Podcasts Charts In Estonia
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Estonia is a Baltic country of 1.3 million people and four million hectares, half of which is forest. Its government presents this digitization as a cost-saving efficiency and an equalizing force. Digitizing processes reportedly saves the state two per cent of its G.D.P. A year in salaries and expenses. Since that’s the same amount it pays to meet the NATO threshold for protection (Estonia—which has a notably vexed relationship with Russia—has a comparatively small military), its former President Toomas Hendrik Ilves liked to joke that the country got its national security for free.
Other benefits have followed. “If everything is digital, and location-independent, you can run a borderless country,” Kotka said. In 2014, the government launched a digital “residency” program, which allows logged-in foreigners to partake of some Estonian services, such as banking, as if they were living in the country.
Other measures encourage international startups to put down virtual roots; Estonia has the lowest business-tax rates in the European Union, and has become known for liberal regulations around tech research. It is legal to test Level 3 driverless cars (in which a human driver can take control) on all Estonian roads, and the country is planning ahead for Level 5 (cars that take off on their own). “We believe that innovation happens anyway,” Viljar Lubi, Estonia’s deputy secretary for economic development, says. “If we close ourselves off, the innovation happens somewhere else.” “It makes it so that, if one country is not performing as well as another country, people are going to the one that is performing better—competitive governance is what I’m calling it,” Tim Draper, a venture capitalist at the Silicon Valley firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson and one of Estonia’s leading tech boosters, says.
“We’re about to go into a very interesting time where a lot of governments can become virtual.” Previously, Estonia’s best-known industry was logging, but Skype was built there using mostly local engineers, and countless other startups have sprung from its soil. “It’s not an offshore paradise, but you can capitalize a lot of money,” Thomas Padovani, a Frenchman who co-founded the digital-ad startup Adcash in Estonia, explains. “And the administration is light, all the way.” A light touch does not mean a restricted one, however, and the guiding influence of government is everywhere.
As an engineer, Kotka said, he found the challenge of helping to construct a digital nation too much to resist. “Imagine that it’s your task to build the Golden Gate Bridge,” he said excitedly. “You have to change the whole way of thinking about society.” So far, Estonia is past halfway there. One afternoon, I met a woman named Anna Piperal at the e-Estonia Showroom. Piperal is the “e-Estonia ambassador”; the showroom is a permanent exhibit on the glories of digitized Estonia, from Skype to Timbeter, an app designed to count big piles of logs. (Its founder told me that she’d struggled to win over the wary titans of Big Log, who preferred to count the inefficient way.) Piperal has blond hair and an air of brisk, Northern European professionalism.
She pulled out her I.D. Card; slid it into her laptop, which, like the walls of the room, was faced with blond wood; and typed in her secret code, one of two that went with her I.D. The other code issues her digital signature—a seal that, Estonians point out, is much harder to forge than a scribble. “This PIN code just starts the whole decryption process,” Piperal explained. “I’ll start with my personal data from the population registry.” She gestured toward a box on the screen. “It has my document numbers, my phone number, my e-mail account.
Then there’s real estate, the land registry.” Elsewhere, a box included all of her employment information; another contained her traffic records and her car insurance. She pointed at the tax box. “I have no tax debts; otherwise, that would be there. And I’m finishing a master’s at the Tallinn University of Technology, so here”—she pointed to the education box—“I have my student information.
If I buy a ticket, the system can verify, automatically, that I’m a student.” She clicked into the education box, and a detailed view came up, listing her previous degrees. “My cat is in the pet registry,” Piperal said proudly, pointing again. “We are done with the vaccines.” Data aren’t centrally held, thus reducing the chance of Equifax-level breaches. Instead, the government’s data platform, X-Road, links individual servers through end-to-end encrypted pathways, letting information live locally. Your dentist’s practice holds its own data; so does your high school and your bank. When a user requests a piece of information, it is delivered like a boat crossing a canal via locks. Although X-Road is a government platform, it has become, owing to its ubiquity, the network that many major private firms build on, too.
Finland, Estonia’s neighbor to the north, recently began using X-Road, which means that certain data—for instance, prescriptions that you’re able to pick up at a local pharmacy—can be linked between the nations. It is easy to imagine a novel internationalism taking shape in this form. Toomas Ilves, Estonia’s former President and a longtime driver of its digitization efforts, is currently a distinguished visiting fellow at Stanford, and says he was shocked at how retrograde U.S. Bureaucracy seems even in the heart of Silicon Valley. “It’s like the nineteen-fifties—I had to provide an electrical bill to prove I live here!” he exclaimed. “You can get an iPhone X, but, if you have to register your car, forget it.” X-Road is appealing due to its rigorous filtering: Piperal’s teachers can enter her grades, but they can’t access her financial history, and even a file that’s accessible to medical specialists can be sealed off from other doctors if Piperal doesn’t want it seen. “I’ll show you a digital health record,” she said, to explain.
