Slashdot Mirror
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?"
"Could this be the start of something good, or is this Big Brother?"
Depends. Yes, it could be Big Brother, if the government is planning on using this as a way to track people. It also could be something very good, in that people could quickly and easily track themselves through the government. Unfortunately, this could also be a means for people to track you quickly and easily....leading to all sorts of uncool cracking/piracy,theft. It's a new tech, gonna have it's problems just like everything else.
Sent from your iPad.
This could be the start of something good, or it could be the start of a Big Brother-esque rule. It all depends on where the government takes it. If they only allow people to update their informationk, and do not track it beyond where they have to as required by law, then I would say it is a good thing. However, if they track it, and use the information to spy/whatever you want to call it on their citizens, then it could be considered as going the way of the Big Brother.
Online voting? Never going to happen anytime soon until they can create a good system which is almost impossible to hack. Not, extremely difficulty to hack, but almost difficult, and any bugs which are found are patched immediately, not when they get around to it.
And so we go, on with our lives
We know the truth, but prefer lies
Lies are simple, simple is bliss
I hate to throw cold water on this, but with a digital certificate, are you proving that you are Jean Deau, or that you are sitting at Jean Deau's computer? This distinction isn't that important for, say, your my.excite.com page, but is vital for dealing with the Government. The links provided don't really give much detail on how this will be implemented. Will each Canadian have his own password, eh? Not being a Canadian myself, I am willing to work with the assumptions that a) there is some way of telling John Smith of Quebec from John Smith of Vancouver b) a substantial enough percentage of Canadians have access to the internet to make this not a waste of time and money.
-- I Am Not A Terrorist.
With pgp/gpg and keyservers like pgp.mit.edu, it's painfully simple to create and revoke keys that you control - as long as Canada picks a similar system, the citizens are still in control. If you feel your key has been compromised, revoke it and go create a new one next time you go to the post office or city hall, or however they verify people...
I've *never* felt that having a digital ID was a threat to my privacy - if I control the keys, I can use the ID when I feel like proving who I am.
Nothing stops me from generating a new ket for some other purpose either - I usually create one for each job/work-email that I use. I've had my private one since '96 or so - you can go grab it from my slashdot profile.
Cheers,
Jim
-- My Weblog.
Point :)
Anyone who truly believes Canada is a police state should try living in a real police state for awhile. There's a reason we have so many refugees here.
Voting online is a bad idea regardless of the software used to implement it. Simply put, there is no guarrantee of privacy. By having people goto public locations with private booths, each persons privacy can be garranteed because there are people there whose job it is to ensure it. At home, an abusive wife can illegally influence her husband into voting for a candidate or issue he would have otherwise not voted for. Corporations or Labor Unions could setup computer voting centers for thier members or employees. What guarrantee is there the persons Boss or Union Leader won't be standing over thier shoulder or there isn't a keystroke capture program installed on the computer or the data stream isn't funneled into another program designed to change votes or somehow invalidate "Wrong" votes.
"Our products just aren't engineered for security,"
-Brian Valentine,VP in charge of MS Windows Development
OS, Web Server and Hosting History for www.gol-ged.gc.ca OS Server Last changed IP address Netblock Owner
:(
Windows 2000 Microsoft-IIS/5.0 12-Oct-2002 198.103.32.172 Finance Canada and Treasury Board Secretariat
NT4/Windows 98 Microsoft-IIS/4.0 5-Apr-2002 198.103.32.172 Finance Canada and Treasury Board Secretariat
NT4/Windows 98 Microsoft-IIS/4.0 23-Jan-2001 198.103.32.142 Finance Canada and Treasury Board Secretariat
It does not look too good to me
You could actually have this and online voting as well - online voting doesn't have to mean from any internet-connected computer at all.
If you voted 'online' at a polling booth terminal, you could gain enormous efficiencies over today's system involving so many bits of paper.
And a digital certificate might be something you take on disk, card or some other medium to a public terminal, but again not use from just anywhere on the internet.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
How about voting online?
What is there this mad rush to figure out how to make voting to work on the internet? I mean...you vote very close to where you live...you either care to vote, or you don't, online voting isn't going to change that. The technical hurdles are so big that I can't see how they are justifiable.
Furthermore, Canada already has its own little system of voting (piece of paper, put x in your preferred candidates box) and it's cheap, easy to count, difficult to mess up, et cetera. It's we Americans, obsessed with technology, who have varying levels of expensive technology most of which more or less works the majority of the time. (Unlike the Canadian system which works all the time for pennies per election.)
``Voting Onlin'' doesn't (necessarily) mean voting from your home DSL on your PC. The purpose of online, electronic voting is to have control over how votes are counted, and how long it takes. This does not preclude a public poll, administered by real people, where the voters are ensured their privacy. However, it does mean that there has to be some sort of digital ``accountability'' for each voter.
I prayed about it, and God said, "Don't do it!" But I thought, "I know better."
Why is information garnered by computer somehow more incideous than information garnered by more traditional means?
The government already has the information, or will have recieved it anyway. They are using the certificates to give you access to your information, and not leave it available to other people. Even the information you will give or update would have been given to the government sooner or later.
I don't see a way for the government to abuse your privacy with this anymore than if a data entry clerk had entered your request for a change of address at the local post office.
Is stupid.
Go to the polling station.
Mark an X in the circle.
Votes are counted while the scrutineers watch.
Time-honoured, simple, distributed computing system. Works great.
There's no sense in technology for technology's sake. Paper, pen, and people are the appropriate technology for voting in Canada.
