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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."
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.
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!"
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
One Card to rule them all, One Party to find them, One System to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
(Apologies to JRRT)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Double sided tape. Forehead. Problem solved.
which is totally what she said
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.
That post was a whole lot of appeal to emotion (ignored) plus half a dozen examples (quoted below) of corruption and incompetence which are nothing to do with communism and everything to do with typical behaviour of humans in power.
a year's supply of anti-magnetic paint is used up whitewashing rocks because an admiral wants an improved-looking coastline; thousands of tons of chemical fertilizer are dumped into the Volga River (creating an environmental catastrophe) because the Party didn't make adequate preparations to store it; military exercises are run which leave the country defenseless; soldiers are sentenced to barbarous punishments for the slightest infractions; generals keep private harems and use military resources to construct fabulous dachas; incompetent drunks are promoted to important posts simply to get rid of them.
So, is your argument that similar inefficiencies and corruptions cannot be found in Western governments and corporations? Or what exactly are you trying to say?
Note that I didn't say "Soviet communism was great; capitalism sucks!" I asked whether the people of Russia are any better off now than before the Soviet Union. I've asked it lots of times to many people. I've heard lots of "yeah it's much better!" from those who have prospered financially, and lots of "no it sucks!" from those who have lost various securities. I've never been provided with a well-researched answer which tries to make an objective study of the change in quality of life throughout the country. Surely someone, somewhere has been interested in answering the question from a sociological/psychological/anthropological point of view rather than taking the opportunity to start a political rant.
To be honest, there is no country that I know of where identity theft is a problem as big as it is in the US. I have a national ID card here in Poland, and you know what? It's a HUGE bitch to fake, I suspect it would be easier to steal my identity by faking my passport and driver's license. That still wouldn't do you much good, since I could have any of those three documents invalidated - when you sign any sort of contract here, you put down both your ID/Tax number and your ID number. The corporate equivalent of identity theft is much more prevalent over here.
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.
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.
I mean, the universe is pretty big.
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.
Suvorov is a notorious defector who has a massive axe to grind. I would not take his words at their face value without a boulder-sized grain of salt.
I've talked to a few ex-USSR folks at work. They say for most people life was better back then. Social safety net was stronger, there was certainty in the future, there was industry (yes, including the massive military-industrial complex), people were generally paid well, science and engineering were strong, and there was no shortage of work. In fact by law you could end up in jail for _not_ working, but the law in question was rarely applied. You basically could say, with high probability, how your life would play out. I.e. finish high school, go to the university, become engineer or a scientist, get employment, get paid 150 rubles a month as a start (+yearly bonus), get in line for government subsidized housing, eventually get an apartment, buy a crappy Soviet car, work until you're 60 years old, retire.
Sure, the opportunity to get rich wasn't there, and sure you couldn't buy much in the way of western stuff (except for perhaps jeans), but realistically, only a small percentage of people become really rich, and they weren't into "stuff" back then anyway. Many compare USSR to North Korea, but really, there's no basis for such comparison. There was no "dear leader", no cult of personality and no famine (not since the 30's anyway, but then again the US was pretty shitty in the 30's as well).
Compare it to now: Moscow is really prosperous, and the rest of the country can barely make the ends meet. Those in power steal astronomical sums of taxpayer money (remember the old apparatchiks didn't need to steal, they were set for life by the government) with impunity. Corruption is horrifying, everything is bought and sold, and in some cases you don't even need to pay - just get the right guy to make a phone call. Government pensions to the retirees are laughable and impossible to live on. Oligarchs illegally privatized people's property (through rigged auctions etc) for pennies on the dollar, and now exploit those same people, paying them barely enough to buy food. Infrastructure is crumbling. And so on and so forth.
In other words, it's pretty bad there right now. But on the other hand, the folks at least have an opportunity to leave, which wasn't the case before.