In the past year and a half, almost 14,000 new Estonians have become e-citizens of the tiny Baltic nation, many of them without ever stepping foot in the country. While nations around Europe are debating closing their borders, Estonia’s e-residency scheme is bucking the trend and pushing the online door wide open.
“As we’re able to serve our diaspora, we can serve anyone around the world,” Taavi Kotka, the Estonian government’s chief information officer, told the audience at WIRED Security 2016. Estonia is the world’s most digitally advanced society. Thirty per cent of its citizens vote in elections over the internet, births, deaths and marriages can all be registered from home and almost all public spaces have been covered by free Wi-Fi for the last decade.
For every problem the country faces, Kotka posits a digital answer. Declining birth rates? Invite anyone in the world to become an e-citizen. Beset by Russian cyberattackers? House your government’s data on the cloud or in ‘data embassies’. Have a tiny population that’s stretched over rural areas? Shift vital government services online where anyone can access them without having to go out and brave minus temperatures and inches of snow.
“We had a need to push people towards self-service,” Kotka said. “Whatever happens, we can’t go back on paper.” Now, 98 per cent of government interactions in the country are online, and each citizen carries a card that contains a single code – their unique digital identifier.
“That connects me with everything – all the private sector and government sector,” Kotka said of the digital identity scheme which is similar to the national ID card scheme suggested by Labour in 2006 but later scrapped by the coalition government.
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“You need a strong digital identity. This card gives it to you,” he continued. In Estonia, the ID card system has been in place fourteen years already.
When citizens are faced with technology that works, Kotka said, it becomes second nature to them. While successive UK governments have vacillated and backtracked on a series of technological upgrades, in Estonia, Kotka just gets building. “We can start building more solutions,” he said.
Governmental services in Estonian are housed across 900 different databases. The very complexity of this system limits the potential impact of any attack. If one server is hit, that slice of data may be lost, but the 899 other databases – all running their own unique system – can stay functioning.
The country has good reason to worry about cyberattacks. In 2007, an attack thought to be perpetrated by Russian hackers took a major Estonian bank offline for hours while disruption to government services continued for more than a month. In response, Estonian businesses created voluntary cybersecurity units, bringing in security experts across the world to help fight hackers.
No country is immune to cyberattacks, Kotka added. “You can’t build 100 per cent safe environments. It’s impossible. It’s just a matter of time – they will fail.” But by moving the country online, Estonia is defending against a worst case scenario: a Russian invasion and annexation, as happened in the Crimea in 2014.
If the worst happened, Estonia’s public services could keep running on the cloud, or from another country. Citizens could still interact with a government in exile and partake in Estonian politics. Whatever happens to its land, a digital Estonia would never cease to exist.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
