ESTONIA DIGITIZATION PODCAST

Estonia is a technologically advanced country known for its digital processes. They have a state-issued digital identity called EID, which allows citizens to complete various processes online. Estonia also has efficient transportation systems, including paperless freight transport and smart road maintenance. The country has embraced digital banking, with over 99% of transactions done online, and they have an electronic tax filing system. Estonia's e-Police system and X-Road secure data exchange process ensure efficient and secure policing and information sharing. The country also has online voting and an online judicial system. In terms of education, Estonian schools have embraced digital learning materials. However, the digitization of Estonia's systems also poses cybersecurity risks, as seen in the 2007 cyber attack on the country. What's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of Society and Culture in Europe, Anthropology 101. It's Olivia here, and I'm accompanied, as always, by my wonderful co-host, Anna. Today we have a very up-and-coming topic for all you nerds and tech savvies out there. This episode is called Estonia and Digitalization, and my segment for the day is Top 5 Digital Processes in Estonia Today. For a quick bit of background, Estonia is typically known for its gorgeous islands, historic capital Tallinn, and vast natural landscapes. However, that is not what we're here for today. Estonia is one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world. I mean, they invented Skype. This is even more impressive upon learning how small the country actually is. They sport a population of around 1.3 million, which is approximately comparable to the population in Montana. They may be small, but they sure are mighty, so let's get into digital process number one. First up is Estonia's state-issued digital identity, known as EID. This system has actually been implemented for over 20 years now and gives citizens an online identification through an encrypted chip, which connects to every other process needed in their lives, including things like paying bills, shopping, signing contracts, and handling prescriptions. The IDs are issued to citizens at birth and take away the need for extra identity checks. Besides marriage, divorce, and purchase of physical property, any process can be completed with the EID. Over 98% of these processes are completed online, and it makes each one more efficient. Further, the EIDs connect directly to smartphones through SmartID, which is a convenient mobile app that works for those who do not have a SIM card in their device but need to securely prove their online identity. It's free, unlimited, and can be downloaded on any device. Next up, our second digital process is smart mobility. Estonia has extremely efficient transportation, whether traveling by bus, train, tram, or ship, but there are a few especially interesting innovations. Since 2011, a paperless freight transport system has been in place that can reduce a single border crossing by hundreds of hours. Not only this, but it's also decreased road congestion, as well as noise and air pollution. This system allows transporters to reserve time slots and access lines ahead of time at border checkpoints. Continuing with smart mobility is intelligent road maintenance. Estonia sports smart crosswalks and bus stops, which can communicate with citizens' cars and cell phones. Not only this, but they also act as sensors, which deliver weather information directly to smartphones. That way, everyone is receiving real-time updates on weather and road conditions. E-bricks, which are built into roads, contain LED lights and can be digitally linked with traffic lights or can be lit up with certain symbols to increase pedestrian safety. Further, these e-bricks also contain their own defrosting systems to minimize ice slippage while driving. Last for smart mobility is self-driving cars, buses, and robots meant to deliver people, items, or food straight to their destination. Estonia was one of the first countries to legalize autonomous vehicles on public roads, and they are now well-implemented since 2021. The third digital process involves banking. After the creation of EID, banks wholeheartedly embraced the process by encouraging use of the EID chips or the mobile app. Over 99% of all banking transactions today in Estonia are carried out online, and these can be done from anywhere in the world at any time. Opening a bank account itself is possible online using EID, a video recording, and facial recognition technology. Along with this, Estonia widely uses an electronic tax filing system set up by the Tax and Customs Board called e-Tax. This system enables citizens to file declarations for income tax, social tax, insurance, or pensions, as well as request tax returns and file personal income tax declarations, all from the comfort of their own home over their mobile device. The average time to file personal taxes in Estonia is only three minutes. Also related is Estonia's unique and advanced system of registering a new business online. Since 2011, most entrepreneurs have used this process to establish their own companies, and it only takes a couple of hours. The register allows users to create the company, change data in the business register, file annual reports, and all it takes is an EID card or mobile ID app. Next up, our fourth digital process is legislation and policing. Estonia's e-Police system consists of two primary parts. The first is an advanced waterproof tablet used in police vehicles. The second is the web-based software