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Russia Moves To Universal ID Card
prostoalex writes "On January 1st 2012, the Russian government will start issuing universal ID cards (Russian original) that will replace current national identification system (Russia has a system of internal passports), medical insurance cards, student IDs, public transport passes, and debit cards. The smart card contains unique personal identifiers and allows for multiple levels of authentication. The Russian government is pushing for local government agencies, transportation providers, banks and retail operators to adopt the government-issued ID to streamline their operations."
In Soviet Russia, card identifies you!
The party can always find you.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This will make forging identities much easier.
Hurray, now it only takes one flawed system to destroy someones life.
will replace current national identification system... debit cards.
So it's basically one card that replaces everything? What if I want multiple debit cards from multiple banks?
I like and want to keep my multiple cards.
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
Estonia has used ID cards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_ID_card) for some time and I am seriously surprised that more governments are not following the same footsteps. While the cards may introduce new security concerns, imagine the amount of bureaucracy that can be reduced if citizens can pay everything from traffic tickets to taxes using a simple card.
it will also streamline theft operations as thieves now need to steal only one card.
Frankly I'm pretty annoyed we haven't got one of these in my country!
Were there any advantages to the Russian people of the fall of the Soviet Union? Ignore the half a dozen oligarchs whose limits on greedy and corrupt behaviour were lifted. Consider the other 141 million people.
Papers please!
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
I was just thinking that this is a privacy nightmare. However, if you make it so that each entity that needs to query the card gets its own id unique to the pair of queryer and card, instead of having one id for everything, then it can be just like having lots of different cards that just happen to inhabit the same physical space. So e.g. a hotel you check into can scan your card to know that they can track you down if you don't pay them. However, until they can show that you didn't pay, the government would not have to tell them who owns the card that was scanned. It could even be made so that you could check in twice with the same card and the hotel would get two different ids and so couldn't tell that you were the same person. Also, if the code the card gave was a once-off thing that was just generated from the card itself, the government also would not know that you checked into the hotel using your government id until the hotel comes asking for your identity because you didn't pay the bill. The same system could be used to prevent different government agencies from comparing notes on you, since they'd be working with different ids that can only be matched up if they can make a case to a judge or similar that this is necessary. That's much better privacy that you could potentially get with a card like that than you currently do with a credit card. Not that I have any illusion that this is what is happening in Russia.
You must wear the Mark of the Beast in order to buy or sell.
In Soviet Russia, er, uh... hmm.
... but if you read the title it clearly says it is an ID card, not a debit/credit payment card.
They did the same thing with international passports a while back, microchip etc. Basically 99% of the population couldn't possibly care less since most Russians are preoccupied with what they consider to be more important things.
There is a PIN to use it, of course, but there is supposed to be a "decoy" PIN, so if you are forced to enter your PIN by the bad guys, it, apparently, looks like it was successful ("buys you some time") but (in theory) alerts someone and triggers police response.
Paul B.
Frankly I'm pretty annoyed we haven't got one of these in my country!
I don't even care if my country gets one card, I just wish the branches of government would talk to each other so any change doesn't require a million calls.
When my wife and I got married it took two separate government organizations just to make the marriage official, then she had to contact six of them to let them know her name had changed. When we moved we had to update our drivers licenses, health cards, income tax info, etc.... Meanwhile half these services were in the same building.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
That's exactly what's it about. And it's not just Russia that wants this.
Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
Just y 2C, but the story looks highly suspicious. First of all, NOWHERE on the website does it say that it will replace the internal passport. Transport passes, social security as a mean of getting services, but in Russia social security number and internal passport are two very different things. Secondly, the website is, I would say, rahter suspicious. Generic Joomla, with even Joomla logos still there (footer, site icon, etc). Looks like something created in 20 mins, providing they had the text. Government structures, although slow, do not work this sloppily. So I would take the whole thing with a grain of salt :)
http://www.automatiq.se
before writing another single word, incoherent babble man
"The data is stored in the cloud, but it's under the supervision of the state, and don't worry, if you lose your card they won't lose your data!" LOL!! Yeah, data being in the "cloud" under the supervision of the state takes away ALL worry I could possibly have.
