[kictanet] Great story on Estonia as an Internet nation

[Suhayl Esmailjee]

Check out the Estonian President's interview talking about this and the
impact made in his country...

http://www.ericsson.com/thecompany/press/broadcastroom

(you will need to login to look at the videos)

Regards

SE

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 7:00 PM, Paul Kukubo <pkukubo at ict.go.ke> wrote:

> In 1995, four years after Estonia<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/estonia> broke
> free from the USSR, Toomas Hendrik Ilves read a "very Luddite" book by
> Jeremy Rifkin called The End of Work. "It argued that with greater
> computerisation there would be fewer jobs," remembered Ilves, then a senior
> diplomat, now the country's president<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/03/president-ilves-made-estonia>,
> "which from his point of view was terrible."
>
> Ilves and many of his colleagues saw it differently. In a tiny
> (population: 1.4 million) and newly independent country like Estonia,
> politicians realised computers could help quickly compensate for both a
> minuscule workforce and a chronic lack of physical infrastructure.
>
> Seventeen years on, the internet<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/internet> has
> done more than just help. It is now tightly entwined with Estonia's
> identity. "For other countries, the internet is just another service, like
> tap water, or clean streets," said Linnar Viik, a lecturer at the Estonian
> IT College, a government adviser and a man almost synonymous in Estonia
> with the rise of the web<http://www.eubusiness.com/europe/estonia/040420021538.qhs3vusx>
> .
>
> "But for young Estonians, the internet is a manifestation of something
> more than a service – it's a symbol of democracy and freedom."
>
> To see why, you just have to go outside. Free Wi-Fi<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/wifi> is
> everywhere, and has been for a decade.
>
> Viik says you could walk 100 miles – from the pastel-coloured turrets here
> in medieval Tallinn <http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/tallinn> to the
> university spires of Tartu – and never lose internet connection.
>
> "We realised that if the government was going to use the internet, the
> internet had to be available to everybody," Viik said. "So we built a huge
> network of public internet access points for people who couldn't afford
> them at home."
>
> The country took a similar approach to education. By 1997, thanks to a
> campaign led in part by Ilves, a staggering 97% of Estonian schools
> already had internet <http://www.tiigrihype.ee/?op=body&id=45>. Now 42
> Estonian services are now managed mainly through the internet. Last year,
> 94% of tax returns were made online, usually within five minutes. You can vote
> on your laptop <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6407269.stm> (at
> the last election, Ilves did it from Macedonia) and sign legal documents on
> a smartphone. Cabinet meetings have been paperless since 2000.
>
> Doctors only issue prescriptions electronically, while in the main cities
> you can pay by text for bus tickets, parking, and – in some cases – a pint
> of beer. Not bad for country where, two decades ago, half the population
> had no phone line <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3603943.stm>.
>
> Central to the Estonian project is the ID card, introduced in 2002. Nine
> in 10 Estonians have one, and – by slotting it into their computer –
> citizens can use their card to vote online, transfer money and access all
> the information the state has on them.
>
> "There's nothing on the ID card itself, because that could be dangerous if
> you lost it," says Katrin Pärgmäe, who is in charge of public awareness at
> RIA, the country's internet authority <http://www.ria.ee/en>.
>
> "It only gives you access to the database if you type in the right code."
>
> You can also present the card at the pharmacy to pick up a prescription.
> On public transport, it doubles as a ticket.
>
> Many people also have special ID chips on their mobile sim cards that
> allow them to pay people by text.
>
> To a British audience, the ID card will have a whiff of Big Brother. But
> many Estonians argue the opposite: that it allows them to keep tabs on the
> state, rather than the other way round.
>
> "You'd think, given our history, we'd have a problem with it," said Ilves,
> in an oblique reference to the days when the KGB had an office down a
> cobbled street in central Tallinn.
>
> "But I feel much more secure with a digital ID. If anyone goes into my
> files, they're flagged. Whereas if my files – which would exist anyway –
> were made of paper, no one would know who was looking at them."
>
> Every Estonian can see who has visited their data, and they can challenge
> any suspicious behaviour. In one famous case, a policewoman was caught
> accessing information about her boyfriend.
>
> During a recent election campaign, a candidate was swiftly punished for
> accessing personal information about would-be constituents. "I don't know
> what the idiot was thinking," said Viik. "You can't hide."
>
> To an outsider, it is not immediately clear why Estonia took to the
> internet so much faster than its Baltic cousins, Latvia and Lithuania. All
> three won independence at the same time. All three needed quick ways of
> revamping their ailing infrastructure. But to Estonians, the reason is
> simple. Estonia has a sizeable Russian-speaking minority, but the country's
> ethnic Estonian majority feel Nordic, rather than Slavic or eastern
> European. In the early 90s, this meant they looked to tech-happy
> Scandinavia for both inspiration and investment.
>
> Those Finnish and Swedish businesses that did invest expected their
> Estonian counterparts to communicate by email rather than fax.
>
> And pretty soon it was the newcomers who were leading the way.
>
> "I remember when one of our banks was bought by a Swedish one, they came
> over and said: 'And now we're going to teach you how to do computer
> banking'," recalled Ilves. "And we said, 'well, you might want to look at
> what we're actually doing with computer banking ourselves.'" At the last
> count, 99% of Estonian bank transfers were online.
>
> It helped that many politicians in the early 90s were unusually quick to
> "get" the internet. "The people in power after the collapse of the Soviet
> Union were really young," said Jaan Tallinn, the co-founder of Skype, the
> Estonian internet telephone company, and a co-developer of file-sharingwebsite
> Kazaa <http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/apr/15/www.kazaa.com>.
> "They knew what was going on."
>
> Mart Laar was 32 when he became prime minister in 1992. Ilves is slightly
