Digital Rights Activists in Taiwan Driven by Memory and Threat of Authoritarianism

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

This week, RightsCon, which bills itself as "the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age," descends on Taipei.

According to the Freedom House Freedom on the Net report, “Taiwan hosts one of the freest online environments in Asia” and enjoys a “vibrant and competitive democratic system.” But the beautiful island country faces its own challenges, and of course, it lives under the specter of an aggressive authoritarian regime that interferes in its politics both overtly and covertly and may one day attempt to take its freedom.

To better understand the dynamics in the civil society community working on digital rights and tech policy matters in Taiwan, I spoke to three experts:

• Liu I-Chen (劉以正), Asia Program Officer at ARTICLE 19;
• Kuan-Ju Chou (周冠汝), Deputy Secretary-General of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights (TAHR); and
• Grace Huang (黃寬心), Director for Global Justice and Digital Freedom at Judicial Reform Foundation.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Liu I-Chen:

My name is I-Chen. I am Asia Program Officer for ARTICLE 19. ARTICLE 19 is a international nonprofit organization that works on promoting freedom of speech and also information integrity. And I'm based in Taipei.

Grace Huang:

My name is Grace. I am working at Judicial Reform Foundation, JRF, which is a pro bono lawyers CSO in Taiwan. I'm currently the Director for Global Justice and Digital Freedom, and it's great to be here.

Kuan-Ju Chou:

I'm Kuan-Ju Chou and I work for Taiwan Association for Human Rights, and you can call us TAHR. And TAHR is a member-based nonprofit organization in Taiwan. And we do many different human rights issues, like refugee rights, rights for assembly, and rights for housing. And about digital rights, that we focus on privacy, freedom of information and expression. I'm working as the Deputy Secretary-General.

Justin Hendrix:

I'm so pleased to have all of you here, and I'm very pleased, I hope to meet you in person at RightsCon in Taipei. I've had the opportunity to travel there twice before. And very much looking forward to both being on the island, but also in the community of folks who are concerned with human rights and with internet freedoms. And looking forward to this conversation, which I hope will set the stage a little bit for those attending RightsCon as to what's happening in Taiwan at the moment.

And I thought I might start by asking each of you, just explain to me what is top of mind for you? Your broader community of colleagues is traveling in from around the world. They're bringing their own concerns, of course, and going to be talking about a range of issues that cross the planet. But what is on your mind about what's happening in Taiwan right now that you want people to leave understanding? Kuan-Ju, perhaps I'll start with you on that.

Kuan-Ju Chou:

This year, what is on the top of my mind is because in this year, there is a deadline in August for Taiwanese government to fulfill several legislations relating to privacy. And the first one is that the Taiwanese government should complete the legislation on the data protection authority in Taiwan, because currently there is no independent data protection authority in Taiwan. There is only a preparatory office now. And why there is a deadline, it is because there is a judgment from the Constitutional Court back in 2022.

And this is because there is a case. The case was filed by the Taiwan Association for Human Rights and other NGOs that related to women's rights, and also NGOs that they are supervising the National Health Insurance system in Taiwan. And this case is about the informed consent, and also opt-out rights from patients. So currently, we also hope that in August this year, I think there might be three legislations that focus on the general data protections, and specifically on secondary use of health data and also social welfare data to respect patients' rights.

Because this is not only for patients and health data. That we knew several years ago that this kind of data can be linked with other data. These drafts are currently not in the Parliament. So they are just inside the ministry or inside an administrative bureau in Taiwan. So that we hope that the version come about from the administrative bureau or ministry is rights-based, have rights-based protection enough.

And we also hope that currently Parliament in Taiwan will support people's consent and privacy rights. And also support a data protection commission or other data protection authority to have enough tools to both supervise the private and also public sectors. We think that it is very important to supervise the policy and have the public sector use data. But also how they are setting policies for secondary use or other use of data that is on a very, very massive scale.

