Welcome to e-Estonia, the world's first digital nation!

[Music] hello and welcome to this special edition of tech 24 out of town in estonia the world's first e nation [Music] estonia is often hailed as the most digitally advanced society in the world since its independence from the soviet bloc 28 years ago this small baltic state has transformed itself into an e nation with 90 percent of government services online internet access is even considered a basic human right and is enshrined in the constitution in a tweet the president of estonia recently called attention to the country's high proportion of unicorns or companies valued over one billion dollars compared to the country's population estonia is already known as the birthplace of skype one of its four unicorns along with playtek taxify and transferwise after london paris berlin and silicon valley talent seems to be the new land of opportunity for entrepreneurs let's meet with some people who have decided to set up their business here in the estonian capital [Music] and welcome to my office here in thailand 40 computer engineers from across five countries work in this 500 meter squared office they're the team behind the startup on off an application that allows you to have multiple numbers for one mobile phone first of all i thought to myself we need to find a country not just where the engineers are very good but where they know how to produce the kind of technology that i want to make so clearly i had to go to a country where the workforce is cheaper to create a more effective product and so become more competitive and finally we're based here in the silicon valley of europe a hub of technological ingenuity whose spirit is embodied by one place in particular the teluskivi creative center a former soviet industrial complex now home to startups from all over the world including chile china canada and italy they operate from this co-working space known as lift 99. youssef a moroccan software engineer came here from berlin six months ago to develop a virtual reality startup aimed at allowing anyone to create their own vr experience it's transformed his project in one year in berlin i could test two methods which wasn't what i wanted since moving to estonia i could test all the methods that i hadn't gone through due to its efficiency and supportiveness this tech community is a tight-knit one so far 340 companies have received what's called startup status this grants them the right to apply for a startup visa or temporary residence permit in estonia the startup visa is just one of the ways people can bring their company here e-residency allows you to be a digital citizen without setting foot in estonia then there is the digital nomad visa which is being launched here in january and differs from the start-up visa startup estonia is a government initiative which works to support and encourage the country's startup ecosystem the main difference is that the digital nomad visa gives you a right to just come here for a brief amount of time but you can also continue traveling after that but with the startup visa we see that people actually commit themselves to at least a couple of years in estonia they want to benefit from the community and then get the contacts and maybe scale out as estonia looks to attract more and more international entrepreneurs it now has to respond to new challenges how to ensure that the necessary infrastructure is in place for those who choose to up sticks and move here [Music] the estonia project aims to make the government more efficient and more transparent every single citizen here has a secure digital identity enabling them to file their tax returns check their medical records and vote estonians can do pretty much everything online apart from marrying divorcing and buying a house let's meet with one of the founding fathers of this project [Music] leonard vic thank you so much for joining us here on tech 24. how did the idea of creating the world's first e-government arise back 28 years ago it all started with necessity estonia has just at that time regained its independence from soviet union and we saw a technological opportunity to make public administration and government work more efficiently it was just efficiency gains we were seeking for and it came from necessity we were not able financially to maintain the public administration and bureaucracy as we know in europe and now how did you gain people's trust trust can be gained with an interaction as we say often that it takes 10 000 hits in golf to become somebody who knows how to hit it takes 10 000 interactions or emails to gain a trust it starts also with non-formal trust which means that municipalities of government is responding to emails the public services and information is transparently online and when people gradually start using it it also increases the trust level and now the personal data of 1.3 million estonians is now stored in the government cloud how do you ensure the security of all this data we have a distributed architecture for the digital government which is on top of that highly encrypted and all the data exchange and all the services which we create are carried out through the common secure data exchange layer which we call in estonia x road and this ensures that the data of the citizens and businesses is securely stored in government on other angle not only that we carry out continuous digital security tests and we certificate our systems it's also extremely important that all citizens can see what government knows about me and how government is using data about me so we have not the big brother controlling society but rather we have a small brother which is citizens who can have a full control over what government is doing with their data now you say that you're creating an e-government for everyone an e-nation for everyone but what about citizens who don't want to give their identity and have their personal data stored in the cloud can they still function in a society where everything is digitized we need to be available and accessible for everybody however we need also to understand that it's more efficient and convenient for people also to use digital services let me give you one example when we declare our taxes online then the tax returns when i do it digitally i get it back virtually in couple of days if i do it on paper which i can also do it will be stored and it will be processed only when the tax declaration period is over and i get my returns back after the paper document is processed because it takes more time and last but not least parliamentary elections are set to take place this march with about 50 percent of estonians that are set to use the e-voting system some specialists are worried about security breaches what do you say to that internet voting in one country say for example referendums in switzerland using electronic voting system in united states or internet voting in estonia are very different compared to each other it's very difficult to compare them to each other in estonia the system is built around the digital identity card individual certificates and centrally coordinated approach which ensures much higher levels of security and despite the fact that there is a theoretical possibility to intrude to one person's vote you can't undermine the total elections linarvik thank you so much for that and it's time for our test 24 segment of the week and dan and jay cattle car is here to tell us just what it's all about to be an [Music] estonian at the heart of estonia's e-governance is the system called x-rode which essentially is a digital platform that connects individual databases this ensures privacy and an efficient transfer of information now one of its biggest advantages is it that it saves plenty of time how do you access this x road platform it's through a digital id card that's issued to every estonian citizen and resident to talk more about this card and how it works i'm now joined by tobias who is the spokesperson of e estonia uh could you tell us how this card works you have um a physical card that is issued by the estonian government by the police in border guard and with the help of this card you can log into information systems and also actually give digital signatures this could be now id card based but also based on the mobile id so you can actually also use your mobile phone in order to access public service this is actually my my id card so i'm plugging the card into the computer there's an integrated smart card reader and with the help of the smart card reader i can now go to the state portal which is sd.e and there if i want to do get access to confidential information i of course need to authenticate who i am so just like going to the office of the authority and showing my id card so that people know that's really me and what services can be accessed through this card what you can do here is actually you can do everything from establishing a business you can request a child birth allowance for example you can um also check your your education register like what kind of information is accessible about you there you can change your address a very practical thing that you need to do every time you move so that's very very easy through that environment but also and this is now separate from the state portal is that you can actually vote electronically okay thank you tobias for your time yeah thank you for coming now one of the most important features of this system is that it ensures data privacy and data integrity now this is done through the so-called pki system which is the public key infrastructure system and there's also a data protection inspectorate so if a citizen or a resident finds that there has been some violation of data then he or she can complain to this authority and there's an additional layer in the form of blockchain technology which it again ensures more data integrity to know more about it we are now joined by a representative from guard time [Music] how does blockchain technology help in ensuring data integrity so the way blocks ksi blockchain works is that a user of the services has some kind of data which it wants to protect it hashes a data it can be for example a medical record it the hash which is a digital fingerprint of the data is linked with the ksi blockchain and the user gets in return a token which can be used to independently and continuously verify the integrity of the data the signing time of the data and the signing entity of data ita well that's how you say thanks in estonian back to you julia that brings us to the end of this special edition of tech 24 out of town in estonia but do stay with us here on france24 you

Channel: FRANCE 24 English

Views: 448,361

Keywords: technology, Estonia, Digital, TECH24, france24, news

Id: sh7W3kudseg

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 04 2019