used on these tablets, which gives officers access to all the information they need, such as whether or not a license is valid or to check for any arrest warrants. Each of these data transfers takes only a few seconds after scanning a citizen's EID. As the software is web-based, no sensitive information is stored in the device itself, which is accessed via a safe data transfer infrastructure called X-Road. X-Road is Estonia's secure data exchange process for sending and receiving data between both private and public sector organizations. To ensure secure transfers, all outgoing data is digitally encrypted, while incoming data is meticulously authenticated by the program. Over 50,000 organizations are indirect X-Road users, and the program encompasses over 3,000 e-services. X-Road has spread out of just Estonia, so in cases of policing, for example, it allows finished tourist data to be accessed as well. In terms of legislation, iVoting and online justice systems are huge time-savers. iVoting gained much of its popularity in 2001, and Estonia became the first country in 2005 to hold legal general elections over the Internet. This, like much of Estonian life, is based around the EID, which allows online voters to vote ahead of time during an early period. The system allows citizens to change their votes an unlimited number of times before the final vote is tabulated. Voters' ballots are verified through the SmartID mobile app, but their identity is removed from the ballot before it reaches the National Electoral Commission for counting. At around 45% of eligible voters participating in the iVoting system, it is not as widely implemented as some of Estonia's other online processes. However, it has been determined as the fastest, most cost-efficient voting channel offered in Estonia. Lastly, the online judicial system provides data to court information systems, as well as to information systems of the police, jails, prosecutors, and criminal case managers. Data is only entered in the system once, so it saves time, money, and keeps all parts of the legislative process on the same page. Summons, hearings, and decisions are all done online, and classified information can be encrypted by courts to make sure no third party would be able to access the data. Estonia is now working to implement AI into their online judicial system to make the process even more efficient. Finally, for our fifth digital process, we are looking at education and research. Since 2020, Estonian schools have been able to provide education using only digital learning materials. This greatly cuts down on costs needed for books and school supplies, as well as operational costs associated with running a school. Among the technologies used are digital textbooks, online learning materials, and digital assessments. The fact that so much schooling is done over the internet provides a great opportunity to use data and analytics to improve teaching through the collection of data over students' technology. It also poses as an opportunity to teach digital awareness and skills early on in school. There are opportunities for learning programming, robotics, and other technologies as early as preschool in Estonia. All right, well, this has been the top five digital processes in Estonia today, and next up is Anna with a bit more information on the possible benefits and drawbacks to this digitalization. Hey, guys, this is Anna. Thanks, Olivia, for giving us some insight into Estonia's digital systems. I'll be covering the threats, costs, and implications of their public and commercial digitization projects. So first off, in terms of cybersecurity, the digitization of commercial enterprise in Estonia, as well as that of economic and political establishments, presents the risk of catastrophic cyber attack on critical infrastructure. Most notably, in 2007, Estonia felt the heat of a new type of warfare, that which weaponizes information in a digital landscape. It began with the Estonian government's movement of a statue of a Red Army soldier from the center of the capital of Tallinn to a cemetery on the edge of the city. Ethnic Estonians saw this statue as a symbol of Soviet occupation, but Russian speakers, to whom the statue represented Soviet triumph over Nazism, were outraged over its movement. What resulted from this dispute over a bronze symbol was the first cyber attack on an entire country. These cyber attacks began April 27, 2007, and didn't cease for weeks. Unprecedented internet traffic bogged down banks, media outlets, internet service providers, as well as government agencies. So broadcasters had considerable difficulty delivering news, government officials had difficulty communicating with one another, and banking services crashed sporadically. Most of this malicious network traffic was traced back to Russian IP addresses and was likely politically motivated. This attack exposed the vulnerabilities of Estonia's digital infrastructure, as well as that of the NATO alliance. The thing is, NATO members can only defend one another in cyber attacks in the case that it results in a loss of life comparable to that of traditional military action. So Estonians faced this problem largely alone. After the attack, they invested significantly in cyber defense, becoming the third most secure country on the Global Cyber Security Index in 2021, number one among EU member states. Now, the EU IT agency, as well as the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence, are both headquartered in Estonia. Estonia is more equipped these days to deal with these kinds of distributed denial-of-service attacks, or