First, this is NOT an ID card (at least at first), it's just a government-mandated standard card. Second, Russia _already_ has a universal ID system - internal passports, which have nice unique ID numbers and every citizen by law must get a passport. A lot of things (bank accounts, phone numbers) are already linked to passport serial numbers, so it's not like it's hard to correlate these data.
Interestingly enough, it's not used for oppression of political opposition. Mostly because it's not of much use to know where your political opponent is.
In my opinion, ID cards are better than paper passports - they are physically smaller and easier to carry and do not fray around the edges as easily as paper documents. A major boon of ID cards should be the ease of cancellation. A stolen paper passport is a disaster, a stolen ID card should just be a nuisance.
However, though internal passports are a legacy of the USSR, they have some advantages too - they can contain more "naked-eye visible" information than a credit-card-sized ID card, like marital status, information about children, blood type, etc.
In Soviet Russia, card identifies you!
Meanwhile, back in the States: "Yes Mr. Bank Teller, that is my card. Oh, you need a second form of identification? My wife says that card is mine, too!"
All because of the fucking Patriot Act.
Id be interested to know what if any crypto they are using in the cards. Id also like to see them run through these side channel "analysis" kits I saw a very good demonstration of recently http://www.riscure.com/inspector/product-description/inspector-sca.html which includes modules for 3-DES, AES, RSA and ECC and are able to determine the secret keys or ID right off smartcards without damaging them. To my mind the writing is on the wall for smart card technology and in 5-10 years these "analysis" kits will be as small,fast,convenient and cheap as the magnetic stripe reader/writers are today.
You know, I thought it was a great idea to use up all of my mod points until I saw this. If I had a mod point, I would get you with a +1 insightful since you can shed some extra light on the id cards. Somebody else out there, please, mod parent up
The world is how you make it
.. If they are optional and opt-in. Country/federated id's can be a great tool for simplifying access to various services that you feel that you should trust. In a democracy these are typically run by the ones that you voted on as trustees. Having a unified id does simplify access to many services, as proven by many years of service in European countries. Privacy concerns are definitely warranted when using such a system. Legislation for a no-logging of association with id and obtained service (prescription, opinion, financial-info. etc..) should take care of current, and near future aspects of faced fears of universal ids.. Or..
A little more depth. There is a talk about deprecating internal passports and replacing them with ID cards, however as far as I understand this card will not yet be the national ID card.
I'm reading specifications for this card, and so far it seems that government is just mandating a single standard for micropayments and ID transmission info. Which certainly makes sense (I hate buying subway passes every time I visit Moscow).
Internal passports are interesting in themselves. They were first invented during the USSR era as means of migration control. In order to get a job each citizen of the USSR had to have a local registration ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propiska ), it's a stamp on a passport page. And to get a propiska one had to have a local job - a nice Catch-22 scenario. And living without registration in the USSR was actually a crime that could get you behind the bars. With the fall of the USSR, both of the requirements for propiska were lifted, even though the requirement for the mandatory local registration remained in place (though now punishment for living without the local registration is trivial, about $15, AFAIR).
But local registration has been transformed from a barrier into a bureaucratic nuisance (or hell). It's now a classical Brazilia situation - state can't nominally refuse you to register, but it can make it thoroughly unpleasant.
The proposed ID card will _finally_ kill off the propiska for good. As a citizen of Russia, for me it's much much much better than nebulous additional threats to privacy.
Ah that is bureaucracy working for you. Because they don't talk to each other it is that much harder for the government to get information about you.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I mean, the universe is pretty big.
US already has a national ID. It is called SSN. It's just a simple number and there is no authentication and anyone can forge it. Yet, it is used as some secret ID. You can open bank accounts and even get a mortgage just having your SSN number.
At bars and highway checkpoints, cards get peopled!
Plenty of people have studied it. The rough answer is that 40% of Russians are much much better off, and 60% of Russians are worse off financially. Overall, this amounts to a net gain, but it isn't evenly spread. Crime is higher today than it was in the Soviet Union. There is more freedom of speech today than there was before. You don't have to look very hard to find these numbers - don't take my word for it, do the research.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
Senator Edward "Teddy" Kennedy was hassled at the airports because "T Kennedy" was on one of those no-fly lists. It was the wrong Kennedy, of course, but better safe than sorry.
