1.9 Billion Digits: Brazil's Bid For Biometric Voting

MatthewVD writes "Brazil is on a massive fingerprinting spree, with the goal of collecting biometric information from each of its 190 million citizens and identifying all voters by their biological signatures by 2018. The country already has a fully electronic voting system and now officials are trying to end fraud, which was rampant after the military dictatorship ended. Dissenters complain that recounts could be impossible and this opens the door for new kinds of fraud. Imagine this happening in the U.S."

Comments

digits == fingers, not numerals

[ClickOnThis]

The article refers to digits as in those things at the ends of our hands, not numeric digits. So, the actual amount of data will be far bigger than 1.9 billion numeric digits. Nothing they can't handle, of course.

Re:GODDAMNIT

[marcosdumay]

It is because of that anonimity requirement.

Anonimity makes it impossible to make a secure (in the mathematical sense) election. The best we can do is to make the flaws hard to exploit, what is a completely diferent problem from securing an ATM.

Re:Sounds like

[alexgieg]

Several times? What are they?

When you make your National ID card you must give them (all ten fingers), as well as anytime you renew it, for any reason, be it because it was stolen, because you lost them, or because it's time to renew it, which is once every 10 years (although you usually only discover it's time to renew it when you try to open a bank account and someone tells you your ID is void). The same goes for your passport, which is valid for 5 years, although most people don't have one, so this one is optional.

Don't people refuse to give them, or or use fake fingerprint skins to defeat the system?

Nope. Brazil has no recent history of extensive persecution of minorities, so the huge majority of the population doesn't mind.

Brazil has always seemed to me like the next fascist superpower, going beyond China.

Ah, I don't think so. People here mostly don't care about anything political, at all. And the governing parties, all of them, are corrupt in a purely non-ideological way, interested solely in money above anything and everything else. This isn't the kind of scenario that leads to fascism. Besides, when we had a fascist party, way back, it was as odd in its "fascistness" as anything that happens around here. I remember reading once a text by its founder, I don't remember his name, criticizing then Nazi Germany and fascist Italy for persecuting Jews and foreigners. Go figure...