Estonia’s digital minister on the history – and future – of its trailblazing government

In this episode of Government Transformed, Estonia’s minister of justice and digital affairs, Liisa Pakosta, speaks to GGF’s executive editor Richard Johnstone about her country’s digital transformation journey.

She explains how, after regaining independence from Russia in 1991, Estonia set out to end government corruption and make all public sector activities trackable for citizens. Together, Pakosta and Johnstone discuss the country’s success to that end, touching on the role that digital signatures play in making its government departments more efficient, as well as how data trackers allow Estonians to know when a government official has accessed their data, and on what legal grounds.

Pakosta also discusses why governments around the world to strike universal accords on AI safety, likening the technology’s capacity for progress and destruction to that of nuclear energy.

She also speaks about Estonia’s approach to cybersecurity, which she says is tightly organised around strict rules, cooperation between public and private sectors, rapid incident response, and a voluntary cybersecurity squad. Highlighted in this thread of the conversation is Estonia’s centrally managed distributed Data Exchange Layer (DXL), known as ‘X-Road’, which Pakosta offers as an example of secure architecture used today by both Estonia and Ukraine.

Estonia boasts some of the world’s most sophisticated digital public services, and is widely considered an exemplar among nations in the field of digital transformation in government. In this episode, Pakosta explains how the country’s fully furnished suite of personalised digital public services began with something very simple: the provision of automatic support for parents immediately after a child is born.

Listen to the episode to find out all this and more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.