Our health care costs us less than your public health care. I'm quoting a figure, not sure if it is correct but it's as best as I can remember, you guys spend 12% of GDP on your public health care, we spend 8% of GDP. Everyone gets health care from the public system here, where as only a few get it from the public system down there. Hmmm, what one do you think is more efficent? Who has a better public health care system?? the US or Canada, I think that is easy to answer. Sure it maybe underfunded, but lets say that we move up to 15% of GDP, then we would have a much better health care system, it would be much better than your two tier system.
"You voted for gun control, and what have you got? Skyrocketing crime, criminals that are more and more dangerous..." wtf are you talking about? Hell just take a look at the amount of cops killed by guns in Canada, vs. the US... I don't know any figures but I'm pretty sure it's a lot less in Canada.
"You voted for big government, and this is what you got: Taxes going through the roof, government services lacking, and Big Brother watching you" Yes, that's right, government services lacking, we need like 30 different police forces to do the same thing, what do you guys have, FBI, ATF, State Police, County Police, City Police, etc. Yes we should get rid of our nice RCMP (One of the best police forces in the world), and replace it with three different services, that's how we could save money.
Yes that's right, we should have been made the 52nd state, then we could all be sued for saying the wrong thing, not having some of the best educated work force, and k-12 students, not teaching evolution in the public school system, and all the other great things that the US has to offer. Oh but wait a minute, we wouldn't be charged 40% tax, we wouldn't get that health care system, we wouldn't have welfare, we wouldn't have an economy that is doing better than the US's, yes that's what we want!
Canada has been rated the best country to live in for seven years up to 2000, now we are 3rd or something. And guess who beat us, other more socialist countries.
But lastly, yes Canada has some problems, but what country doesn't, the US has a lot more than Canada. I think Canada could use some reform, but if anything I would want it to be towards the left, I think we could streamline the government, redistribute the money more evenly, fix up the health care, etc. I think if we took ideas from Norway and Sweden we could come up with the best country in the world.
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." - Soren Kier
First,let me cmt about the self-proclaimed libertarians with their rhetoric that they don't even understand.
Canada, Communist(tm)? Them braying this wouldn't know anybody to the left of Teddy Kennedy if we bit 'em in the ass. They claim there's no difference between, say, Jimmy Carter, Teddy Kennedy, and Stalin...and then claim that there's a *huge* gap between Reagan/Bush/Bush and Fallwel and Mussollini.
They're simply ignorant, and militant about their ignorance, so, y'all from Canada, just ignore 'em, unless you like "debates" with folks who have no idea what a real argument is (the Argument FAQ is at ).
Voting online - the worry that someone brought up, about the company setting up polling places, and checking keystrokes (hell, they can put something to read the signals from meters away!), I *do* worry. Union bosses? Uh, sorry, turkeys, you have *no* clue what the reality of most unions are like. Now bosses...when I worked at a Baby Bell in the mid-nineties, and all the telecoms were pushing for deregulation (the Telecom Act of 1996), our managers were told to "encourage" us to write or email our Senators and Congressmen...and that the CEO wanted a copy of the letter.
Fascism? Yes, it's here. Look at Ashcroft. How did they get in? All you little geeks "oh, the Democrats" are all special interests (um, unions represent 13 million people - who do the telecoms, or the financial industry represent...and they give a *lot* more money to the Republicans . All the little geeks, who make in the range of what 80% or 85% of what all US workers do ($100k/yr), but are all Billionaire Gates wannabees, who won't even vote their *own* "enlightened self-interest", which is anybody *but* Republican.
But that's ok...so, now, if y'all want to flame me that's ok, too...as long as you can tell me, without lieing, that y'all voted in the primaries the last couple of years, and then in the elections. I have my little stubs that say that I do, around here. I could find them and scan 'em (and get the jpeg down to a reasonable size in the Gimp) to prove it.
If you ain't got 'em, sit down and shut up. They're my license to criticize. Remember, y'all got the government you deserve.
mark
This is nothing to worry about. Canada a police state? Canada is perhaps the most free country in the world. An identity simply provides a mechansim for the government to be relatively sure they are dealing with whom they think they are for online transactions -- much like you have to show some ID in some circumstances. No one has to use their digital ID if they don't want to engage in online transactions. For those interested in trying free digital ids, Thawte has a web of trust program for free x.509 certificates. I think they run the program as a loss leader -- they hope people will upgrade to paid-for certs.
This has got to be one of biggest differences between Canadians and Americans. The American stance seems to be that government is bad, the smaller and less invasive they are the better. Conspiracy theories abound, and unfortunately I can't for surely say that they're unfounded. The irony is that instead of letting the government have any control, corporations have managed to gain control. The dollar rules much more in the states than here.
There seems to be a large Us vs. Them mentality between the Government and the People in the U.S. This isn't so in Canada. For one thing, the government is the people, not just in theory but in reality. If the government were to try and take over the country (a common reason for Americans needing their guns) how would they do it? Are you suggesting that my parents and sister (government employees) would take me (non-government worker) hostage? Its ludicrous to be afraid of the government.
So getting back to the main point, I too trust the government more than a corporation, as I think do most Canadians. Corporations have only one goal, and that's to make money, and that's bad. When people talk about privatizing things like jails it truely scares me. I work in private security, and its pathetic. No corner is left uncut. There's no conscience or social responsibility. This is much better left in the hands of government. I personally believe the same holds for most things, like utilities and such. After all, the goverment is basically a gigantic co-operative. Sure the government doesn't always do the right thing, but its rarely a big deal in the long run. My only real complaint about the government is the lack of efficiency that companies have to gain to stay afloat. Of course, a lot of that efficiency is gained through corner-cutting. The trick is to eliminate the bloat without cutting corners.
Anyway, that's my CDN$0.02.
--
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]