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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."
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.
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.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I live in Finland and this doesn't surprise me at all...
When it comes to IT, we're all talk and no action :(
What a clueless post! I too live in Finland and we have made many pioneering internet inventions like
* The Linux kernel
* A web browser before web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwise
* Secure Shell protocol or SSH
* Internet Relay Chat
etc
/me wonders what those hoops would be?
I have a driver's license, a passport, and a Global Entry ID. Nothing about getting them was onerous. I didn't even have to bribe anyone.
What is "is," and why is it based on national electronic ID cards? I think it (is) should be "it" instead of "is."
Well, then, I'll help you.
PLEASE US Feds and State leaders, pass by this idea, don't dwell on it and for God's sake, don't try to implement it.
We can't even get a fucking website working...please don't fuck with a National ID...we'll all be screwed.
It won't work here....just tell us a tax amount, and leave us alone!!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Erwise: Started March 1992, Released April, 1992
WorldWideWeb: Proposed in 1989, Started late 1990, Released August 1991
I don't think "before" means what you think it means, but I'll accept the other three.
Also, many daily services like online banking, are premium quality. Actually, I dare to say that if you hire Finns to make any kind of web service, the general quality is usually quite good.
Invention and adoption are two totally different animals. There are plenty of examples where inferior technologies succeed or superior technologies fail.
In this case, it sounds like the original technology was good, but for it to be useful, it needs an implementation in a larger framework. Just like the best tires in the world aren't all that useful without an appropriate vehicle to mount them on.
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.
You know that the "tell us a tax amount" is a thing that other countries can do because of unified national identity databases, right? In some places, you don't have to "do your taxes". The government just sends you a bill for what they didn't take out over the year.
IRC: 1988
Linux: 1991
Erwise: 1992
SSH: 1995
But what has the next generation done?
No, it's because their tax code isn't so bloated and screwed up as ours. Printed on 8.5x11, the US tax code is 74,000 pages long (well, actually 73,954).
The fact that the IRS can come knocking on your door and send you fines for not filing your taxes is pretty clear that they don't need a cross-agency centralized national identity database to do so.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
But then, you aren't even able to close a HTML tag.
You know, I was about to add a reply to the person you replied to, but then I read your post and it could not be more spot on!!
The person above you was apparently only talking about personal tax too, for a country. It's a different story here in the US as that you also have state and sometimes city taxation to deal with too, and if you're a business owner, or working 1099 contracting, well...a whole new kettle of fish there.
No, a national ID wouldn't help this at all. Currently the answer is, if you have tax requirements above the 1099 EZ form for the Feds, just is best to hire a CPA and let them deal with it.
I certainly do wish we had an easier, more straightforward system, some sort of flat tax or national sales tax. But that would relieve the Feds of too much power and hence, we'll likely never get there.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
What a clueless post! I too live in Finland and we have made many pioneering internet inventions like
We have a proverb that could be roughly translated as "you can't become a prophet at home".
Also, Erwise post-dates the WWW. Did you notice how nonsensical your clam is? That's like saying "we've invented alphabet even before human speech appeared". Think twice next time.
Ezekiel 23:20
Angry Birds.
I know driver's license and passport, but WTF is a Global Entry ID?
Never heard of that in the US before....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Getting an ID is only a problem if you don't want to be ID'd. For example if you're an election official and want to vote a half dozen or so times you wouldn't want to show an ID card.
Is is....is is? is is! is is is
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
Maybe Estonia should join Finland. Or vice versa
X-road is not also much a website per se but an background infrastructure to exchange data from different (state and private) databases and websites.
I don't know in what way this is finnish invention, AFAIK it was entirely developed in Estonia from the start. Maybe the idea as such originated in Finland. And p.s. - its open source.
The post mentions Finland's contribution was the national ID card system.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
National id card system maybe originated from Finland. But X-road is more for server to server communication infrastructure, so its a bit different thing. And that is local. Id card is just one way of authenticating users.
The government just sends you a bill for what they didn't take out over the year.
Dont know about you, but I'd rather the government sends me a cheque for the amount they weren't meant to take (seeing as tax contributions by pay period in Australia are controlled by your employer's accounting system, not the govt, its the market doing it). But seriously, in June would you rather get a cheque or a bill. If you opt for a bill, I suggest you seek mental help.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
It's basically your fast track through customs. Why it can't be added as an endorsement on your passport is a mystery, but... US. So I guess it makes sense when you put it that way.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".