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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?"
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.
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
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.)