E-stonia Takes Off

• Author: Toomas Hendrik Ilves
• Pages: 38-39

38 FINANCE & DEVELOPMENT | March 2018

IN THE TRENCHES

PHOTO: ALAMY / KRISTOFFER TRIPPLAAR

E-stonia Takes Off

Toomas Hendrik Ilves explains how

digitalization can make people’s lives a

whole lot easier

TOOMAS HENDRIK ILVES is the former president of

Estonia and the man be hind rebranding the coun-

try once best known for log ging to the place where

Skype was born. Inspired by his own childhood

experience learning computer programming in a

New Jersey high school, Ilves launched t he Tiger

Leap project–which involved building network

infrastr ucture and getting schools online. It wa s the

early 1990s; Estonia had regained it s independence

after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Ilves

recognized the promise of technology as a means

of boosting its ailing economy.

Born in Sweden to Estonian parents who had

escaped the Iron Curtain, Ilves grew up in the

United States. It was while serving in Washington,

DC, as Estonia’s Ambassador to the United States

and Canada that Ilves laid the groundwork for the

country’s digitalization program known today as

e-Estonia. He was elected president of Estonia in

2006 and served two terms.

In this interview with FD’s Bruce Edwards,

Ilves says it was innovative policy more than

technology that enabled Estonia’s remarkable

digital transformation.

F&D: Just how digitalized has Estonian society

become?

THI: ere are only three tra nsactions involving the

government where you actually have to show up.

e rst is getting married, the second is the sa le

of real estate, and the t hird is divorce.

F&D: Are people well adapted to the sy stem?

THI: Yes. e common gripe among Estonians

abroad is that systems don’t work. After the end

of my term I came to Silicon Valley, the mecca of

information technology and innovat ion. Within

a 10-mile radius are the headquarters for Apple,

Facebook, Google, Tesla, and more. But when I

registered my daughter for school, I had to prove that

we lived in Palo Alto by bringing a photocopy of my

electricity bill. So you have th is enormous contrast.

We Estonians in Silicon Valley all wonder how

it’s possible that this is the center of the technology

universe, yet everyday li fe is so 1950s!

F&D: Certa in aspects of digitalization are highly

contested in a lot of countries because of the col-

lection of personal data. How dicult was it to

get Estonians to buy into this idea?

THI: People didn’t really object because it’s highly

secure. Part of it is architect ural: we don’t have any

central databa ses. You can only acce ss this system

through a high ly encrypted end-to-end, two-factor

authorization system. For that, you need a secu re

digital identity or ID card.

F&D: On what technology is it based?

THI:

You have a distributed data exchange layer, which

means that only you and those people you authorize

can access your data. If you authorize a doctor, only

that doctor can see your medical data. And every time

someone accesses the data, the system ags it. is is

how people know they’d get caught if they were to try.

Ultimately it is all based on trust. I can assure

you that even in the most horrendous of crimes,

the government of Estonia would not go into your

private data because there is f ull recognition on the

part of the government that, if the s ystem were ever

to be compromised, it would fall at and coll apse.

So no one takes that risk .