Words matter. These are the best Toomas Hendrik Ilves Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The fake news is – I mean, as a tool of warfare – has been there for decades and decades and decades. It was never very well done until, really, the Ukraine, though I would say that the Russians used to complain about fake things to say the State Department.
Until defense of democracy in the digital era is taken up by governments collectively, both in NATO and outside the alliance, liberal democracies will remain vulnerable to the cyberthreats of the 21st century.
Social media has become a primary factor in political campaigns.
It’s much cheaper to influence elections than it is to go to war.
The whole information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure must be regarded as an ‘ecosystem’ in which everything is interconnected. It functions as a whole; it must be defended as a whole.
The Russian Federation’s practice of instant citizenship, whereby Russian passports are distributed willy-nilly to ethnic Russians abroad so they can be ‘protected’ in their current homeland, is unacceptable. Passports are travel documents, not a tool to justify aggression.
Big data knows and can deduce more about you than Big Brother ever could.
When your country is in dire straits, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a social democrat or not.
When hackers have access to powerful computers that use brute force hacking, they can crack almost any password; even one user with insecure access being successfully hacked can result in a major breach.
When our diplomats go abroad, they are surprised that they can’t do the things that they can do here.
I was the child of refugees.
In both Russia and the U.S., there are a very small number of very, very rich people, and then there are a lot of people who don’t have anything. The less inequality you have in a society, the more social peace you have. It’s kind of a no-brainer.
We Estonians will do what is necessary to join the European Union.
Democracy is messy, clearly, but it has one key factor, which is an orderly transfer of power.
I remember starting to read about the Soviet Union when I was eight years old; I think I was reading my father’s ‘New York Times.’
The Soviet Union collapsed without a lot of people thinking it should or would, whereas for Estonia, it was something we’d been praying for for 60 years.
People who come out of the liberal arts don’t have an understanding of science and technology, and the people in science and technology have very little experience with liberal arts and the traditions of a liberal democracy.
In Russia, tweeting or sharing real news that’s embarrassing to the regime can land you in prison. Imagine, then, the response of the regime to ‘fake news’ that’s damaging to the Kremlin.
Can the wider West establish a global ‘cyber NATO?’ It would be difficult, but so, too, was the founding of NATO itself, which was called into being only after successive communist coups in Eastern Europe.
Nothing costs more than the loss of freedom.
The domestic policy of any president, U.S. or otherwise, is his or her own concern, as long as democratic norms are followed.
The problem of online identity is expressed best in an old ‘New Yorker’ cartoon with a picture of a dog next to a computer, and the dog says, ‘No one online knows you’re a dog.’
My American undergraduate education probably gave me a better idea of the fundamentals of what European civilization is about, better than the undergraduate education you get at most European universities.
Cybersecurity needs to be taken seriously by everyone.
Everything can be known and, in some cases, everything is known.
If getting young people computer-literate through putting school systems online is a no-brainer, at least in retrospect, getting older people and those in rural areas online can be a tougher nut to crack.
In cyberwarfare, it is much harder to identify the attacker and, therefore, to know how to retaliate.
George Bush and I share a love of steel brush cutters. It turns out we use the same professional brush cutter. He asked me what I did. I said I cut brush. He says, ‘Oh, what do you use?’ I said steel. He goes, ‘Oh, me too.’
Liberal democracies do not and often cannot respond in kind to cyberattacks on their own way of governance.
I knew who Bruce Springsteen was before he had his first record.
