From an interview with Joel Berke, author of Rebooting a Nation: The Incredible Rise of Estonia, E-Government and the Startup Revolution: ... ... ... ...
From an interview with Joel Berke, author of Rebooting a Nation: The Incredible Rise of Estonia, E-Government and the Startup Revolution:
Estonia is a short way away across a body of water from Helsinki. When Finland transmitted radio and TV waves, they were strong enough to reach from Helsinki to much of Estonia, including the capital. That meant that, unlike many of the nations cut off behind the Iron Curtain, Estonia still got exposure to the West, to a capitalist society a short distance away. You would read advertisements for grocery stores that were full of meat at a time when there were bread lines. Former President Ilves talks about watching reruns of Dallas and Dynasty and these ’70s and ’80s TV shows that were broadcast in English in Finland.
The other reason I mention Finland is, if we roll back the clock even further to just before Estonia was occupied in World War II, Estonia had about the same standard of living as Finland. Then after five decades of Soviet occupation, as you can imagine, Estonia far lags its neighbor in any calculation of wealth or wellness. So there was this sense of collegial rivalry or competitiveness, where Estonia and Finland were always each other’s measuring sticks. Or at least for Estonia, Finland was.
After receiving independence, Estonia saw that Finland was way ahead. It became clear that if they just followed the traditional development methods, they’d never be able to catch up. So they had to pursue a really radical agenda. And I think Estonians were bought into this idea of trying to leap across the chasm to make better lives for themselves, and both that popular support and the boldness of leaders allowed for really aggressive reform.
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In 1994 there was the “bloody autumn,” which was turf wars between gangs across the former Soviet Union. Estonia’s privileged trade position was part of the reason for its repeated occupation, and it had been part of the Hanseatic League long ago. If you've achieved re-independence after years of fighting for it and you're now in charge of your own destiny, you don’t want to fall into the trap of corruption. But if you don’t have the literal manpower to actually staff the system, what do you do? Estonia decided to bet on digitization.
Former President Ilves has a great quote: “You can’t bribe a computer.” That’s catching on elsewhere — one of Ukraine’s first big e-government projects was Prozorro open contracting, which has been held up as a gold standard. Government procurement contracts are a prime vector for corruption, so Prozorro puts things out in the daylight and digitizes them to protect the process. If you apply for a construction contract, you won’t have someone showing up at your house saying, “We can expedite this for a tip.” Instead, it goes through a standard digitized workflow and everyone can see who checked it.
Estonia is now making a big bet on AI too. If you're Poland or Ukraine, you're going to matter simply on the basis of your population and size. Without that, Estonia needed to find other ways to compete and make itself into an interesting market or have any meaningful impact on the global stage. Technology became that dual tool: a way to prevent corruption, and a way to compensate for a missing workforce while also solving pressing problems.
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Estonia honors the once-only principle: if you’ve submitted your home address to one government agency, another agency shouldn’t have to ask you for it again. X-Road lets agencies share that information. I should also mention for your more technical audience that it’s now maintained by an open consortium, so other countries can explore and adopt it. If you want to go talk to the engineers, play with the code, and figure out how to build on it, you can.
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Some listeners might be screaming about privacy concerns here. Estonia’s system actually lets you look at all of the information the government has about you. For example, the government portal has a digital health record system. When I go to a doctor and they add a note or upload a lab result, I can log in and see exactly who has accessed my health records. If I notice that someone I didn’t authorize has viewed my data, outside of a few national security exceptions, I can demand that information from the government. The system enables transparency. It might not be directly privacy-preserving, but it creates an environment that facilitates it.
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I touched on this earlier, but a critical piece of this is that Estonia has a strong rule of law and low corruption. If you demand to know who accessed your data, the government will tell you, and you can trust that the data won’t be misused. I’d be much more concerned about centralizing large amounts of data in a country that didn’t have strong legal safeguards or real checks and balances. But Estonia has that rule of law and a strong press.
One of the advantages of being a country of 1.3 million people is local accountability. Maybe your parents went to school with the president, so they can message them on Facebook. Nothing grounds a person more than a message from an old teacher or favorite professor saying, “I don’t really like that thing you did.” It’s a much flatter hierarchy.
I had never thought about it like that before, and I wonder if this should be applied to the Internet in general? The only reason to access data is if it necessary to have that data. Even meta...
Some listeners might be screaming about privacy concerns here. Estonia’s system actually lets you look at all of the information the government has about you. For example, the government portal has a digital health record system. When I go to a doctor and they add a note or upload a lab result, I can log in and see exactly who has accessed my health records. If I notice that someone I didn’t authorize has viewed my data, outside of a few national security exceptions, I can demand that information from the government. The system enables transparency. It might not be directly privacy-preserving, but it creates an environment that facilitates it.
I had never thought about it like that before, and I wonder if this should be applied to the Internet in general? The only reason to access data is if it necessary to have that data. Even meta data, semi-anonymized one way or another, should only be accessed when it's necessary in my opinion. In a strange sense, it makes me wonder whether it isn't privacy directly that's the big issue but rather, the lack of accountability when data is being accessed, stored, etc.
One thing I also really appreciate about this interview is the emphasis on that simply copying the strategy of Estonia is most likely not a good idea. It's easy to say 'country X did Y, which means that so can we!' but countries are so complicated that it's rarely that simple.
Also, I'm impressed at the actual constructive criticism of DOGE by the end. Given all the emotional charge around the chainsaw approach you don't see people being able to do that often(myself included, unfortunately).
I assume it works well normally, but this bit seems dubious: If the wrong government gets in (a DOGE-like situation), what keeps them from getting full access to all citizen records? It's all...
I assume it works well normally, but this bit seems dubious:
outside of a few national security exceptions
If the wrong government gets in (a DOGE-like situation), what keeps them from getting full access to all citizen records?
It's all assuming the government never goes rogue. Maybe Estonia is okay making that assumption, but it seems like a special case?
That's a good point, and something I hadn't thought about. At the same time Estonia has thing called Russia right next to it so they also have more than enough reasons to have a few of those...
That's a good point, and something I hadn't thought about. At the same time Estonia has thing called Russia right next to it so they also have more than enough reasons to have a few of those exceptions. At the same time, that also can immediately cause issues with ethnic minorities which can end really badly.
From an interview with Joel Berke, author of Rebooting a Nation: The Incredible Rise of Estonia, E-Government and the Startup Revolution:
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I had never thought about it like that before, and I wonder if this should be applied to the Internet in general? The only reason to access data is if it necessary to have that data. Even meta data, semi-anonymized one way or another, should only be accessed when it's necessary in my opinion. In a strange sense, it makes me wonder whether it isn't privacy directly that's the big issue but rather, the lack of accountability when data is being accessed, stored, etc.
One thing I also really appreciate about this interview is the emphasis on that simply copying the strategy of Estonia is most likely not a good idea. It's easy to say 'country X did Y, which means that so can we!' but countries are so complicated that it's rarely that simple.
Also, I'm impressed at the actual constructive criticism of DOGE by the end. Given all the emotional charge around the chainsaw approach you don't see people being able to do that often(myself included, unfortunately).
I assume it works well normally, but this bit seems dubious:
If the wrong government gets in (a DOGE-like situation), what keeps them from getting full access to all citizen records?
It's all assuming the government never goes rogue. Maybe Estonia is okay making that assumption, but it seems like a special case?
That's a good point, and something I hadn't thought about. At the same time Estonia has thing called Russia right next to it so they also have more than enough reasons to have a few of those exceptions. At the same time, that also can immediately cause issues with ethnic minorities which can end really badly.