“A doctor from here”—a file from one clinic—“can see the research that this doctor”—she pointed to another—“does.” She’d locked a third record, from a female-medicine practice, so that no other doctor would be able to see it. A tenet of the Estonian system is that an individual owns.
Every time a doctor (or a border guard, a police officer, a banker, or a minister) glances at any of Piperal’s secure data online, that look is recorded and reported. Peeping at another person’s secure data for no reason is a criminal offense.
“In Estonia, we don’t have Big Brother; we have Little Brother,” a local told me. “You can tell him what to do and maybe also beat him up.” Business and land-registry information is considered public, so Piperal used the system to access the profile of an Estonian politician. “Let’s see his land registry,” she said, pulling up a list of properties. “You can see there are three land plots he has, and this one is located”—she clicked, and a satellite photograph of a sprawling beach house appeared—“on the sea.” The openness is startling. Finding the business interests of the rich and powerful—a hefty field of journalism in the United States—takes a moment’s research, because every business connection or investment captured in any record in Estonia becomes searchable public information. (An online tool even lets citizens map webs of connection, follow-the-money style.) Traffic stops are illegal in the absence of a moving violation, because officers acquire records from a license-plate scan.
Podcasts Charts In Estonia 2016
Is a non-issue if people can vote—and then change their votes, up to the deadline—at home, online. And because, in a borderless society, a resident need not even have visited Estonia in order to work and pay taxes under its dominion. Soon after becoming the C.I.O., in 2013, Taavi Kotka was charged with an unlikely project: expanding Estonia’s population. The motive was predominantly economic.
“Countries are like enterprises,” he said. “They want to increase the wealth of their own people.” Tallinn, a harbor city with a population just over four hundred thousand, does not seem to be on a path toward outsized growth. Not far from the cobbled streets of the hilly Old Town is a business center, where boxy Soviet structures have been supplanted by stylish buildings of a Scandinavian cast. Otherwise, the capital seems pleasantly preserved in time.
The coastal daylight is bright and thick, and, when a breeze comes off the Baltic, silver-birch leaves shimmer like chimes. “I came home to a great autumn / to a luminous landscape,” the Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski wrote decades ago.
This much has not changed. Kotka, however, thought that it was possible to increase the population just by changing how you thought of what a population was. Consider music, he said. Twenty years ago, you bought a CD and played the album through. “If countries are competing not only on physical talent moving to their country but also on how to get the best virtual talent connected to their country, it becomes a disruption like the one we have seen in the music industry,” he said. “And it’s basically a zero-cost project, because we already have this infrastructure for our own people.”.
In the U.S., it is generally assumed that private industry leads innovation. Many ambitious techies I met in Tallinn, though, were leaving industry to go work for the state. “If someone had asked me, three years ago, if I could imagine myself working for the government, I would have said, ‘Fuck no,’ ” Ott Vatter, who had sold his own business, told me. “But I decided that I could go to the U.S. At any point, and work in an average job at a private company. This is so much bigger.” The bigness is partly inherent in the government’s appetite for large problems. In Tallinn’s courtrooms, judges’ benches are fitted with two monitors, for consulting information during the proceedings, and case files are assembled according to the once-only principle.
The police make reports directly into the system; forensic specialists at the scene or in the lab do likewise. Lawyers log on—as do judges, prison wardens, plaintiffs, and defendants, each through his or her portal. The Estonian courts used to be notoriously backlogged, but that is no longer the case. “No one was able to say whether we should increase the number of courts or increase the number of judges,” Timo Mitt, a manager at Netgroup, which the government hired to build the architecture, told me. Digitizing both streamlined the process and helped identify points of delay. Instead of setting up prisoner transport to trial—fraught with security risks—Estonian courts can teleconference defendants into the courtroom from prison.
For doctors, a remote model has been of even greater use. One afternoon, I stopped at the North Estonia Medical Center, a hospital in the southwest of Tallinn, and met a doctor named Arkadi Popov in an alleyway where ambulances waited in line. “Welcome to our world,” Popov, who leads emergency medical care, said grandly, gesturing with pride toward the chariots of the sick and maimed. “Intensive care!” In a garage where unused ambulances were parked, he took an iPad Mini from the pocket of his white coat, and opened an “e-ambulance” app, which Estonian paramedics began using in 2015. “This system had some childhood diseases,” Popov said, tapping his screen. “But now I can say that it works well.” E-ambulance is keyed onto X-Road, and allows paramedics to access patients’ medical records, meaning that the team that arrives for your chest pains will have access to your latest cardiology report and E.C.G.