Don't assume that the government won't act on the basis of incomplete information. A cudgel can be as effective as a scalpel, in the wrong hands.
Do you get a separate passport for international travel? I assume the internal passport accepted for travel to some former USSR countries?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I suppose it would make the line outside the Pearly Gates move a little more quickly.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
- By passport sticking from the front shirt poket.
That was a joke few years ago. Apparently that was a russian habit due to street searches by Moscow police. National ID card is not something new to them.
There's no line at the Pearly Gates. If for no other reason than lack of customers. No matter what the guy in front of you says, that inscription above the entrance, "Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch'intrate", is not Church Latin for "Welcome to the Kingdom of God".
The problem is that you (and they) are asking the question too soon. Learning how to deal with a government that recognizes the inherent freedom of the individual is scary, and takes some time, even when the people are brave enough to go for it.
Whether they will end up better off or not is up to them.
We used to say that and know, deep inside, that we were lying. Now, there is a chance, even if it doesn't yet look very promising.
To my way of thinking, that such a question can even be asked is indication of a fundamental shift, even though the conservatives are dragging their feet and trying to bring back the old familiar ways of keeping their security back.
Security, at any rate, is an illusion, always was.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Yes, there is a separate passport for that - the one most countries know as just "the passport". We call it the "foreign passport".
debit cards, but of course we do not have nationalized banking in the states (yet) and cause of that I currently have 2 debit cards and can only imagine how that would work (they are different accounts for a reason ya know)
I know I'm making myself look a little naively retro by saying this, but just how do you define "basic needs"?
Is it reasonable for a government to refuse to recognize the fundamental freedom of the individual, when the people in power are using their own inherent freedoms to give themselves a false sense of security at the expense of the other individuals?
The present case in the US, where the government officially recognizes freedoms, but the people in power are lining their nests at the expense of the "little people" or whatever they call us, is not exactly wonderful, but will US citizens be better off if (when?) the people in power generally refuse to admit that individuals can make responsible choices?
That is the core question:
Can the people in general be allowed to act responsibly?
Is it not a basic need to be allowed to assume responsibility for oneself?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
...we will hear "Papers Please!" in Soviet Russia!
I just hope your papers are in order. It's cold in Siberia this time of the year!
if (!sig) { printf("Signature Unavailable\n"); }
Just because USians are trying to throw their freedom away in over-reaction to an act of war about ten years ago does not mean that the principles of freedom change.
On the other hand, whereas an ID card in the US is still a huge problem, relative to maintaining the freedoms recognized by the Constitution, the cultural context is different in Russia.
Single points of failure are always a weakness in a system. They are also sometimes expedient, the issue being whether they can be implemented now in a way to allow the single point of failure problems to be alleviated in the future.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
If you read the material they are providing, they are saying the right things.
That is, if such a card must exist, they seem to be saying that they will do it the right way.
In the US, no, this would be a bad idea.
In Russia, it might be an improvement. That remains to be seen, and I would hope for them to have plans for doing away with the card at some point in the future, but I can't say it would not be an improvement.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
It's not Church Latin at all, unless you're the kind of person who refers to the language I'm writing in as Late Insular Saxo-Normannic.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It's easy to talk like that when you've got a warm house and a full belly.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
that is pretty close to what they do with member ids served to 3rd parties.
Seriously folks, why all the fuss. Just get those implants and let the government take care of your every move. It's a lot less bother.
It's coming to the country where you live. You know it and despite your moaning you'll do nothing to stop it. Why not make it easy on yourself and welcome our brave new world.
But seriously, adopting such a scheme nation-wide has numerous scary aspects, starting with privacy and then branching out into security, abuse, impersonation, spoofing, data theft, management, technical implementation, cost, integrity and a host of other things I forgot. Which is why even the EU (otherwise a glutton for punishment where new, centralised, and baroque administrative systems are concerned) hasn't adopted it (yet). It takes courage to actually roll something like this out nation-wide, and to do that without a backup plan (there seems to be none) is something that senior Whitehall functionaries would probably describe as "courageous".
