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China Creates Massive Online ID Database
schwaang writes that while the US continues to hash out concerns over the Real ID Act, which aims to create a national ID by standardizing state driver's licenses, China has already implemented a massive online ID database, which they say will help prevent fraud. From the Xinhua English-language site: "Anyone can now send a text message or visit the country's population information center's website, to check if the name and the ID number of a person's identity card match. If they do match the ID card-holder's picture also appears, said the Ministry, adding that no other information is available to ensure a citizen's privacy is protected. Completed at the end of 2006, China's population information database, the world's largest, contains personal information on 1.3 billion citizens. Giving public accessing to the database is also designed to correct mistakes if an individual discovers that their name, number and picture don't match."
China has already implemented a massive online ID database, which they say will help prevent fraud.
And by "fraud", they mean "democracy".
Push Button, Receive Bacon
This is a great way to do it, you have to admit. I wonder if they list all of us expats as well...
Thats gotta be a pretty massive database, any ideas about the tech running underneath?
liqbase
So China develops a national ID that ties a name and a number to a photo, can be corrected if its incorrect, and can't be used by the bouncer at the bar to get that hot girl's address and phone number, and we're still stuck on our useless social security cards and drivers' licenses? Clearly China has become the new overlords of freedom.
Who am I kidding? We all know that internally, China will use this database to track every citizens' whereabouts, who they are talking to, what they read at the library and most importantly whether you've bought milk recently or not.
They are not keeping this all secret. I don't think it's as big of a deal if we have access to and knowledge of what is kept in the database. I already know that I exist and that there are records of my existance. As long as there is no address or name alongside the picture I don't see this as a bad thing.
This kind of open ID database is not nearly as frightening as the ones being made of us without our knowledge or confirmation of facts pertaining to us.
once more into the breach
And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
I seem to remember someone here making the argument that instead of their being privacy. Everything would be open to everyone else.
Many Chinese are lactose intolerant!
Some parts of Harvard such as the libraries call up one's picture as one enters. Harder to forge or distract the guards.
Actually, this is not all that far off from an "identity clearinghouse" idea I had a while back.
You voluntarily register in person with a government agency your name, address, and certain other personally-identifiable information of the sort that is required for a bank or other lender to grant you credit. When you apply for a new credit account somewhere, that lender sends a request to the government agency containing the PII that you provided to the lender. The government agency then contacts you to verify whether the credit request is valid. Then, the government agency responds to the lender, either stating that (1) the person is not in their records, (2) the person is in their records and has confirmed verification, or (3) the person is in their records and has denied verification. It would then be illegal for the lender to open an account for which the #3 response was given by the government, and the lender would be responsible for clearing up all the resultant credit problems.
In order to modify your data with the agency, you must show up in person at the agency's office with photo ID. If such a system were implemented in coordination with local DMVs, they could use the photos on file for your driver's license.
The government already has access to this data anyway, so allowing people to voluntarily put it to good use to stop identity theft is a good thing. The banks won't do it because the losses they suffer haven't reached the amount of money they think they'll lose if they start being more vigilant about credit applications.
When I've lived in a new place, including China, you are first hit by the sameness of people and places. Soon that fades into the background and you start seeing the differences among people and places.
It was a little harder the first time was there beacuse everyone wore those blue work clothes called Mao suits (some were green or gray!).
Then some Chinese say Europeans all look alike- European have yellow(*), curly hair and big noses. (* stereotype any hair color not black) Eye shape is a not a standard stereotype to them.
The US and UK governments would have exactly the same system if it weren't for democracy.
Open Source Society, where not only does one have no privacy, you would have no right to privacy. How far could China (or we) go with this?
... open to everyone ... all the time.
A logical conclusion would be the eventual development of a live video and sound feed wherever a person is, at any given time (including the bathroom and in the boudoir). Anyone at all could view you at any time, and could do so with the click of a mouse. The viewer would of course be recorded as well.
Everything
It is not the database people should think about but the government running it. A peoples suspicion of their government is a metric of their freedom, or lack thereof.
Nazi Germany was planning a similar but telegraph based system that included a centralized department with everyone's picture and a detailed description that could be telegraphed to local police and SS stations to aid suspect identification, interrogations, and worse. Hitler would have been proud of his Chinese friends...
I don't see how this helps for anything other than transactions that are conducted in person. Great, I can get picture of the person if I have their ID card info. It certainly doesn't help phone or internet transaction security.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
It's designed to get all of us to accept their brand of authoritarianism because it's more "open" than ours. We are doomed to ally ourselves with the radical Islamists to avoid being run over by the Chinese. If we could only turn them against each other, then we can keep another war off our shores.
Giving public accessing to the database is also designed to correct mistakes if an individual discovers that their name, number and picture don't match."
Prisoner: Where am I?
Number Two: In The Village.
Prisoner: What do you want?