Since 2011, the hospital has also run a telemedicine system—doctoring at a distance—originally for three islands off its coast. There were few medical experts on the islands, so the E.M.S. Accepted volunteer paramedics. “Some of them are hotel administrators, some of them are teachers,” Popov said. At a command center at the hospital in Tallinn, a doctor reads data remotely. “On the screen, she or he can see all the data regarding the patient—physiological parameters, E.C.G.s,” he said. “Pulse, blood pressure, temperature.
In case of C.P.R., our doctor can see how deep the compression of the chest is, and can give feedback.” The e-ambulance software also allows paramedics to pre-register a patient en route to the hospital, so that tests, treatments, and surgeries can be prepared for the patient’s arrival. To see what that process looks like, I changed into scrubs and a hairnet and visited the hospital’s surgery ward. Rita Beljuskina, a nurse anesthetist, led me through a wide hallway lined with steel doors leading to the eighteen operating theatres. Screens above us showed eighteen columns, each marked out with twenty-four hours. Surgeons book their patients into the queue, Beljuskina explained, along with urgency levels and any machinery or personnel they might need. An on-call anesthesiologist schedules them in order to optimize the theatres and the equipment.
“Let me show you how,” Beljuskina said, and led me into a room filled with medical equipment and a computer in the corner. She logged on with her own I.D. If she were to glance at any patient’s data, she explained, the access would be tagged to her name, and she would get a call inquiring why it was necessary. The system also scans for drug interactions, so if your otolaryngologist prescribes something that clashes with the pills your cardiologist told you to take, the computer will put up a red flag. The putative grandfather of Estonia’s digital platform is Tarvi Martens, an enigmatic systems architect who today oversees the country’s digital-voting program from a stone building in the center of Tallinn’s Old Town. I went to visit him one morning, and was shown into a stateroom with a long conference table and French windows that looked out on the trees. Martens was standing at one window, with his back to me, commander style.
For a few moments, he stayed that way; then he whirled around and addressed a timid greeting to the buttons of my shirt. Martens was wearing a red flannel button-down, baggy jeans, black socks, and the sort of sandals that are sold at drugstores. He had gray stubble, and his hair was stuck down on his forehead in a manner that was somehow both rumpled and flat.
This was the busiest time of the year, he said, with the fall election looming. He appeared to run largely on caffeine and nicotine; when he put down a mug of hot coffee, his fingers shook. For decades, he pointed out, digital technology has been one of Estonia’s first recourses for public ailments.
A state project in 1970 used computerized data matching to help singles find soul mates, “for the good of the people’s economy.” In 1997, the government began looking into newer forms of digital documents as a supplement. “They were talking about chip-equipped bar codes or something,” Martens told me, breaking into a nerdy snicker-giggle. “Totally ridiculous.” He had been doing work in cybernetics and security as a private-sector contractor, and had an idea. When the cards were released, in 2002, Martens became convinced that they should be both mandatory and cheap.
“Finland started two years earlier with an I.D. Card, but it’s still a sad story,” he said. “Nobody uses it, because they put a hefty price tag on the card, and it’s a voluntary document. We sold it for ten euros at first, and what happened? Banks and application providers would say, ‘Why should I support this card? Nobody has it.’ It was a dead end.” In what may have been the seminal insight of twenty-first-century Estonia, Martens realized that whoever offered the most ubiquitous and secure platform would run the country’s digital future—and that it should be an elected leadership, not profit-seeking Big Tech.
“The only thing was to push this card to the people, without them knowing what to do with it, and then say, ‘Now people have a card. Let’s start some applications,’ ” he said. The first “killer application” for the I.D.-card-based system was the one that Martens still works on: i-voting, or casting a secure ballot from your computer. Before the first i-voting period, in 2005, only five thousand people had used their card for anything. More than nine thousand cast an i-vote in that election, however—only two per cent of voters, but proof that online voting was attracting users—and the numbers rose from there.
As of 2014, a third of all votes have been cast online. That year, seven Western researchers published a study of the i-voting system which concluded that it had “serious architectural limitations and procedural gaps.” Using an open-source edition of the voting software, the researchers approximated a version of the i-voting setup in their lab and found that it was possible to introduce malware. They were not convinced that the servers were entirely secure, either. Martens insisted that the study was “ridiculous.” The researchers, he said, gathered data with “a lot of assumptions,” and misunderstood the safeguards in Estonia’s system. You needed both the passwords and the hardware (the chip in your I.D. Card or, in the newer “mobile I.D.” system, the SIM card in your phone) to log in, blocking most paths of sabotage. Estonian trust was its own safeguard, too, he told me.
Earlier this fall, when a Czech research team found a vulnerability in the physical chips used in many I.D. Cards, Siim Sikkut, the Estonian C.I.O., e-mailed me the finding. His office announced the vulnerability, and the cards were locked for a time. When Sikkut held a small press conference, reporters peppered him with questions: What did the government gain from disclosing the vulnerability? How disastrous was it?
