Dusseldorf, Tokyo, New York Digital Minister Audrey Tang mentions the greatest threat to Taiwan’s security only indirectly, never literally: the People’s Republic of China. “We are also planning for more serious man-made disasters that cut all of Taiwan’s undersea internet cables,” she told Handelsblatt. It’s an allusion to China’s extensive summer military maneuvers in the Taiwan Straits, where these cables run.
Tang’s job is to protect the highly digitized Taiwan from Chinese cyber attacks and attacks on the IT infrastructure. The communist leadership in Beijing regards Taiwan as a renegade province and, under President Xi Jinping, has repeatedly threatened to take the democratically governed island with around 23.5 million inhabitants, if necessary using military force. Taiwan’s self-defense includes not only anti-aircraft missiles and submarines, but also digital defenses against cyber attacks and disinformation.
Taiwan is keeping a close eye on Ukraine this year. “When it comes to security, we draw on Ukraine’s experience in resisting Russia’s brutal war of aggression,” Tang says.
Imagine Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv without internet connections. “Then the international community would have had no way of knowing about Russia’s brutal war of aggression or seeing President Volodymyr Zelensky’s daily speeches.” Instead, false news and Russian propaganda would have reigned – and possibly undermined the aid projects of other countries.
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Democracy, tolerance and freedom can only be preserved if Taiwan remains able to communicate in an emergency, warns Tang, Taiwan’s first digital minister. She is working out of necessity on a digital fortress that shows what the future of digital communications could look like: Satellites are replacing undersea Internet cables, fire engines provide 5G reception in emergencies, and the nation is training an army of citizen journalists to be fact-checkers. Tang’s plans are still in the early stages, but time is pressing. Many China experts consider an attack to be possible or probable in the coming years.
The undersea cables are Taiwan’s sore point
So far, Taiwan is connected to the world grid by 15 undersea cables. Due to the risk of earthquakes in the region, the cables converge on different stretches of coast. “The submarine cables are a massive sore point,” says East Asia expert Eberhard Sandschneider. The sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline in the Baltic Sea showed how easily such an infrastructure can be destroyed.
China has repeatedly threatened to take the country with military force if necessary.
(Photo: NurPhoto/Getty Images)
In order to prevent an internet failure, Minister Tang relies on satellites – a technology that has already proven itself in Ukraine. The Ukrainian military and population have had access to the Starlink satellite network since March. The Internet provider of US billionaire Elon Musk operates around 3,600 satellites in low earth orbit that can establish a data connection. This could replace fragile infrastructures such as radio towers and undersea cables.
Initial project drafts, which Tang announced in September, envisage 700 ground stations that receive the Internet signal from Earth orbit. What’s special: “Some of these stations could be mobile and mounted on boats or trucks or even drones,” she explains. Around 18 million US dollars are estimated for an initial test phase.
Tang’s project is said to be divided into two areas: the commercial infrastructure and the crisis internet. Tenders have already started for commercial 5G coverage by satellites. This system is primarily intended to reach the nine percent of the population who do not yet have regular internet access, for example in very rural areas. The infrastructure for the event of a crisis is to be set up from the spring. Tang does not name the estimated costs for this.
contingency plan
700
ground stations
provide the first project drafts to prevent a failure of the internet supply.
Taiwan’s satellite plans are “strategically logical,” says Sandschneider. “An attack on this new infrastructure would not be easy for China.”
The fire brigade uses the 5G network
Taiwanese technology groups such as Pegatron and Foxconn are to be involved in the construction of the new communications network. The government is counting on the chip and IT companies also investing because they would also offer commercial services on the infrastructure. Tang says this should increase global trust in Taiwanese chips, as well as the industry’s cybersecurity. And it keeps public spending down.
A project in the Taiwanese city of Hsinchu is considered a pioneering project for the future emergency Internet. Here, fire engines have been equipped with 5G receivers.
“The idea is that if there’s a serious fire that destroys fiber optic cables or radio towers, the fire brigade can drive in with their vehicles and connect to the satellites in orbit,” explains Tang. Service provider is the Luxembourg satellite operator SES. Three of its geostationary satellites and other devices in medium Earth orbit cover Taiwan. Their signal could also be used in the event of a Chinese invasion.
But a model with just one operator is not enough for the digital minister. Various providers would have to come into play in order to prevent a possible dependency. “The more heterogeneous our system is, the less likely it is that all transmission paths will be switched off at the same time,” says Tang. “We are ready to work with any utility that meets our cybersecurity criteria.”
The example of Ukraine shows what threatens when a country becomes too dependent on one provider: According to media reports, Starlink boss Musk has had more than 1,000 receivers in the war zone switched off. The entrepreneur had previously complained in a letter to the US government about the high operating costs of the system.
Cooperation with several software providers: “Strength through diversity”
But it’s not just the operator model that drives Tang: Resilient software that coordinates the system is just as important. According to publicly available documents, Beijing is already having methods developed to undermine the satellite Internet of providers such as Starlink. And Russia is also working on corresponding hacker attacks, as shown by failures in Ukraine.
In order to prevent such attacks from being successful, Tang wants to cooperate with various software providers, each of which is supposed to secure different sections of the Taiwanese cyber fortress. Experts call the Zero Trust Architecture approach. “Perhaps one layer will be managed by Microsoft, one by Amazon, one by Google, one by VMWare. And so these big IT companies each take care of the areas they are most familiar with and thus participate in a common cyber defense,” explains the minister. The goal is “strength through diversity”.
>> Read here: Starlink satellite system for Ukrainian military fails over front
The homepage of the ministry is already secured via two networks: “It is hosted on both Cloudflare and IPFS. If you want to shut down our website with a cyber attack, you have to shut down Cloudflare as well.” This feeds pretty much all major social media websites, the NFT exchanges and the crypto world. Anyone who paralyzes Cloudflare declares war on almost everyone.
Tang: Every citizen should become a fact checker
Tang believes that Taiwan’s open society is also based above all on information. To prevent disinformation from Beijing from undermining the basic trust in Taiwanese society, Taiwanese should be trained in dealing with sources of information and encouraged to become citizen journalists. They should be able to access the internet securely – especially in times of crisis. “It makes society more resilient.”
Audrey Tang wants to protect Taiwan’s IT infrastructure against attacks.
(Photo: Reuters)
Tang, the 41-year-old planner of Taiwan’s digital stronghold, is a pioneer. In 2016, she became Taiwan’s youngest minister. As the first member of the government, she appeared openly non-binary, i.e. as a person belonging neither to the male nor to the female gender.
She came into contact with the Chinese democracy movement early in her life: in 1989 her father was a Taiwanese correspondent on Tiananmen Square, where the Chinese leadership violently suppressed the student protests thirsting for freedom. The mother was also a journalist.
When Tang was 11, the family moved to Saarbruecken, Germany, where Tang’s father did his doctorate on communications from Tian’anmen Square protesters. Tang was interested in the opportunities of digitization early on. As a child, the highly gifted dropped out of school, went to Silicon Valley as a young entrepreneur at the age of 19, worked as a hacker and programmer.
She sees herself as an “individualistic anarchist”. For a long time she didn’t want to believe that the public sector could also create innovations. Now she has a different opinion. After all, it’s innovation that could save Taiwan’s freedom on Day X.
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