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which data can be bridged, but a lot of the responsibility to safeguarding the integrity and security of the system requires basic common sense on the part of the end-user. Consequently, a high premium is placed on personal responsibility in ensuring data integrity in the society.
It might be hard to imagine the transition that Estonia has made from being one of the backwater nations within the former Soviet Union. A visit to the repository of Estonia’s Museum of Occupations helps give a firmer grasp of how far back and how fast the country had transited towards a fully digital society.
“By the time Estonia got freedom in 1991, about 20% of Americans were already using personal computers, but here in Estonia, there were virtually no computers, but we had typewriters,” Merlin Piipuu, the Director of the museum, explains.
She explains that though there were landlines, mobile communication technology was unheard of, let alone the then nascent Internet.
A new Estonia had to be built from scratch when the country broke away from the former USSR. That meant they could take advantage of something that was as brand new as the Internet. Their new vision of what the country could be and how it ought to be run, meant that within a few years Estonians had jumped from typewriters to the latest web-connected computers.
The transition to modern-day Estonia is a classic case of necessity being the mother of invention, according to Dr Robert Krimmer, and a Professor in the School of Business and Governance at the Tallinn University of Technology. According to Dr Krimmer, Estonia did not have much choice back in 1991. There was just not enough money to pay for all the services if you have to do it the traditional way. It was then decided that information technology was the one thing that could help the country organise itself.
One of the most powerful expressions
of trust in the nation’s digital frontier is none other than the 2005 decision to migrate voting from being paper- based to online, in what Dr Krimmer rightly describes as “bold”, as well as demonstrable of “how much people trust their online government services”.
Cyber security
One might get the impression that the entire shift to becoming an e-society was a breeze. It wasn’t. In fact, Estonia faced a major crisis in 2007 when it became the first country to experience a massive cyberattack, which took down emails, banking and newspaper servers. The very portal on which electronic government services are so depended upon was severely affected, which created a lot of panic.
In 2008, Estonia established the Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence, a multinational funded think-tank opened in Tallinn in response to the ever-present threat of cyberattacks. The centre draws on trained military and civilian experts from 21 countries in order to keep abreast of ways to protect against cyberattacks on government systems, banks and utilities. While even the best of efforts can’t stop cyberattacks, as the centre Director, Merle Maigre, admits, being forewarned, within split seconds, could minimise damage.
Digital embassies
Another line of defence against cyberattack is the creation of a back- up system in another country, in
what Estonians refer to as “digital embassies”. The first country in which the digital embassy had been established was Luxembourg, where Estonia’s strategic digital assets are stored. Maigre says the idea, in the long term, is to build a bigger kind of network of these digital embassies across the world, with the use of blockchain technology. The objective of digital embassies is that should anything happens within Estonia, or it gets attacked, the government would not lose strategic data.
Next big thing?
The next step for this small country is to expand beyond its borders. It is doing this by offering what is called an e-residency to everyone in the world. The programme is targeted at attracting entrepreneurs to Estonia. A minimum fee of about $120, plus background checks, entitles an e-resident to an Estonian digital ID card, which could be used to establish companies and facilitate easier access to the EU market.
An estimated 30 000 people from 140 counties currently enjoy the e-residency status and there are plans to recruit even more. Nonetheless, the biggest gift that Estonia could bestow on the rest of the world is lessons learnt from their unique experiment in building a digital society.
* Case study based on an edited transcription of a PBS News Hour documentary
FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Volume 12 No.3 of 2019 | SERVICE DELIVERY REVIEW 29