No More Paperwork: Estonia Edges Toward Digital Government (apnews.com)

In the Estonian capital of Tallinn, three-day-old Oskar Lunde sleeps soundly in his hospital cot, snuggled into a lime green blanket decorated with red butterflies. Across the room, his father turns on a laptop. "Now we will register our child," Andrejs Lunde says with gravity as he inserts his ID card into the card reader. His wife, Olga, looks on proudly. And just like that, Oskar is Estonia's newest citizen. No paper. No fuss. From a report: This Baltic nation of 1.3 million people is engaged in an ambitious project to make government administration completely digital to reduce bureaucracy, increase transparency and boost economic growth. As more countries shift their services online, Estonia's experiment offers a glimpse of how interacting with the state might be for future generations. Need a prescription? It's online. Need someone at City Hall? No lines there -- or even at the Department of Motor Vehicles! On the school front, parents can see whether their children's homework was done on time.

Estonia has created one platform that supports electronic authentication and digital signatures to enable paperless communications across both the private and public sectors. There are still a few things that you can't do electronically in Estonia: marry, divorce or transfer property -- and that's only because the government has decided it was important to turn up in person for some big life events. This spring, government aims to go even further. If Oskar had been born a few months later, he would have been registered automatically, with his parents receiving an email welcoming him into the nation.

Comments

Ivan brings frost piss!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is place Russians keep do the hacking, da?

Re:Ivan brings frost piss!

[Hognoxious]

No, it's that place Dilbert keeps visiting. Their economy is 100% based on mud.

Re: Ivan brings frost piss!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think most Estonians would be really offended that you're conflating them with Russians.

Re:Ivan brings frost piss!

[szabo.m.peter]

That is Elbonia.

Other than its climate, Estonia is a pretty nice place...

Re:Ivan brings frost piss!

[Hognoxious]

Their neighbours wouldn't be my first choice.

Re: Ivan brings frost piss!

[Anonymous Coward]

You clearly can't read, so what you think is irrelevant.

Re:Ivan brings frost piss!

[szabo.m.peter]

Their neighbours wouldn't be my first choice.

Except for one, I think they are okey.

Re:Ivan brings frost piss!

[arglebargle_xiv]

Across the room, his father turns on a laptop. "Now we will register our child,"

"Unt now ve register our child. Ve haff permission from ze government to haff him, provided he doess his compulsory military serviss, vhich guarantees both citizenship unt voting riiights!".

Re: Ivan brings frost piss!

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been Russians living in what is now called Estonia for over hundreds of years.

How convenient

[quonset]

When I need information it's now one-stop shopping in Estonia. All the people's information in one convenient place. No muss, no fuss, Hack once and live a lifetime.

BTW, what happens when, not if, Russia decides that uppity former republic needs to be taught a lesson? We've seen what they're trying to do in the Ukraine. Imagine a country with a population less than the city of Philadelphia being taken down when nothing works because somehow, mysteriously, large amounts of data are lost or corrupted.

What's that saying about putting all your eggs in one basket?

Re:How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

Estonia is a NATO member and an EU member and Britain and Germany have deployed forces in the Baltic nations. They are safe.

Re:How convenient

[MobaHup]

The data *isn't* kept in one convenient place. On the contrary. Each government agency only keeps data relevant to them. If they need information about, for instance, someone's company's mailing address, then they can request it -- straight from the agency that deals with this information -- over X-Road, a sort of secure intranet/SOA hub. Each agency publishes a set of SOAP services (with various access restrictions) to make use of the information they maintain, and other agencies can securely and directly access these services. Access from/by each agency is protected by standardised security servers that take care of encrypting, validating and logging the data. If a hacker gets access to, say, the local DMV, then they would only have access to DMV's information and could make some individual requests that other agencies allow DMV to make -- no more.

Re:How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

As for the attack on digital front, Russia has tried, it wasn't very effective. Besides, do things really grind to a halt when paperwork is disrupted? Not really, especially when everyone knows why paperwork is disrupted. Paperwork is important, but not to the point where you need to retain an army of paperpushers just in case something goes wrong with digital systems. If you can waste less time on red tape, it makes sense to do so.