Sikkut looked bemused. Many upgrades to phones and computers resolve vulnerabilities that have never even been publicly acknowledged, he said—and think how much data we entrust to those devices. (“There is no government that knows more about you than Google or Facebook,” Taavi Kotka says dryly.) In any case, the transparency seemed to yield a return; a poll conducted after the chip flaw was announced found that trust in the system had fallen by just three per cent. The history of nationhood is a history of boundaries marked on land. When, in the fourteenth century, peace arrived after bloodshed among the peoples of Mexico’s eastern altiplano, the first task of the Tlaxcaltecs was to set the borders of their territory.
In 1813, Ernst Moritz Arndt, a German nationalist poet before there was a Germany to be nationalistic about, embraced the idea of a “Vaterland” of shared history: “Which is the German’s fatherland? / So tell me now at last the land!— / As far’s the German’s accent rings / And hymns to God in heaven sings.” Today, the old fatuities of the nation-state are showing signs of crisis. Formerly imperialist powers have withered into nationalism (as in Brexit) and separatism (Scotland, Catalonia). New powers, such as the Islamic State, have redefined nationhood by ideological acculturation. It is possible to imagine a future in which nationality is determined not so much by where you live as by what you log on to.
Estonia currently holds the presidency of the European Union Council—a bureaucratic role that mostly entails chairing meetings. (The presidency rotates every six months; in January, it will go to Bulgaria.) This meant that the autumn’s E.U. Digital Summit was held in Tallinn, a convergence of audience and expertise not lost on Estonia’s leaders.
One September morning, a car pulled up in front of the Tallinn Creative Hub, a former power station, and Kersti Kaljulaid, the President of Estonia, stepped out. She is the country’s first female President, and its youngest. Tall and lanky, with chestnut hair in a pixie cut, she wore an asymmetrical dress of Estonian blue and machine gray. Kaljulaid took office last fall, after Estonia’s Presidential election yielded no majority winner; parliamentary representatives of all parties plucked her out of deep government as a consensus candidate whom they could all support. She had previously been an E.U. “I am President to a digital society,” she declared in her address.
The leaders of Europe were arrayed in folding chairs, with Angela Merkel, in front, slumped wearily in a red leather jacket. “Simple people suffer in the hands of heavy bureaucracies,” Kaljulaid told them. “We must go for inclusiveness, not high end. And we must go for reliability, not complex.” Kaljulaid urged the leaders to consider a transient population.
Theresa May had told her people, after Brexit, “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.” With May in the audience, Kaljulaid staked out the opposite view. “Our citizens will be global soon,” she said. “We have to fly like bees from flower to flower to gather those taxes from citizens working in the morning in France, in the evening in the U.K., living half a year in Estonia and then going to Australia.” Citizens had to remain connected, she said, as the French President, Emmanuel Macron, began nodding vigorously and whispering to an associate. When Kaljulaid finished, Merkel came up to the podium.
Regulatory uncertainty or not, data from the SEC indicates the number of filings related to token sales continues to trend upward. Indeed, a review of SEC data through June indicates that the SEC has received nearly 100 filings for token sales (93) in the past year, beginning with four in August 2017 and building to an all-time high of 15 in May.
Many of the filings reviewed by CoinDesk related to sales of Simple Agreements for Future Tokens, or, which essentially serve as promises for tokens at a later date. The framework is modeled after the Simple Agreements for Future Equity, or SAFEs, which a funding model popularized by the startup accelerator Y Combinator. Still, the data from the SEC’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval system shows additional details that provide insight to the trend. Geographically, it’s perhaps no surprise that the U.S. Accounted for the majority of the funding, though according to the SEC, Spain, Japan and the U.K. Were represented as well. As for where the startups are incorporating, Delaware was the clear winner, accounting for the lion’s share of filings.
Other popular jurisdictions included the Cayman Islands, Estonia and Bermuda, the latter of which has been to attract startups and innovators of late. The growth in filings comes in spite of what some sources say is scrutiny of the SAFT model by SEC officials. As CoinDesk previously and quoted from a knowledgeable source: “The SEC is targeting SAFTs.” However, it remains to be seen what will take place over the latter half of 2018, as recent remarks from the SEC perhaps hint at a softer tone that could do much to propel new filings. For example, there’s SEC chairman Jay Clayton’s statement in June where he that token sellers should “come see us” if they plan to sell tokens. Further, later that month, an SEC official provided what was a moment of market clarity when he stated that he ether and bitcoin, the market’s two largest assets are securities. While the verdict is still out for ICOs, it seems the current lack of clarity is doing little to stem or slow the tide of token offerings. Via Shutterstock Data collected and analyzed by Adam Hart.