Number Two: Information.
Prisoner: Which side are you on?
Number Two: That would be telling. We want information, information, information...
Prisoner: You won't get it.
Number Two: By hook or by crook we will.
Prisoner: Who are you?
Number Two: The new Number Two.
Prisoner: Who is Number One?
Number Two: You are Number Six.
Prisoner: I am not a number. I am a free man.
Number Two: Ha, ha, ha, ha.
- Intro to "The Prisoner"
--
BMO
Revelation 14:4
These are they which were not defiled with women; for they are virgins.
Prepare all ye, for the end of the world is nigh at hand!
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Things can be very convenient when your government has a centralized database of all of its citizens, and isn't hampered by things like:
Human rights
Privacy rights
Civil rights
The cyberdyne system failed, so they instead choose to grow it in china and build it there, where later they will mass produce
lots of terminator 4 versions all chineese, made by chineese and being 5ft tall and kick like Jackie Chan.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Since anyone buying milk is probably not Chinese.
..........FULL STOP.
I mean China is beating us in oppression..??! We gota' beat those F'in commies! We *need* Real_ID and RFID chips now, today.
(note to mod: This is satire)
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
A couple of quick observations from someone married to a Chinese national and has been to China five times. There are far fewer unique names in China both first and last and generally no middle name. Being able to uniquely identify people in China is a huge problem for private industry and government alike.
I am all for national ID cards and a central database for all citizen info. You provide this info over and over and over to various local, state, and federal agencies. How about just one yearly form you update at tax time? Want to live off the grid? Tough, get over it. We are long past the point where armed insurrection is going to change the American government. The only people that NEED to live off the grid are criminals (I know I'll get some angry replies to that). Lets get rid of black markets, gray markets, and illegal immigration. Need jobs filled? Then either give a decent wage or issue enough citizenships to fill them. Guest Worker program? Just an excuse the screw the working class by artificially keeping wages low, not to mention creating a whole new officially sanctioned underclass.
There are potentials for abuse to be sure, especially if third parties are allowed access (a practice I would like to see barred by law). But the gains to out society probably outweigh any theoretical down side. We're not talking papers you have to carry around or be arrested. We talking about a card you use when applying for jobs or bank accounts. I really don't understand all the hysteria surrounding the resistance to national databases or national IDs, though I'm sure some here will be all to anxious to enlighten me.
Letter To Iran
Traditionally, China is the people of "One Hundred Names:"
In many Western countries, there is a short list of popular 'first names,' but countless 'last names.' In China, it is just the reverse. The list of last name is short, and the number of first names is in the billions. This may be the reason that in Western countries, one customarily tell strangers one's first name ("My name is Bob.") Whereas in China, one generally give out his last name instead ("Just ask for Mr. Wang.") One Hundred Chinese Names
So, this seems like a good idea with potential terrible consequences. Let's say I've got a bot net of a million machines. We run the bot-net on the database pages, trying random numbers, gathering a database of names, numbers and pictures. Then I take these names, id numbers and pictures and start making IDs maybe? Or using photo recognition to classify people into different groups for spam/marketing purposes, or maybe by ethnicity by last name, or match it up to a directory service and getting addresses and all...
Of course, this could probably be defeated with enough, "Mother's maiden name?" sorta questions and all, but just seems like a ripe source of information that you may not want getting out. By itself, it's not so damaging, but paired with other resources, perhaps it's the last piece in a perfect identity fraud scheme.
Think of the Web 2.0 mashup possibilities:
- Every time a clerk checks your ID they also vote "hot or not"
- Every time a store checks your ID they send their own GPS location to a Google Earth-enabled match.com site. If the connect-the-dot path of your last N transactions is close to someone else's, your compatibility score goes up.
- For bonus points, if your stored GPS path spells something in Chinese, you win a prize.
Haha that was funny, partly since it's almost true.
I've seen technicans debugging Shanghai Metro Line #1 ticket vending machines.
They run on VB6.
So if they use Access to power that, I'm not surprised.
Therefore if it turns to be slower in off-peak hours than Wikipedia in peak hours, I'm not surprised either.
Honestly, this is one of the hardest things about adapting to an environment dominated by Asians.
When I first moved to the SF Bay Area I had the same problem: I was unable to tell most of my coworkers apart. Since then I have learned to pick up on other cues: weight, dress, shoes, age, voice, location where I see them, etc. It is still moderately difficult to tell with some of them since their faces mostly look identical, but my heuristics allow me to identify the majority of them. And if I run into them outside the context of the workplace, in street clothes, it is much harder.
Just the first step, next is DNA sampling with retinal scans and RFIDs embedded at birth. I'm sure they will be the first with Borg-like implants too. Can you say "hive mind"?
Privacy has been going bye-bye for 5,000 years. This is just another step. On the other side, getting the dossier on every person in China will be reduced to one database dump by a CIA cracker/agent. Efficient espionage, ya gotta love technology!
