Quotes from Toomas Hendrik Ilves

The E-government cabinet, E-health services, online voting, online pre-filled tax returns, e-mobile parking, are all examples of Estonian innovation, but far more importantly, they are examples of the transformative power of intensive and extensive use of Information Technology in the public sector.

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.

It's much cheaper to influence elections than it is to go to war.

Digital warfare, in the Clausewitz definition as 'the continuation of policy by other means,' reached Western public consciousness via my own country, Estonia, in 2007 when our governmental, banking, and news media servers were hit with 'distributed denial-of-service attacks,' which is when hackers overload servers until they shut down.

Russia has had very aggressive military exercises. They've practiced mock nuclear attacks on Warsaw. Russian bombers practiced attacking strategic military targets in Sweden. The military aggression gets everybody nervous.

Everything can be known and, in some cases, everything is known.

Democracies stand on several key pillars: Free and fair elections, human rights, the rule of law, and a free untrammeled media. Until 2016, an open media was seen as a resilient democratic pillar that supported the others.

When our diplomats go abroad, they are surprised that they can't do the things that they can do here.

I think there are a number of little Ribbentrops running around. But Molotov hasn't found a good enough deal yet.

I'm not afraid of code. I mean, I understand how these things work. I thought that that was the one area where Estonia was playing on a level playing field.

It is hard to work with the nagging doubt that perhaps some foreign intelligence agency is reading all your correspondence, especially when you know they have done so in the past.

Nothing costs more than the loss of freedom.

Sanctions work over time. They do work, but it takes years for them to have an effect.

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.

Big data knows and can deduce more about you than Big Brother ever could.

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.

Fake news is cheap to produce. Genuine journalism is expensive.

When your country is in dire straits, it doesn't matter whether you're a social democrat or not.

The minute a collective alliance fails to live up to its agreement to collective defence, then from that moment on, everybody is on the run.

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 a modern digitalized world, it is possible to paralyze a country without attacking its defense forces: The country can be ruined by simply bringing its SCADA systems to a halt. To impoverish a country, one can erase its banking records. The most sophisticated military technology can be rendered irrelevant. In cyberspace, no country is an island.

The rights that people have offline must also be protected online.

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.

I was surprised by some of my French colleagues who immediately assumed that because I spoke English with an American accent, that, therefore, you must be a supporter of whoever is the current president of the United States. There seems to be this widespread feeling that, 'Oh, American accent - therefore, you like cowboy boots.'