The News Lens International (TNL): A lot of what you have talked about is very positive; trying to improve Taiwan society for the benefit of Taiwan. To go back to your teenage years, I have read you came across anarchism and liked some of those ideas, and then moved through your passion for computer software and programming into the civic hacking space. Can you talk about your views on hacking, and whether that has changed now that you are in government?
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I am still a hacker. Hackers are people who are deeply immersed with a system, and then when a new situation comes, they invent new tools out of it. It is unfortunate that in English, hacker has a double meaning.
There are people who are into cyber-security, and people who are able to find loopholes in existing systems. We say there are hackers with hats: we have “white hats” who report or fix those issues; we have “black hats” who exploit those issues for their own benefits; and we have “grey hats” who kind of fall in between.