Re:How convenient

[houghi]

Why bother with Estonia? Just go to Belgium. At least the code of the ID reader and the whole security is out in the open. Somebody even put it on Github and anybody can see if an ID is valid.

So much easier to hack if you know the source, No need to try to figure it out.

Re:How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean it's all transported over a network which is presumed to be safe, and everyone has to implement the relevant access restrictions etc on their own?

What could possibly go wrong?

Re: How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Brussels has visa restrictions against certain middle eastern countries. It seems the databases got corrupted and other countries passports and visas were affected

Re:How convenient

[Freischutz]

When I need information it's now one-stop shopping in Estonia. All the people's information in one convenient place. No muss, no fuss, Hack once and live a lifetime. BTW, what happens when, not if, Russia decides that uppity former republic needs to be taught a lesson? We've seen what they're trying to do in the Ukraine. Imagine a country with a population less than the city of Philadelphia being taken down when nothing works because somehow, mysteriously, large amounts of data are lost or corrupted. What's that saying about putting all your eggs in one basket?

Estonia is a NATO member and an EU member and Britain and Germany have deployed forces in the Baltic nations. They are safe.

Those are token forces. Unless the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian armies are able to deal with massive armour and airborne invasions and delay the Russians for a significant amount of time while NATO forces deploy to the theatre the Russians can overrun those countries in hours and judging from what I've seen in terms of training of Baltic forces by NATO that seems to be the strategy. Once the Ivans are occupying them these countries will become another frozen conflict like the E-Ukraine or those disputed territories in Georgia ... unless the Russians decides to annex Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to 'protect' the inhabitants. After that it becomes a question of whether NATO is willing to put up rather large armoured invasion force to liberate these countries. To that purpose they must first deal with a massive Russian SAM and fighter umbrella and judging from what Trump has been saying I'd be sceptical the US would ever agree to it and they'd be the ones who'd have to provide a large part of the air defence suppression assets in particular (read: cruise missiles and stealth bombers). As for the internet, I suppose the Russians would cause some damage in the event of an war, probably quite a lot, but I don't think it would be win-the-war-in-six-hours type damage and I'd also be surprised if there aren't plans to isolate Russia from the ROW internet by a button press in the event of a war.

Re: How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

Luckily actual destruction of the Balticâ(TM)s is not in the interest of either EU, US, or Russia. Baltic civilization predates most other cultures

Re:How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW, what happens when, not if, Russia decides that uppity former republic needs to be taught a lesson?

That is not how Russia does things. They have no use for the average Estonians medical records.

The way they operate in every country is that they fund a Nationalistic party with the intent to isolate the country from the rest of Europe.
The information they want is dirt on politicians, both opponents and cooperating ones.
The dirt on opponents they can leak at convenient times to advance their isolationist parties and the other stuff they can keep for blackmailing.

Re:How convenient

[MobaHup]

It's transported over regular (and/or government-only) Internet strictly over TLS with known certificates, but the reference security implementation (software as well as hardware) is provided by the government. Basically, each agency only needs to implement the services and make them available for the security server, which takes care of publishing the service, validation, encryption, logging -- all the tricky and sensitive stuff. The common security solution is of course developed and maintained by competent people. But even if case that gets hacked, then the communication relies on public key cryptography, and the private keys of the security servers themselves are generated and stored in hardware, which is never accessible from server software.

Re: How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

It is easy to predict a Russian attack. They serve the troops extra vodka for courage just before an invasion. Usually they just use diplomatic bluster

Re:How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

Estonia is a NATO member and an EU member and Britain and Germany have deployed forces in the Baltic nations. They are safe.

Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons based on security guarantees from NATO, the EU, and the US.

They are safe...

Re: How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that because USA is so much larger? Is it really that easy when you have only 1.3m citizens?

Re:How convenient

[110010001000]

Baloney. Anytime you put information on a network it can be accessed.

"The common security solution is of course developed and maintained by competent people"

Right.

Re:How convenient

[Kjella]

When I need information it's now one-stop shopping in Estonia. All the people's information in one convenient place. No muss, no fuss, Hack once and live a lifetime.