Justin Hendrix:

I guess I'll come to you next, I-Chen. You've been working on a variety of different things. I know you're concerned about cyber security and the balance of cyber security versus human rights, particularly when it comes to resisting Chinese influence on Taiwan. What is top of mind for you headed into RightsCon?

Liu I-Chen:

I think this will be a good opportunity for an international audience to visit Taiwan at this time, and particularly, I think they will have the chance to witness firsthand of how Taiwan is under the attacks, at least kind of digital threats, and how the society as a whole respond to these threats. So to provide a clearer picture, Taiwan suffers various forms of digital threats, including the gray zone tactics from PRC that include cyber operations or information manipulations.

And Taiwan has actually been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year by the V-Dem Institute. And in terms of cyber attacks, we have 2.4 million cyber attacks on a daily basis according to the statistics from the National Security Bureau.

So we do have a lot of attacks. But at the same time, I think government and the civil society collectively showed a lot of resilience against these kind of threats. And I think it'll be a very good example of how one society walks a fine line between resilience against external threat and also try to ensure its commitments to the human rights.

Justin Hendrix:

And Grace, how about you? Headed into RightsCon, what are you working on?

Grace Huang:

So my concern would be that, of course with the big context of China and the general Western democracy, and the dynamics between China and the so-called Western democracy countries. So Taiwan, politically-wise, has been framed as a little bit of an idealized version. It's quite sad. Of course, we would love to say we are a real law democracy, and we of course, colleagues here are all working on that. But that's definitely a work in progress and it's a large struggle.

And actually, pretty interestingly, especially when the government tries to polish the image as being almost like a role model of democracy, especially in Asia, which in a certain sense misrepresents the reality of Taiwan society, of the power relationship between the government, and the people, and the capitalism, domestically and internationally. In short, the struggle in Taiwan is real. And there are a lot of common issues worldwide that we share, of course, with the Chinese so-called influence is more like a case study, an intense case study. But it will be a pity and a mis-framing to only think of Taiwan only in the context of China and in the context of disinformation, in this context of, we are almost like a role model of democracy regional-wise worldwide. Because that would actually stifle true progress domestically. And it is happening.

So I understand for RightsCon to be hosted in Taiwan, we still feel happy and privileged. But as a CSO worker, we would like to shout out and tell the world, "This is not a perfect place. We share a lot of same issues. And even if we don't, some of the issues are not that common; fundamentally, there could be a lot of common issues that we could work together on." And in that sense, JRF, Judicial Reform Foundation, the organization that I work in now, we strategize to reserve at least 80% of our effort for long-term structural change.

Around 20% of our effort and energy, we respond to current emerging situations. However, we consciously reserve lots of effort, energy, or resource in digging into the structural problems. And try to deconstruct and construct together in a way that the means and the ends actually aligns, which means that the movement that JRF worked on, which we like to call it...

So there is a Bill of Rights in US history, and we borrowed that idea and call it a Digital Bill of Rights, which inferred to this critical historical pivoting point where the old framework of law, the old framework of political, economic rules has to have a sort of a quantum leap where new ideas, new frameworks must begin to establish. And through what means? It must be through co-working from the very bottom. Okay? So this is a bottom-up movement.

This is purely run on volunteering lawyers, volunteering tech experts, volunteering activists, or just anyone. We have students in college, we have old professors, we have gender non-conforming people, we have handicapped, physically-challenged people all together, to really sit down and dig inside about, first of all, what is the value that we fight for? Democracy value could be a vague word, but what precisely is this fight, is this revolution or movement for?

And when we begin to reform the consensus of this 2025, this moment, this historical moment right as of now, what is the real value that we actually fight for? And with that common value, we build on writing legal languages that specifically use the language of rights. We try not to fall into the mistake of protectivism, or even parentalism, where the state is still the initiative.

This also means that if the initiative point is the state, it's easily that first, they could easily neglect that initiative. And secondly, there's no real checkpoint to the state themselves. So we try not to use protectivism, even in the issues where protectivism is commonly used even now, is for instance children's rights. So we use children's rights, the children's situation of this new digital age, and also for physically challenged or even gender minorities, racial minorities. There's just too much protectionism even for now in approaching the so-called digital situation.

