- Estonia has the most advanced
digital government in the world.
Banking, prescriptions, even voting,
in Estonia, they're all managed through
a single online system called e-Estonia
and other countries are taking note.
- This system has been in operation since 2001.
It's a convenience for the citizen.
And people love it, obviously.
- Estonia has been filing taxes
and voting online for years with little fanfare,
but when say, a global pandemic hits
those capabilities are actually crucial.
- Especially under COVID all those functions break down.
Whereas for us, everything keeps just humming along
and there's no break in anything.
- Estonia has proven that digital governance
actually works really well.
So how can we get it up and running everywhere else?
- I'm Toomas Hendrik Ilves, former President of Estonia.
- As President, Ilves oversaw the rollout of e-Estonia.
Nowadays, he lives in California
and consults on cybersecurity and digital governance.
- I'm smack in the middle of Silicon Valley.
In a 12 mile radius,
I have the headquarters for Tesla, Apple, Facebook, Google.
Yet, if I want to do anything with the government,
it's a mess.
I mean, I would have to go to a government office
like DMV, stand in line there,
take along a photocopy of my electricity bill.
- Or take taxes.
If you're an American,
you're probably used to paying for an online filing service
or an accountant and have to take time
every year doing a comprehensive review
of the past year's financials.
In Estonia...
- We file taxes with about five or six clicks
and it takes about two or three minutes.
- And it's free.
So here's how e-Estonia works.
- Each of us has a digital ID.
It's based on a one single number. It's a public number.
- The system operates on a blockchain,
meaning that records of each transaction are decentralized
and can be securely, transparently verified.
Your personal information stays private.
And once a piece of information is entered,
you never need to enter it again,
whether you're applying for a loan
or filling a prescription.
- There are only three transactions
that cannot be done online and that's getting married,
getting divorced and selling or buying real estate.
(upbeat music)
- Ilves entered Estonian government as a diplomat,
and then as a minister of foreign affairs,
just as the country emerged from under Soviet rule.
- I was thinking about how to pull Estonia
out of the mess it was in,
which was, it had just become independent and was very poor.
Mosaic, came out. The first web browser.
You had to buy it
and load it into your computer from floppy disks.
And I looked at that and I said,
well, this is someplace where Estonia
is no more backward than anyone else.
By 1998, all Estonia schools were online.
- And by the early 2000s, the framework
for e-Estonia was under construction
and slowly but surely,
the public began to adapt to the new digital system.
- 2005 was our first election.
And the first time around 0.3%
of the population voted online.
Last May for the European parliament,
we had 46% of the population voting online.
- Especially in the U.S.
the idea of the government collecting and being responsible
for your most personal and private data
might sound a little alarming.
But in the e-Estonia system,
every citizen is able to see a detailed log
of any time their data is accessed by a government agency.
Meanwhile, in countries like the U.S.
governments might collect large amounts of data
from your everyday interactions, without you even knowing.
- The data that is scraped
from all of your digital interactions is incredibly vast.
And it's all data that my government never sees.
So if you wanna be dystopian and worry about big brother,
don't worry about the government doing it directly,
worry about the government doing it indirectly.
(upbeat Music)
People say you're a small country.
You can do that. We're a big country.
But there is no impediment
to digitizing governance in larger countries
other than server size
because the design is basically the same.
But you have to be willing to take the risks of doing this.
- And for online governance to be widely adopted,
people have to believe in it.
- I've been asked, especially since COVID,
shouldn't we do e-voting?
But it takes a long time to create the trust necessary
to have people vote online.
It works in my country because we use exactly the same tools
that we use to take money out of the bank,
to register your kid for school.
Since the trillions of transactions that citizens have made
over the past 20 years have not been hacked,
you trust your vote.
I think it's a virtuous circle.
- Estonia has shown us
that a more modern system of governance is possible.
The question is, are we ready to build it?
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