One step closer to preventing Freedom and Liberty from ever entering China.
When will China be FREE? Could China ever be FREE???
It sure is a lot less likely with more 1984'ish types of tracking and control. How can you protest a communist government without ending up in the clink? Anoninimity is the best way.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
This is merely a toy compared to what Google has on every US citizen. Equifax has the rest, and the CIA ties it all together.
The difference is what China has planned actually sounds useful to everyone, not just the watchers. An old idea, tried many times, but the bad guys want to be the only ones with that info.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
I'm not so sure about this system. There must be errors in the database. What happens to the unfortunate individuals who don't match because of such an error? This also can be an easy way for the Chinese government to censor people.
If someone says something that the government doesn't like, they just insert an "error" into the database. Instant harassment that those poor individuals will have to go through before the error is fixed. Or even worse, the government could not admit to the change and simply lock the person up on fraud.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
It seems that this is a paid service -- 5 yuan (around US$0.60) per ID checking.
I feel like death on a soda cracker.
... when about 1/2 billion of the submitted entries will be:
<id number> + "chan"
or
<id number> + "wong"
Although I generally agree with your point that Chinese do not all look alike, saying that there are 51 (there's actually 56) minority groups in China is not a valid argument as greater than 97% of Chinese are Han ethnicity.
He already announced that if America was a disctatorship it would be OK as long as he was running it.
Why do you have to resort to name-calling, this guy has trouble telling the difference between people. He just has not had the experience of seeing 4billion faces? How is that something to pick on. Maybe your just a social whore? When and if he does go out he meets people like you that tell him he is a dumbass and ignorant. Identifying faces is actually complex skill, One hard to master if you have vision problems or mental problems, or had problems during child hood while learning to socialize. Being a basement dweller does not make you dumb. Geekdom does not make you an ignorant racist. Assuming the parent poster is.. on the other hand is stupid.
Why does the fact that he hasn't met many chinese people make him an incredible dumbass? If you are used to telling people apart a certain way and then you find yourself in a group where the characteristics you look for are all very similar, it is natural to expect some difficulty.
Do all people of [any ethnic group] look the same? No, of course not. But to belittle or think less of someone just because they haven't had a chance to meet many people of a group (or because they didn't take a lot of time studying pictures, or whatever) is a little unfair. Telling people apart is a learned skill like any other, and it isn't totally his fault if he never knew any chinese people and had trouble telling them apart at first.
The actual site. Looks like it's currently 5RMB (~65cents US as of today) per query.
After all these years... Goodness! To prevent Fraud. I hope I am not "prevented".
Of course, China might want to install its own big-brother database for reasons of central control and other fascist means. But I won't go into that.
Because the one thing that database won't do is help against fraudsters. Actually, it will help them. Contrary to ones belief, fraud goes up as more data about people is collected.
You'll notice that the credit-card fraud-rate is lower in europe, where we have relatively strong data-protection laws, than in the USA where personal data is protected less.
And any database which is generated will have its abuse (by users entering false data, by legitimate users using it for illegal means, by people illegally accessing it), the more it encompassess the more bodies will need access to it, the more it will be abused, and the first thing you will notice is a definitive increase in fraud.
So contrary to the common assumption that these databases will help to combat crime, they will foster crime.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
There aren't any pictures, but the IRS already has a TIN matching program which lets "authorized payers" "Match the payee W-9 name [the person's name] and TIN [the person's social security number] with IRS records".
China has massive class division between rich and poor. Rural dwellers are treated as second class citizens and mandated to have a city residence permit (which usually cost several times their annual income and can take months to get) to live in the city and earn a decent wage. There is currently a crackdown because of the Beijing Olympics and this may be part of it as another way to move the illegal rural people (the floating population) out of the cities. An ID card would make it easy to crosscheck with a database and then simply kick the person out.
I'm not thrilled with the idea of universal surveillance either, but it's been argued that the only choices are between that and one-way surveillance against us by governments and other powerful groups. See David Brin's The Transparent Society, a good chunk of which is free here. He wrote this pre-9/11, and I suspect he's not thrilled with the direction we're heading between those two alternatives.
Revive the Constitution.
I haven't yet seen people make the connection between such a database and a proposed US one meant to let employers confirm that their employees are citizens or legal residents. Right now our enforcement of immigration law is a joke because these people can find jobs with employers who look the other way when they use fake Social Security numbers, right? For once I'm going to say this database policy is a reasonable move. Of course China wants it for more than keeping out illegal immigrants from North Korea, but there really is a legitimate use for it in the US.
Revive the Constitution.
No, the guy really does sound like a fucking idiot.
I'm not worried. At least, not until the Chinese build a massless online ID database.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Is it possible to do so that in order to start browsing the Internet from China, you'd have to enter your ID and password in "the first Internet page"?