So this is just an example of we are consciously trying to do maybe two fundamental things. First, this is a bottom-up process where we start with common values. We build from the very bottom. This is, we're trying to establish pillars for future social constructions, and especially through the language of law. And secondly, we consciously try to depart from protectivism, especially from the state. And instead, we use the language of rights, the people's rights, and also the... The people's rights, and therefore, the state's responsibility, which is not only to protect but also first respect people's rights, of course. And also, not only passively, but also actively, strategize for the people, by the people, and of the people.

Justin Hendrix:

So I've heard three interesting things. And Grace, I appreciate that because you've put us in a kind of global context. You've addressed maybe a misconception that some folks who are reading Freedom House reports or V-Dem reports, we all have a picture of Taiwan, of course, as being at the top of the chart when it comes to both democracy generally and also when it comes to internet freedom and digital rights, things of that nature. But sounds like, from Kuan-Ju's comments, from your comments, of course things are more complicated, and there is still a battle underway there in many ways that may look like some of the battles that are taking place elsewhere around the world. I-Chen, I do want to come back to threat from China, but I want to dig in just for a moment with all three of you, I hope, on the nature of the civil society sector there.

One of the things, and again, Grace, you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but the story on Taiwan from outside is that you have a unique relationship between various civil society organizations, between academia, and between the government. That there are more channels for communication, that you've got better platforms for conducting democracy, and that there is more of a healthy civic environment for addressing some of these questions than perhaps we have in, as you say, other Western democracies.

Certainly, I'm speaking to you from the United States. There are a lot of people here wondering if we're a democracy anymore. Perhaps the grass is greener from where I sit at the moment. But let me ask each of you that. Do you have a sense right now that what you have is, while not perfect, are there things about your current circumstances that you admire, that you think people could learn from, without tipping over into perhaps giving off a false impression that nothing is wrong?

Grace Huang:

I would like to follow up when you mentioned about the score of our Freedom House index, whether it's index for democracy, index for online freedom. And not only Freedom House. Globally, there are a lot of indexing, ranking work. And I happen to have worked on those before, just quite recently. And what I could share, and I believe there is a blind spot when people begin to read those, is that all of these index are in relativity. Okay? It's relatively fine, relatively okay. Yes, Taiwan is definitely relatively okay than a lot of other societies, and we appreciate that.

But my experience in working on these global indexing is that, let's make it an abstract example. Let's say the actual freedom on the internet situation decreased by three points of score. However, let's say in China, a lot of those indexing, they already got zero point maybe 10 years ago. But of course, this year is worse than 10 years ago, but it still keeps the zero point. You understand that? So the bottom line has decreased. So the seashore has receded 10 kilometers, 20 kilometers. And therefore, when Taiwan or other so-called more democratized society, we also recede. But relatively, we recede relatively little than others.

And with those kind of methodology, when the zero point is still the bottom line, we get propped up. So the truth is, Taiwan is not improving. The situation in Taiwan is worse. And in the same logic, I would say that the whole world, every country is not improving. We are losing our battlegrounds. It's only because other, more challenged place gets even worse situation that on face, the score looks like, oh, 70, 80, 90 points. It looks fine. No, it's not. It's just relativity. And I guess this is also a good message for people who's going to come to Taiwan to understand the real situation.

So what we could learn from Taiwan's experience is to, in a perspective-wise, look at who is actually working to improve. It is not the state, it is not the government that is trying to work on improving our freedom situation. It is the civil society. And the reason why the Taiwan civil society prosper, again relatively, it's that we've been through authoritarianism quite recently. The current authoritarianism ended around, let's say, 30, 20 years ago. It depends on how you define authoritarianism, right? But it is short history, and therefore, the civil society cherishes what we have now.

