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Japan IDs All Its Citizens
Edis Krad writes "While RealID in the US is a threat whose implementation is a ways in the future, the Japanese long ago implemented something similar; and there has been very little complaint raised about it. The Juki Net (Residents Registration Network — link in Japanese) has been silently developing since 1992. The system involves an 11-digit unique number to identify every citizen in Japan, and the data stored against that ID covers name, address, date of birth, and gender. Many Japanese citizens seem to be oblivious that such a government-run network exists. Juki Net had a spotlight shone on it recently because a number of citizens around the country sued against it, citing concerns of information misuse or leakage. And while an Osaka court ruled against the system, the Japanese Supreme Court has just ruled it is not unconstitutional, on the grounds that the data will be used in a bona-fide manner and there's no risk of leakage. While there is a longstanding registration system for us foreigners in Japan, what astonishes me is how the government can secretly implement such a system for its citizens, and how little concern the media and Japanese citizens in general display about the privacy implications."
Get real. You have to register yourself at your local city office, so the authorities already know all about you. You also have to have a medical insurance ID. You also need to be registered at the tax office.
Privacy concerns in this day and age are ridiculous. You haven't any.
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You can't take the sky from me...
You're astonished that a completely different culture has different standards for privacy? The modern American conception of privacy is hardly universal, and it wasn't too long ago that things like your shopping habits couldn't be private because the people who sold to you all knew you personally.
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I AM an american, and all things aside, I don't really have a problem with a proper national ID system.
All this paranoia about IDs and numbers and such, I have to ask:
1. How many people over the age of 16 or so DON'T have a driver's license or state issued ID card? Heck, even students are getting them today in the form of school IDs. I was issued one in HS, never used it other than to get discounts at a few stores that had discounts for students. I had one for college. I have one for my job.
The problem with using the SSN is that it was never designed to be an ID. There just aren't safeguards on it. By law it WASN'T to be used for all the stuff we use it for today. We'd be better off issuing seperate ID numbers for stuff like credit reports - consisting of the two digit state abbreviation then a set of characters determined by the state. Put it on the ID card. Then, for non-face transactions, have a PIN in place to prove it's yours. To reset the PIN, you'd have to go to the appropriate office that would verify your identity.
I don't read AC A human right
Seriously people, it's the 21st century, the information age. Privacy does not exist. You WILL give your information to banks, governments, health care agencies, employers, etc. in order to function in this world. They in turn will eventually fsck up and disclose said information publicly. I'm in favor of regulations that provide recourse and stiff penalties for organizations that mishandle information. However, they won't always be enforcible and lobbyists will put in loop holes making them ineffective, that's just reality. In the information age, your identity is your face. You don't walk down the street wearing a mask, do you? No, you'd look pretty silly. Do you yell at the shop clerk to not look at your face? No, you'd be considered rude. Just shut up and get used to it. Your identity is already public. Your personal information is likely to end up public. The best thing you can do is keep up to date on your credit profile and not be an idiot about spreading your information any more than you must.
DONT PANIC
If you want to sign up to your own ID card system, fine, I have no problem with that whatsoever.
The problem is, if I don't want to sign up with your system, you get to put me in jail.
This is downright wrong and against the basic right that all human beings have to stay silent about their personal information.
Not to mention, any time in human history where ID schemes and mandatory databases have been misused they used exactly the same "what could go wrong/what have you got to hide" reasoning as they are using now.
Godwin's law be damned, how do you think the Nazi government knew where all the jews lived when they started handing out arm bands and shipping them to concentration camps?
The point isn't what today's government in today's climate will do with it. The point is that no organization should be given that much unchecked power to mandate citizens to give up their private information when it has never been proven that a government is immune to corruption and incompetence.
Governments have proven themselves untrustworthy with this level of information on the general public.
The UK government lost 28 million peoples private information LAST YEAR alone.
But the government has proven itself competent and reliable in every other aspect of its business so I guess we should trust it on this one.....
yeesh
Sources :
http://www.betanews.com/article/UK_government_loses_data_on_as_many_as_25_million_people/1195687877
http://www.news.com/U.K.-government-loses-data-on-driving-test-candidates/2100-1029_3-6223292.html
http://www.news.com/U.K.-government-loses-pensioner-data/2100-1029_3-6223493.html
that's the number on my registration card. it was issued when i registered and had my fingerprints taken in the public security office here in sao paulo.
and you know what ? IS NOT A BIG DEAL.
get over it, USians. the govt already know who you are. how many databases you're registered on ? DMV, social security, schools permanent records, with the military, and so on.
if the govt is not abusing all that info, then a national ID will be just a formality without adding any risk.
now, if they ARE using all the info they already have against the population, a new database won't make any difference. and you people should seriously start considering a revolution.
What ? Me, worry ?
My problem is that it's a single point of failure.
It's my understanding that they want to tie bank accounts, driver's license, social insurance / security (I'm Canadian), passport etc. to one single card.
If you lose this card you are completely fsck'd. And if someone wants to steal your identity all they have to do is either steal or forge your card. And before people say that forging cards is theoretically as difficult as forging a credit card I'll just point out that that's extremely little comfort. Forging credit cards is one of the most common credit card scams. All you need is an account number and the PIN and you can make a card to use in any ATM. It won't fool a person but it's not meant to. Since ATM machines can read credit cards all it needs is the magnetic stripe with the account # + PIN encoded on it. With systems designed in such a brain-dead way with a complete lack of thought put into security the idea of a real ID scares the crap out of me because idiots will be designing them and more idiots will be assuring the population that they're hack-proof.
Few, but some (I doubt many Amish have driver's licenses). But the ID card isn't the problem. It would be entirely possible for the state to issue an ID card which merely associated a name and date of birth with a photo, and had record keeping.
