Toomas Hendrik Ilves quotes

Because of cyberattacks and fake news, we can already imagine the problem all democratic societies will face in future elections: how to limit lies when they threaten democracy?

When Estonia reestablished its sovereignty after a half century of successive thuggish, totalitarian, foreign occupations by the Soviets, the Nazis, and then again the Soviets, we knew we wanted to create a democratic country characterized by rule of law and respect for human rights.

That was something that shaped my thinking regarding Estonia: the idea that we should be getting our young people to work with computers.

The thing people forget is that the entire world - or, at least, Europe, U.S., transatlantic, Russia, Soviet Union - that security architecture has been in place since 1945 and has been refined. Already, the U.N. charter that everyone signed is that you can't change borders through use of force or even threat of use of force.

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.

In Germany, a country that for obvious reasons is far more attuned than most to the dangers of demagogy, populism, and nationalism, lawmakers have already proposed taking legal measures against fake news. When populist, nationalist fake news threatens the liberal democratic center, other Europeans may follow suit.

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.