And we still got that, first, we still crave for freedom. Secondly, we still have the skill to push forward. Because we just did the drill, we just did the fight quite recently. Those who fought for the last big war is still around here. And therefore, the young people could still learn from the senior activists. And all of us crave for freedom. And quite in some way, thankfully, to China, to Xi Jinping, that presents a immediate threat. Because we know that any second, China might take over Taiwan. Any second we might lose freedom. So we have that very conscious, immediate urge and the need to act. It is a civil society that's doing the work, and quite oftenly, it is the government who's taking the credit and actually pushing against civil society.

Justin Hendrix:

I-Chen?

Liu I-Chen:

So just echoing one of Grace's point. I think it is quite remarkable for Taiwan as a young democracy to thrive as a democracy in Asia, and how it maintained a relatively high degree of freedom in this region, while try to counter a very real foreign threats from China at the same time. A lot of the countries when facing external threat would tend to a degree of securitizations or they will limit their freedom in certain ways.

But I think Taiwan, in terms of countering foreign threats, has been successful a lot of due to the efforts from the civil society. For example, when we are trying to counter foreign information manipulation and interference, a lot of the efforts actually build upon the success of the civil society and not from the government side. Government has done its share, but a lot of the trust, and the alliances and the collaborations are actually done by the civil society.

We also have a pretty vibrant civic tech community that serves as the cornerstone of digital governance and in the battles of combating disinformation. We have open-source civic tech communities, and they are open to collaborate—hackers, coders, and activists—and to provide those digital solutions to society. And I do think that is a lesson that can be shared with our international audience.

And also at the same time, Taiwan can actually do more to share this experience of combating these kind of threats. At the same time, I think we are not trying to frame Taiwan as the only best practice in the world. It has its own issues.

Kuan-Ju Chou:

I agree that the civil society in Taiwan is very vibrant, and there are many, many improvements that came from civil society and not originally from the governments or the parliament. And also, in last year, we can see that there are some biggest protests, for example, like the Bluebird, that many people think that these movements came from decentralized community, as my colleague are part of the staff. That we know that in many very huge demonstrations there will be some civil society to hold the biggest stage and hold the organizations.

But I think, I personally am very happy to know that people will not put this... How to say? Put this glory to certain NGOs or certain personal hero. I think this is a civil society's improvement, back to compared to the 2014s, some thoughts. There are difference during this year. So I think it is improvement from civil societies. But on the other hand, I have other expectations from parliament and governments.

Personally, I think these two bodies should came from a more healthy relationships with different communities and civil societies, and not just... Because in Taiwan, most of the time we use freedom of informations to know how the government do or how some private sectors, how they are using datas. I think there are more improvements from government and parliament sides that they can put more trust in civil society to let citizen more actively join the supervision to how government or private sector are using our data.

Liu I-Chen:

Just to follow up on what Kuan-Ju just said. I think while Taiwan's model has been praised as more grassroots based, more decentralized, I think it also has a different side of the stories. And for example, in our upcoming report about how China influences the cybersecurity norms in the Indo-Pacific region, we interviewed the digital experts, the experts of cybersecurity in Taiwan. And we observed that there is also another narrative, which is that these experts are very frustrated, because while the civil society are very vibrant and taking very active roles to solving problems and provide additional solutions to the society, on the other hand, they think the government actually lacks a more coordinated efforts to actually dealing with these issues.

And some are very frustrated. They would rather call the government than being active to counter these threats. Well, government may defend itself as it is. It does not want to intervene for dealing with expression. It does not want to take too active roles. Otherwise, it will be content moderation. But still, I think there is a agreement that there are small things that government can do to coordinate the efforts to counter the digital threat in Taiwan's digital landscapes, while maintaining human rights-based approach.

Justin Hendrix:

How would you characterize the difference in Taiwan's approach to cybersecurity, in particular, vis-a-vis China, versus other countries in the Indo-China area? What is it that Taiwan does differently?

Liu I-Chen:

I think Taiwan's digital governance or the cybersecurity governance model, a lot of it is based on civic participation. And I think that comes from the success of the civil society first. So we have hackathons, or the initiative like g0v, which showed a lot of success in using the power of the societies to provide solutions to societal problems.