DDoS hits, which disrupt the traffic of their targeted servers. After 2007, Estonian officials have mitigated the risk of future cyber attacks through the development of blockchain technology. MSI Blockchain, a scalable blockchain technology developed by Estonian cryptographers, backs several government registries and is more secure in the face of internal data manipulation. It is more secure as a result of its scalability, meaning its ability to back increasing loads of traffic, like those that so disrupted the country in 2007. These issues of cybersecurity are increasingly relevant on a global scale, considering topics of recent intention, like the 2016 and 2020 United States elections, in which both sides of the political aisle claim were sullied by foreign interference by entities like Russia, Iran, and China. Speaking of politics, in terms of the political implications of Estonian public projects, e-Cabinet minimizes bureaucracy by cutting hours off the Estonian Cabinet decision-making process. As a result, similar e-Cabinet infrastructures have been adopted by other countries, particularly in the Middle East, where there's a focus on tech, like Qatar and Oman. Finland has also implemented this. Also, e-voting is critical to a place like Estonia, where the weather is often inclement and the country has a low population density. So digital access to voting promotes the participation of more people and offers greater ease of access to the electoral process. In the United States, e-voting became a hot topic in 2012, after Hurricane Sandy altered the election process, and people began looking to ways in which we could amend our voting process to accommodate unforeseen circumstances and promote more participation. Suspicions of foreign interference have only roused more demands for digital elections, with higher cybersecurity. However, the threat of cyberattacks like those experienced by e-Estonia in 2007 has many other people apprehensive to adopt this kind of digital voting infrastructure. Regardless of its efficacy, one significant positive of e-voting is that it is 20 times cheaper than traditional in-person voting. Speaking of other economic implications of Estonian digitization, with a new digital banking landscape, rural communities have greater ease of access to private banks. With e-taxes, people can report their income easier, and with Estonia's implementation of EID and digital signatures, 2% of GDP is saved annually. For reference, 2% of GDP in the United States in 2021 would amount to $460 billion in potential savings if we were to implement this and reap the same results. One of the most interesting programs I discovered about Estonia was that of e-Residency, which is basically the first digital nation available to anyone around the world. It doesn't operate like a visa, so you can't actually live in Estonia with this residency. But what it does do is enable entrepreneurs and businesses to access the nation's public and private sector digital services. It gives access to the EU's single market, attracting international business and drawing significant investment into the Estonian digital economy. Estonia began investing in its own Information and Communications Technology, or ICT, following its declaration of independence from the Soviet regime in 1991, which coincided with the beginnings of the commercial Internet as we know it today. Clearly, this investment has resulted in significant return, cutting many of the costs associated with non-digital systems, not to mention the resulting job creation in the ICT sector. The development of XROAD, an integration system for digital processes, has streamlined the digital experience for every Estonian citizen, making online transactions infinitely more efficient. In terms of these decades of Estonian investment and its influence on the outside world, many other programs have been implemented in countries across the globe. One of these is in-parking, or the ability to pay for parking digitally on mobile devices in Estonia. Countries like the US, Canada, Sweden and Dubai have all mimicked this low-cost parking infrastructure in some capacity. Another program developed by Estonian software programmers is actually Skype, which has paved the way for other similar video chat systems like Zoom, which after 2020 we all know and recognize. In a post-pandemic world, global interest in digital landscapes has risen significantly. Like natural disasters, disease is an unforeseen circumstance that we've seen can launch an entire country indoors, if not the entire world. But Estonia was equipped for the crisis. Their strong digital framework only eased the massive economic burdens that the rest of the world undertook as a result of the COVID shutdowns. Aside from supply chain disruptions, cybercrime actually resulted in a loss of about $1 trillion in 2020. So as interests in a plugged-in world rise, so does the need to develop technologies to mitigate the threat, theft and manipulation of digital property, namely our money and information. As Olivia covered, Estonia is one of the most digitally advanced societies in the world, having adopted digital infrastructure in countless sectors of life. Estonia seems to be ahead of its time, but the implementation of these kinds of programs worldwide is a definitive, particularly in countries like the United States. While there's still kinks to work out in digital healthcare, education, banking and governance, including the threat of rising cybercrime, I do think it's in your interest to keep updated on Estonia's progress, as it might just be a glimpse into your future.