the digital era.
What are the next steps for national and international digitization?
We get eight million visits from Finns every yearand there are only five million Finns.
(We get a lot of return visits.)
[Already] your prescription [is digitized] in Estonia.
So why dont we [make it] interoperable?
It took almost eight years for this to work.
This goes back to my main point about digitization is its not about digitization.
to make it avoid arbitrage, you shouldnt be able to buy anything cheaper because youre buying it abroad.
Finns come to Estonia to buy alcohol cheaper, you cant have that with medicine.
But it took eight years because of the other problems.
Its all political and regulatory.
That would be a big step forward.
That would be the next tier for me as a European.
