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A Digital Certificate For Every Canadian
thepacketmaster writes "September 27 of this year, the Canadian government took a quiet step into the online world. Called Government Online, this broad project involves giving every Canadian citizen a digital certificate, which will allow citizens to access their personal government records online. So far they only have the Custom & Revenue Agency online with a simple Change of Address, but there are over a hundred more applications from various agencies ready to be put online. Could this be the start of something good, or is this Big Brother? How about voting online?"
In the US, being capitalist, EVERYTHING is owned, which means EVERYTHING is controlled. I would wager my next paycheck that your government knows more about its citizens and is much more of a police state than any other country in the world. They just have pay more to the PR department too paint a pretty picture.
The Longitudinal Labour Force File fiasco of a couple of years ago. Of course, it has since been dismantled (or else put in the hands of a government body beyond the reach of the Privacy Commissioner) but I would not put it past the federal government to try this again under a different guise.
Here's a little more info.
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I think this application is awesome. And believe it or not i trust our polotical system. IMHO its far less prone to corruption. Which means in turn that the big brother scenario is dampened a bit.
... A canadians $0.02
Who dont i trust when it comes to this kind of data? The police system. The RCMP is notoriously corrupt and just a crappy system of law enforcement. (traffic ticket quotas for officers for example).
Hopefully with this initiative we will see things like track your tax dollars and ways to choose where your tax money goes. Like the census does today but much much more powerful.
I think with this initiative if they just setup good law to cover the use of collected data that we will be mostly safe from unnecissary data mining.
Basically keep this data away from the judicial branches of government. Tax evasion is still a crime etc and you can proove if someone has or hasnt paid their taxes pretty simple today.
Personally i like the idea of web-polling and referendums through the web.
Some people will bitch and complain "i dont have a computer so im not entitled to participate in government" and all that jazz but the reality is that we have an excellent public-access library system with no user-fees for residents. These systems are able to access any and all of this data.
The only thing that scares me about this is the possibility of "bot-nets". If you could as a polotical party or other nefarious group spyware like kazaa that could control how people vote it would be completely depremental to the process.
However to have any kind of widespread meaning this would have to be something that wasnt "illegal" eg through the use of screwedup eulas. Like kazaa uses.
Thus it really must be made a crime to hack a computer in canada if this initiative is to be meaningful. And that means using a computers function in any way contrary to the users intentions. No more spyware no more bullshit.
This should be an un-waiveable right and something to be prosecuted on-sight.
As for overseas applications doing screwy things like kazaa is to the us im really not sure of the solution. Obviously banning access to forign files is impossible and extradition treaties dont cover this kind of thing so whats a government to do?
One possible method would be through government paid hackers. People with unlimited amounts of bandwidth and resources that could make it very hostile for a forign company to do business.
Imaging blasting kazaa servers with the kind of bandwidth available to the military.
At the very least if you cant take these sites offline you'll run up their bandwidth costs so high that they'll become unaffordable and or the host country will get mad about its main lines getting clogged and deal with the problem theirselves.
Who knows. This is a dangerous technology currently but maybe they'll come out with some non-software-tamperable device to connect to your router/hub/cat5 interface etc.
MIT's been doing this for years. Every student who registers is given a kerberos "identity" which they can use to generate a certificate for each computer/browser. This certificate is required to access any records etc, and is used by many classes to access videos of lectures, etc. even the most techno-illiterate students (at mit, but still) have no trouble using the system.
If canada is able to implement a similar system with the security that MIT has, it sounds like a great idea.
You're absolutely correct. As it is, CCRA won't even *FAX* you your documentation unless you swear on your mothers grave that the fax machine is in your immediate precense (the RCMP is worse, they'll ask for a SECURE FAX number). Why? They can't compromise your personal security by giving out your Social Insurance Number to the wrong people.
That being said, X.509 certs can be used to identify a specific computer (ie: a site cert), or a user identity certificate. The User ID cert *should* have a passphrase protecting the magic key, so theoritically a user logging into a government service would identify themselves with the cert, and authenticate themselves using the passphrase.
This still isn't ideal. In a world of Message Pump driven Windowing systems that allow an attacker to intercept various things at a very low level, I can see a rash of passphrase and identity theft PtP virii coming out.
Put another way, when you're entering your PIN number for a direct debit transaction, do you enter your PIN when you see someone watching over your shoulder? Now what if you don't notice it?
As for voting, forget it. Voting is an intimate activity. If you can't make it to the poll, the standard "away" procedures are in place and work quite well.
As for Big Brother, let's hope Harper's Reform Party doesn't get in. Those guys are better for business than they are for society and will undoubtedly fuck Canadian's up the ass with a new regime of information sharing in our "Information Economy".
We're not socialists, we just have some socialist policies. Healthcare may cost a lot in taxes, but at least everyone can be sure to get proper care regardless of income level. This is only because in Canada healthcare is a right, not a priviledge.
To say Canada's crime is skyrocketing is ridiculous. I can walk through downtown Toronto (largest Canadian city) in any area at any time of day or night and not fear for my life at all. There are a couple bad neighbourhoods, but even they are many, many times safer than a bad neighbourhood in a major US city. Per capita there is not a single major US city that has lower violent crime than any major Canadian city. Stick your insanely relaxed gun laws up your ass, Americans, you guys have got it all wrong.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
I think you'd be amazed at how inconvenient voting can be in this country. For the past 11 years, my polling station has been at an elementary school that's all of 5 minutes drive away. Guess what? Not one single public transportation route goes within a mile of it. Walking the total distance from my house would take well over an hour, and I'm a very fast walker in pretty decent shape.
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For anyone who doesn't own a car, or live on a bus route that takes you right to the polling station, voting is a huge inconvenience. You have to arrange with friends/family/whoever, and I don't remember our constitution saying that you needed to own a car to be able to vote.
And for those of you who cry "take a taxi"... paying $20 just to get to every election is a bit silly. *I* make do, but there are others who I know simply can't make it to the voting booth without a great deal of frustration. There's nothing in our laws saying you must have X number of dollars to be able to vote, and there shouldn't be.
Remember, just because *you* find voting convenient in its current form, doesn't mean *everyone* does. This is why, for example, they allow troops serving overseas to vote where THEY are. Using a bit more technology to extend the ease of voting to more people is never a bad thing - unless you think some people shouldn't be allowed to vote at all, and that's a whole other ball of wax
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
The US already has some IRS services online:
refund status
efile
More things are coming soon. None of it requires a digital certificate. They are going with a "private information" approach. For example, to change your address and things like that in the future you will need to know the exact AGI filed for a given year, etc.
Not sure if this is better or worse, but that is where it is going in the USA.
How me filling out the same forms online as in the Real World (TM) will somehow make the government know things it wouldn't otherwise know, in a Vast Communist Conspiracy To Rule The World And Keep The Working Man Down!
The rampant knee-jerk paranoia on this site by certain people is just disgusting.
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