And a lot of success has been observed by the government, by the executive power, and they are willing to adopt similar models into the government agency as well. For example, we would also have hackathons hosted by the presidential office, and the government would like to use this kind of model even in other smaller branches of the government, to utilize the wisdoms and the success of a civil society to collaboratively provide a solution to the issues that they are dealing with.

And on the other hand, I think right now PRC's digital governance is very heavily focused on state control, party control, and also with almost infinite extension of securitization. So everything will be framed on national security issues. But at the same time, while Taiwan does face very serious national security threats from its neighbors, but it shows a different path of civic participation. And also the government maintains a high level of self-conservation to not intervene in society when dealing with these kinds of national threats, unlike China.

Justin Hendrix:

Kuan-Ju, I want to put a question to you based somewhat on what you were telling us at the outset about some of the challenges you've got there in dealing with the intersection, it sounds like to me... I want to make sure I've got this right... between people's personal health data, private sector players which might be acquiring that data, the government, on the other hand.

If that's correct, it sounds like one of the things you're saying is that Taiwan's facing some of the same problems that everyone in the world is facing with the general acquisition of people's information, how both to get the value out of that for the public interest, but also to protect people's privacy interests.

Kuan-Ju Chou:

It's both a simple and very complicated question, because I think in Taiwan that most of the time people will ask the question is that, is this kind of data leaked? But what we are saying is that currently, we don't have evidence that the health insurance data is leaked or not. And that I don't think it is the most focused questions, but people care about security. And in Taiwan that also the government, most of the time that when TAHR are asking about a data protection system, or data protection mechanism, that the government will say that, "Oh, the cyber security or the information security are perfect to protect this kind of it."

But security and privacy are different concepts. So we are talking about different issues. But in Taiwan most of the time the government or some people will put these two concepts together. So if there is no data breach, if there are no leaks, many people will think that it is not a problem.

And another problem is that when we are talking about the misuse or manipulation of personal data, that people might think that there is no real harm. There is no real harm about this kind of if this is not identity theft, or not a security breach. So it is sometimes very hard to talk about this issue. But why TAHR put much effort on privacy rights, I think is because back in the authoritarian times in Taiwan, there was massive surveillance in physical form, and not a digital form.

But at that time, when we see many documents from that time, that surveillance do not have to be true. Those information do not have to be real about these persons. When a government or when some private sectors have the tools or have the method to collect and organize this data or this system that they can manipulate, they can use these tools or this web to comment a person's life or family.

So that's what we see that the misuse or manipulation of personal data is a threat to democracy. That's why we put effort in this. So in this time that when we are talking privacy to people in Taiwan, that we are not talking about confidentiality. We are talking about how people can control their own data, and to know how the government, how the researchers and private sectors to use this kind of data.

Because currently in Taiwan, there is a very strange concept from both the telecommunication companies and some government offices. The concept is that they think that if they put a personal data into the identified data, so they don't have to give out the legal basis of how they can justify they can use this personal data because they are thinking that if data is de-identified. So there is no personal data, so they do not have to obey Personal Data Protection Act in Taiwan.

But it is very tricky, because the first is how the controller can process this data. No legal basis for them. And because there are some details in Taiwan's Act that the identification data in Taiwan is only pseudonymized data. So this data can be linked with another source of personal data. This is just an incident that we saw in the last year that there is a politician, and now he is a legislator, that who claimed that he got data from telecommunications and he can use this data to analyze two different protests, what kind of people are in it after many months later.

That in TAHR, what we care about is not if the politicians say it is true or not. That is not we care the most. We care the most is that the commercial use of telecommunication data that all the consumers are not aware, and what the legal basis that can make this data be in link with other source of data?

Justin Hendrix:

I feel like one of the things I'm hearing here is, for folks who are coming to RightsCon or who are listening to this podcast and maybe have one view of Taiwan that's based on things they've read in these international reports, et cetera, often the message over here is, "Look at this vibrant democracy, look at this model democracy."