> older, but had learned to code as a child, growing up in exile in the US.
>
> "I thought if I can do it, anyone can," he said in his strong New Jersey
> accent. "I was completely at ease with computers."
>
> The internet was also seen as a buffer to Russia<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/russia>
> .
>
> "We were afraid that Russian armies might take down the TV tower, the
> central radio station, or newspaper press," said Viik.
>
> "Three addresses shut down, and we would have been disconnected from the
> rest of the world.
>
> "But the internet would still work – and so we realised that this would be
> a great way of keeping in touch with the world in case of emergency."
>
> Ironically, when an attack did finally come, it came via the internet –
> and promptly disconnected Estonia from the rest of the world.
>
> In 2007, the government infuriated its Russian-speaking minority by moving
> a Soviet war memorial from central Tallinn to a cemetery on the city's
> outskirts. Violence flared on the streets, and later reached the internet.
> The first cyberattack was simplistic, and easily dealt with: thousands of
> unknown individuals bombarding government, media and banking websites with
> "denial of service" (DoS) attacks.
>
> "It was like an internet riot," said Hillar Aarelaid, who led Estonia's
> response, at the time.
>
> But what started as an emotional backlash soon became a far larger, longer
> and better co-ordinated assault on Estonia's very being.
>
> It lasted three weeks and could only be contained by restricting internet
> traffic in and out of the country. It was, in effect, a cybersiege.
>
> "This is how a lot of myths were created," remembered Pärgmäe. "Those
> outside the country couldn't access Estonian websites, but they didn't
> realise that people inside still could."
>
> Rumours circulated about the collapse of the Estonian online banking
> system, and how people were struggling to buy groceries. "But actually the
> longest downtime for a bank's website was just one and a half hours."
>
> The debacle had two positive effects. First: Nato founded a cyberwarfare
> thinktank in Estonia<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_Cyber_Defence_Centre_of_Excellence>,
> to learn from the experience. Second: the government set up the Cyber
> Defence League<https://www.eesti.ee/eng/riigikaitse/eesti_kaitsejoud/kaitsevagi>,
> a network of 100 volunteers from the cybersector who, among other roles,
> will form – a kind of territorial army during future strife.
>
> "Traditionally in western countries," said Ilves, "you've had a
> weekend-warrior thing where volunteers run off into the woods and do target
> practice. In Estonia, we have a unit of IT people from banks, software
> companies who in their spare time for one day a week work on cyber issues."
>
> This kind of collaboration between private and public sectors was also
> central to Estonian innovation in the 90s, Viik claims.
>
> "The government started several IT programmes as a catalyst," he said.
> "But only in a few was it the main sponsor. From the early days, government
> philosophy was not to hire programmers, but to use the services of private
> companies, which in turn increased the competitiveness of the Estonian IT
> sector."
>
> Case in point: the ID card. "It's private companies who developed and
> manage the service – and who can now export their new-found competencies to
> other countries."
>
> Viik argues that this benefits both the private sector and the state, who
> otherwise would not have the resources for ID card technology.
>
> But some think the overlap between occasionally threatens Estonia's open
> internet.
>
> For many years, each Estonian citizen had the right to a free domain name.
> As in the UK, they could not register top-level domain names – but they
> could bag a ".pri.ee" site, similar to a ".co.uk" site in Britain. In
> 2010, that changed: the government outsourced the responsibility of
> allocating domain names to private registrars. The pri.ee domains were
> abolished, and individuals were instead given the right to top-level ".ee"
> websites. The only catch was a £15 price-tag – one of the highest rates in
> Europe <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/europe-news>.
>
> Many academics and high-profile techies were outraged<http://kogukond.org/in-english/>,
> and some founded a pressure group – the Estonian Internet Community (EIC) –
> that campaigns to give ordinary citizens more of a say in how Estonia's
> internet is run. After public outcry, a new set of free domain-names -
> era.ee - were introduced.
>
> More generally, it is feared that the same politicians who had such
> enlightened attitudes to the internet in the 90s may be starting to lose
> their progressive edge.
>
> "They're still in power," said Jaan Tallinn, "but I'm not sure they still
> understand what's going on. Technology keeps progressing. Young people
> follow the curve. But as they get older they get inertia, and they start
> deviating from that curve."
>
> Ilves himself is fairly critical of parts of Acta<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement>,
> the hugely controversial international agreement that opponents fear will
> curtail the rights of individual internet users.
>
> But there is a perception that other politicians could be doing more to
> oppose its introduction.
>
> "It's difficult because it's actually an EU agreement," admitted Jaagup
> Irve, a PhD student at the Tallinn University of Technology, and an EIC
> board member. "But the government isn't doing enough to stop Acta<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/acta>
> ."
>
> Viik says that among politicians of all stripes there has always been "a
> silent consensus" about the importance of the internet. For many years,
> Estonians could expect whomever they elected to have the best interests of
> the internet at heart.
>
> But Irve thinks the public can no longer be so complacent. "People think a
> government is like a smart missile: the thing practically flies itself," he
> argued.
>
> "But today it's more like a bomb that we have to guide. We have to guide
> the government, and that's what the internet society has woken up to."
>
> *• Explore the seven-day special series on the Battle for the internet<http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/series/battle-for-the-internet>
> *
>
> • This article was amended on 17 April 2012 to clarify details of the
> registration and selling of domain names.
>
>
> --
> Paul Kukubo
> Chief Executive Officer, Kenya ICT Board
> PO Box 27150 - 00100
> Nairobi, Kenya
>
> 12th Floor, Teleposta Towers Koinange Street
>
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>
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>
>
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