The problem is the ID number assigned on that card, and the tracking database to which it forms the key, and the nefarious uses to which this database can and will be put, ranging from bad cops stalking hotties to presidents tracking and harassing their political opponents.
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
The Japanese have an irrational acceptance of authority and conformism.
What's so irrational about it? They didn't always have such an acceptance. This is a country that has existed for thousands of years, the first couple thousand of which were spent in a state of near-constant civil war without any centralized government. It was only after a strong central government was formed - and further refined with our help - that they became a prosperous, peaceful country with one of the highest standards of living in the world.
Acceptance of authority and conformism has brought them peace, prosperity, high educational standards, low crime, good health and long life expectancy. They are no less "free" than we are, either. Their government does not wiretap their citizens' phone calls or endorse torture, and their taxes do not go to supporting a massive military industrial complex or a set of oil cartels. So in what way is their culture "irrational"? Especially in comparison to ours?
Accept the fact that not everybody thinks the way Americans do. We are not the center of the universe and the way we think is not the "right" way.
The big issue with ID cards isn't that you get an ID card with a serial number, your name and photograph on it. The big problem (at least in the UK), is that all the government databases will be linked together using this information; *EVERTHING* from medical records, property ownership, car ownership, travel history, current residential location, employer, purchase histories (thank you private databases).
There is enough information available for any government employee to determine when you are on holiday or away on a business trip to know when to send their mates round to burgle your home.
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The government tip-toes around in slippers regarding issues like this, instead of putting on the jackboots the way the Americans or British do.
Jukinet has been up and running for years, but the central government has been unable to force take-up, just as they cannot enforce take-up of the so-called compulsory social security or health care systems, or just as NHK cannot force people to pay the compulsory subscription. If Japan were the USA they would just put a gun to people's heads, so-to-speak, and enforce participation.
The way it has worked up to now is that individuals elect to sign up for the Jukinet smart card, and less than two percent of the population has done this. There's no actual requirement anywhere to get one, and it seems to be regarded as a slight potential convenience.
My theory is that there are are at least a couple reasons why the Japaneese government seems so ineffective in putting teeth into enforcement of compliance with such systems.
1) There is a lingering sense of respect for "rights of the individual" that remains since the various reforms after the War, and it's tied in with left wing politics. This is why it's taken 30 years to build the second runway at Narita airport.
2) Second reason is bureacratic turf wars. Jukinet is the pet project of one not-particularly-powerful ministry, and they do not have the power to enforce take-up, although they certainly did manage to get to the Supreme Court in this case (which has handed down a judgment that is rather short-sighted about privacy, given the history of privacy problems that we have seen in Japan in recent years).
In short, Japan has all the privacy problems of other developed countries (and perhaps even more so, given the ubiquitous video surveillance), but has soft spots in its central adminstration in unexpected places.
Incidentally, if it were my job to increase Jukinet card takeup, I would offer people the option of getting them in a design theme of Hello Kitty, or Snoopy, or Audrey Hepburn or something such, and then add electronic money and/or train pass functionality, slightly discounted. WHOOOOOSH, massive take-up overnight.
Their obsession with conformity has also graced them with the highest suicide rate in the world.
People miss the point of citing statistics like wealth and crime. Wealth and crime in it of themselves are worthless. Crime in particular is a silly stat to obsess over. If you want to eliminate crime, just knock everyone into a coma and keep them alive with feeding tubes. The reason why we want wealth and low crime is to bring about happiness. When your pursuit of these things fail to produce more happiness, you are failing. The real purpose of a government should be to bring about the greatest happiness for their citizens and sustain their happiness. All the wealth and low crime in the world won't make a damned bit of difference if you are so miserable you throw yourself off a bridge.
If the point of life is happiness, the Japanese fail spectacularly. The Japanese are roughly the last people in this world we should be seeking to emulate. Don't get me wrong, a lot of great things come out of Japan that I have met have been great people, but the emulation of their miserable and unhappy society ranks roughly last on my list of things to do.
You have the wrong idea of how this works.
It's my understanding that they want to tie bank accounts, driver's license, social insurance / security (I'm Canadian), passport etc. to one single card.
Right now, everything is "tied" to your name. The problem is that for many people the name isn't unique. That's why a unique number is a good idea.
If you lose this card you are completely fsck'd. And if someone wants to steal your identity all they have to do is either steal or forge your card.
Huh? An id card merely says "John Smith (23984211038) was born on 4/1/1981, is a US citizen, looks like this, has this signature, and resides here." The cards are hard to forge. Such cards aren't used to replace ATM cards or anything else. They are used when you go to the bank in person and interact with a teller, in which case they are no worse than a driver's license. In the future, these cards are going to have more biometric identifiers (in addition to face and signature), meaning that they are even harder to forge and for people to pretend that they are you.
Id cards are reasonable protection against identity theft. They are used when you need to identify yourself uniquely to another person, and for that purpose, they are a whole lot better than the alternatives (driver's licenses, birth certificates, utility bills, etc.). And if security is really important, people can require those alternative in addition.
Now, there are some civil liberties arguments that one should not be able to identify people uniquely with ease. But those arguments are the opposite of yours: you want sound identification, you simply misunderstand how id cards provide it.
Anonymity is just security via obscurity applied to people. Any IT person worth a damn knows security via obscurity is a terrible methodology; once broken, it can never be put back together, and worse, there's no way to know when it's been broken. Eventually, someone will come up with a way to correlate even the most obfuscated and separated data, and they may or may not tell you that they can do it.
Instead, rely on proven methods like encryption, legal assurances, and simple discretion about what you put in the public eye, with an expectation that public starts where your walls end. We're approaching a small-town expectation of privacy, applied globally. You can't hide from your neighbor.