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Estonia Sharing Its Finnish-Made E-Government Solution With Finland
paavo512 writes "For the last decade or so, Estonia has developed a national electronic data exchange layer called X-Road. Is is based on national electronic ID cards and allows creation of common electronic services like founding a company, declaring taxes or e-voting. Every day, over 800,000 enquiries are made via X-Road (the population of Estonia is 1.3M). According to the PM of Estonia, the solution is saving 2% of national GDP annually. The Estonian ID card technology was originally imported from Finland; however, it appears Finns have for 10 years failed to come up with any significant e-services making use of them. So it is now agreed that Estonian X-Road solution will be expanding to Finland as well."
but then i didn't know what to say.
Just use SOAP over HTTPS - that's what X-Road basically is.
I live in Finland and this doesn't surprise me at all...
When it comes to IT, we're all talk and no action :(
How much did X-Road cost to develop, and how long did it take? Maybe the US government could learn something about creating websites that work for a reasonable price.
how does this work on days when it isn't working? All service "access" cards are inherently also service denial systems if you don't have a card or the access system is down. Is their a fail over system available to every service access point?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Usually, governments trying to automate such things, find out it is more expensive, in stead of a money saver. Support and maintenance are always more expensive than budgeted, because a realistic budget would prevent the project from being started, hence losing prestige. In the Netherlands, government IT projects fail as a rule, by costing at least several times the budget, taking several times the planned time to create, and never being able to perform to specifications. By the time the project is so far finished that is no longer useless, the laws have been changed and the project is still useless. I hope Finland is careful and reluctant in the adoption this X-road thing, and applies a realistic view on the matter.
We can't even issue ID's to our citizens without making them go through more hoops than a Dolphin at Seaworld.
These sorts of cards are very cool. However, they are unfortunately usually implemented badly and/or become a haven for people to rip each other off.
Wow, this is what happens when you let technology work for you, instead of listening to all the critics and complainers.
Wow, if we could save 2% of GDP, that's £40B, which is our entire education budget.
Perhaps the next iteration of healthcare.gov could be outsourced there. Just a thought.
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What is "is," and why is it based on national electronic ID cards? I think it (is) should be "it" instead of "is."
So this is not surprising.
... is wrong. The e-government software solution we're sharing is Estonian made. The original ID-card concept that the software is using was borrowed from Finland.
What I've understood it's a middleware which routes (service registration, queuing) messages between services.
While this does not sound like rocket science, apparently it has allowed them not to pursue commitee made generic interfaces between services (see HL7 crap). The amount of money that is spent on HL7 fiddling around the globe per year must amount to a small nations yearly budget (citation needed, I only know of the Finnish amounts).
Instead of design-by-committee they probably have been able to "use interfaces that seem to work" and even add some nifty features like a citizen being able to log in and see which goverment workers (like healtcare professionals) have accessed the citizens records. I don't know how much the auditing really covers but imagine if your country had such capabilities, wouldn't that sound nice, something along the lines "wow they really have a working system"?
Though, could be I'm 100% wrong and Estonians just have a lot more efficient committees regarding the interfaces. All in all, their e-goverment services sound very advanced.
The US system is certainly better, with 50 different ID cards for driving, which can also be used to board an airplane, or vote (thanks anti-fraud voter suppression bullshit) and different identifiers for retirement benefits, and different identifiers for health insurance
Why have one identity? It could be used to identify you!
Sigh. The reason the US doesn't have a real government is that the citizens don't want to have a real government. Can't have the govt identifying and tracking you. Even though it's pretty trivial to do that anyway
We could make so many complicated transactions simpler by having a real ID. All for the greater good. But the fools who think they're anonymous and getting away with something, or might someday want to get away with something, or don't want to be marked with the number of the beast (Jove help us) are standing in the way. If "they" want to find you, "they" will and the only reason anyone gets away with anything is they haven't bothered looking for you yet
Kudos for staying under budget, Estonia. But let's look at what we have here. An easy-to-use, ubiquitous identity solution that's easily integrated everywhere?
Sounds cool, right? But only if you trust your government, and every government thereafter. With small countries (Estonia, Iceland) this is much easier than with bigger countries. And I'm not even talking Russia or the US, but, say, the supposedly benign and enlightened folks in the UK. First there was the anti-child porn filter, that wasn't to be used for anything else, honest. Then there's that every internet connection is now to be filtered by default for the children's well-being and safety from porn; you have to ring up and admit you're a pervert and prove your identity to "opt-in to porn" (notice dishonest wordgame tactic, that "opt-in" is in the law itself). Let's take the logging and snooping by GCHQ on behalf of the NSA as a given and move on. For next up: The rightsholders mafia have figured out that a few simple lawsuits can make ISPs filter their client's internet connections on their behalf, too.
This sort of thing would be that much easier with an electronic identity card. Staying with the example, the UK already had identity cards, due to world war two, and only got rid of them in the fifties. During that time, the number of "functions" associated with the card rose from three (3) to thirty-five (35). That's quite a bit of function creep, well before the computer became mainstream.
There are many more examples. A canonical example would be the 100 flowers campaign. But now with the internet and ubiquitous electronic surveillance and handy dandy electronic identity cards attached. I don't think I want to live in such a country.
"It could never happen here" is not a valid excuse, even if you can prove that to be true in all cases in your country. So simply rolling out electronic identity cards is not something I want to happen. Exactly because they're so easy to use, they are a direct threat to my privacy.
The fix, by the by, is not to make them hard to use. It's to figure out how to make zero-knowledge identification work, to support multiple identities in a sensible way, and so on. Because we do need electronic identities, but the standard translation of one state issued identity per person is no longer good enough. Hasn't been for a while. Just count the number of times you've used a throwaway email address.
So if Estonia wants to keep on being a leader in this field, they will have to learn how to do this.
Is is....is is? is is! is is is
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What are the factors that have prevented Finland from successfully implementing up until now? Merely coming from Estonia may not be enough even counting 10 years of additional development.
I'm thinking there may be political, cultural or economic issues blocking Finnish deployment.