I think one of the things I've heard tonight is, there are a lot of lessons to be learned from Taiwan which are more drawn from, or perhaps better understood through the lens of its recent struggles with authoritarianism, perhaps than simply by applauding it for its recent history with democracy.

Grace Huang:

In the most general sense with my work in the struggle for digital freedom is that the struggle of digital freedom contemporarily, is the story of the boiling frog. And I think that speaks to what Kuan-JU and I-Chen just said. And how, like, yeah, the government has really target me. Yet... Right? This is all the yet, that kind of gave the leeway to the government to actually do anything, or actually not do anything that's harmful.

So if we think about the boiling frog metaphor is that, it all goes gradually. And it's also a story of global warming, right? So if we say data is the new oil, then definitely the loss of privacy is the global warming of the digital age. So we're facing two global warming now. Both are boiling frog story. And therefore, for me, I would really love to shout out to anyone who's coming to RightsCon can or just basically have an interest in fighting for freedom.

The freedom struggle of contemporary definitely includes digital freedom as a preset, as a prerequisite to any other freedom. The loss of privacy is taking out the foundations of other forms of rights. Therefore, to anyone shouting out to any current human being or future human beings having to listen to this podcast, I would love to introduce you and welcome you to work together on building an actual legislative movement in establishing people's rights.

And the JRF's Digital Bill of Rights is just one example. It is not perfect, and we specifically frame this as a work in progress. It's not going to end anytime. We keep on revisiting the value, reevaluating the current power landscape, the power landscape of politics, the state, and also the capitalism landscape, which of course, is Big Tech. Especially the ecological dependency part where the Too-Big-To-Fail 2.0 is not only too big to fail. It's too big to be regulated.

The time that some form of regulation is suggest, quickly all the lobbying side, legal side, all the army just come and nip the bud. So we have to make sure that current people, future people, keep on making new buds so they can catch up on us, right? So we work together. This is again for the people, by the people, of the people. This is a movement for everyone.

And I personally look forward to meet everyone, all of you in RightsCon. I understand the current situation doesn't allow people to fly now because of the new American political landscape. But anyway, if you can find JRF, you will find a lot of truly dedicated human being that care for freedom.

Liu I-Chen:

I think the opportunity of RightsCon is really valuable and I just want to highlight, I think, two more like recommendations, but more like the things I would like to highlight.

I think the RightsCon is a good opportunity as a reminder to the international community that by standing with Taiwan and advocates for Taiwan's participation in global and digital governance discussion is very important, because I think that will only strengthen the international coalition against authoritarianism. But also means that Taiwan's society and private sector actors, which are very advanced in their own skills, can actually contribute more into the discussions of how digital rights is moving forward and participate in international forums, especially those who are related to the technical standard setting, which are the new battlegrounds for authoritarian actors.

And I think the second thing for RightsCon participants and the people who are joining us in Taiwan, I think right now Taiwan can serve as a platform for human rights advocates to actually collaborate. Because I think our adversaries and these threat actors in digital space actually coordinated better than we do. Our adversaries really take the word "solidarities" for real.

But on the other hand, I think civil societies in the Pacific region, for example, or in Asia in general, can do much more to ensure that we actually act and respond in a coordinated manner. For example, Taiwan has a lot of knowledge in China research, in civic tech communities, and those can actually be, those knowledges and efforts can be disseminated in a more coordinated way, or we can somehow strategize to have a collective response to the emerging threat that we are facing.

Justin Hendrix:

I think each of the three of you have given us a call to solidarity. And I hope that perhaps I'll get the chance to meet the three of you in person in Taipei and that we'll be able to share more about the ideas we've discussed here, but certainly build those relationships to do precisely what you call for there, I-Chen. Kuan-Ju, I-Chen, Grace, thank you so much for joining me.

Grace Huang:

Thank you so much.

Liu I-Chen:

Thank you so much. Very looking forward to seeing you at RightsCon.