Lets just be glad we get to watch what happens without having to incur the cost. Russia might even make some money by patenting solutions for all the problems they're going to find. It would be no more than fair if they do, for this is valuable (and very expensive) social research they're about to conduct.
...if the government doesn't like you, all they have to do is dig into your activities to find something illegal and use that as a reason to disable your ID-card and transform you into a second-rate citizen?
I'm sure they won't do this the first ten years, or at least until everyone is used to having a chip inside their bodies, but once the chip is the only way to be part of society, they can do whatever they want. And that's scary.
why are these guys always out in front
My colleague is a bitch to travel with. He has one of the most common names in the US and is hassled entering the country every time, to the point where it usually takes him an extra day to return from abroad because of the flights he misses while being interviewed by immigration. The only explanation he's ever had: "Sir your name is really common". His question which he still hasn't asked: So my name is really common? How common is my passport number?
Just so I can travel with him without having to worry if I'm going to see him again when we get back to the US, I'd like to see an identity document that can be used to uniquely identify a person (who wants to be identified, for example for purposes of travelling abroad). Seems like a passport could/should do the job but what the hell do I know.
In Soviet Russia this thread would not have "In Soviet Russia" jokes.
I come here for the love
If so, the system is *good*. If not, it's *bad*.
Hello! This is the start of 1984, New World Order stuff. This is a BAD idea!
The Answer to 1984 is 1776!
The Truth is a Virus!!!
I'm pretty sure that the GP post had irony implied. Could you PLEASE learn to understand implication? You "fixed" the post by lowering it from an eighth-grade reading level to a fifth-grade level. It's also the mods' fault for not realizing this.
Not that there are no calls for collective response. No, those voices have not been silenced, which is just as well.
But there may be some increasing recognition that collective action or reaction, either way, begins with individual action.
Somebody (an individual) has to be the first person to move.
And somebody (an individual) has to be the next person to move.
And so on. Individuals have to believe they have responsibility to act. They have to be free to act. Government can't induce responsible action in individuals without recognizing individual responsibility, and responsibility is just freedom looked at from the other side.
Real freedom, that is.
Not context-free existence, not freedom from the effects of bad things happening. Quite the opposite, really -- the freedom to receive the consequences, good or bad, of one has done, as an individual.
Too much of the rhetoric of the collective is about fear of things happening. But that rhetoric is as false as the rhetoric about making individuals free to act without consequence. Society exists because individuals exist. Far too much talk about preventing the consequences of bad decisions by individuals and not nearly enough about helping individuals recover from the consequences of bad decisions.
And if you want to talk about preventing the bad things from happening in the first place, that's a false economy when it goes so far as to impede individual responsibility, because worse things happen. When you try to guarantee security, you prevent individuals from receiving the consequences of their laziness or bad fortune, but you also impede the consequences of their industry, and the consequence of industry happens to be what makes society run.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
It would be great to have one in Canada. Then I could a) Have my drivers permit info on it, b) Have my social security info on it, my medical number on it (If I changed Provinces, my number would not have to change), and it could serve as my debit/credit card. Hopefully the card with chip also has a place for my photo so that bill paying would go a long way to resolving issues. There would still be room for other cards, and I leave that list to you to maintain.
You forget that by linking the card to all micro-payments, you become much more trackable. So any attempt to tie people down to a place will become more trivial in the future. While propiska might not be part of the information currently stored on the card, there is nothing to prevent a future figure-head from deciding it to reintroduce it to satisfy some manufactured security concern. Once the "convenience" of micropayment card replaces cash, any one traveling without authorization will be easily tracked AND easily denied ability to purchase anything.
So? You can be tracked just as easily by your mobile phone (linked to your internal passport). Also, making a centralized database of micropayments is not a trivial task in itself.
The other argument that sometime in future some dictator might reintroduce the propiska is irrelevant, since it can work just as well with paper documents. In fact, something like this had already happened in 90-s in Moscow when Luzhkov started to enforce the rules for mandatory local registration.
You know if Apple made an app for that, you would BUY IT YOURSELF!