Actually the reason identity theft is such a big deal in the US is because having the information is generally sufficient. If I doxed myself here in Norway you could certainly do a lot of annoying things, but you'd find that for anything of real importance you'd either have to use an electronic signature or show up in person. Just having my person number (DOB + sex marker + unique counter), name, address etc. doesn't really get you very far. And while all my data is connected through the same unique identifier they're still kept by many different branches of government, you might say one common login gives access to everything but what happens in other nations? Surely there must be some level of standardization that DOB + SSN + whatever = ID. Unless you're going for the "the only way to win is not to play" solution by physically standing in line at a government office for everything.

Imagine a country with a population less than the city of Philadelphia being taken down when nothing works because somehow, mysteriously, large amounts of data are lost or corrupted.

Nobody's back end system is paper based anymore. Sure you might say that by exposing it over the Internet you're adding additional threats but the real high level hacks are often still an inside job or targeting the employees. We've had online banking here now for a couple decades, I've still not heard of anyone hacking their way to the core bank systems through the client, it's such an obvious way into the system that the protocol is completely locked down. It could make denial-of-service easier, but you still have to consider a power failure or an idiot with a backhoe and work on contingencies anyway. And don't forget how much else depends on the Internet these days, if it stops tons of B2C and B2B solutions won't work. It's not just the government's problem.

Re: How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are under the impression that France or Britain or anyone else will be willing to put their nations' interests in harm's way to protect the Baltic republics, you're sorely deluded. It would take Russia very little to cripple the EU economy with minimal loss of life and everyone with half a brain in Brussels knows it. France matters. Germany matters. Lithuania... Not so much.

Re:How convenient

[110010001000]

" I've still not heard of anyone hacking their way to the core bank systems through the client"

This happens all the time. You just don't hear about it.

Re:How convenient

[dunkelfalke]

There is simply zero reason to invade since the Baltic states are already in the NATO.
Ukraine and Georgia both wanted to, but cannot anymore since the NATO statutes indirectly prevent countries with unresolved territorial conflicts from joining.

Re: How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

Article 5. Russia will not risk war with NATO.

Re: How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

"Is that because USA is so much larger? Is it really that easy when you have only 1.3m citizens?"

It's easy because Estonia is one of the least religious country in the world, so there's no moronic Jesus nuts that slow every progress down.

Re:How convenient

[MobaHup]

I posted a link above regarding how it works exactly.

The point is that data isn't centralised, but kept at agencies that manage it. Different agencies offer different, secure interfaces (some more or less public, some not) to the data they do have. If one agency is hacked or DDOSed, then it doesn't affect the other agencies, or the traffic between them.

Re:How convenient

[wisse]

They have this neat idea of a digital embassy. They have got a copy of digital Estonia running in Luxembourg. When the russians do come the estonians who manage to get out of the country open their laptops somewhere else, and there are still part of digital Estonia.

Re: How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

Ukraine had no formal guarantees from either NATO or the EU. Estonia is a NATO member, so any attack on Estonia would mean war with NATO.

Re:How convenient

[szabo.m.peter]

I don't know...

Putting data on a private network, with TLS, with known certificates (i.e. no easy man-in-the-middle), and then putting further encrypted data on it with private/public encryption sounds pretty solid to me... Certainly more dependable than some corporations I've seen.

Also, AFAIK Estonia has a longer track-record of doing this, gradually adding more-and-more functionality to an existing system.

What happens in case of a wide scale denial of service is an interesting question. Probably they have thought about this. As we depend on network infrastructure more-and-mode with our economies, I think generally all countries should be prepared for such an event.

Re: How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia does not stand a chance against Western forces, unless it would be willing to use nuclear weapons, which would mean the populated parts of Russia would end up destroyed as well. Putin may be evil, but he is far from stupid. He won't risk a war with NATO.

Re: How convenient

[rogoshen1]

Judging from the response to his adventures in Georgia and the Ukraine; I think Putin knows he's squaring off with the west which is currently more Chamberlain than Churchill.

Re: How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are under the impression that France or Britain or anyone else will be willing to put their nations' interests in harm's way to protect the Baltic republics, you're sorely deluded. It would take Russia very little to cripple the EU economy with minimal loss of life and everyone with half a brain in Brussels knows it. France matters. Germany matters. Lithuania... Not so much.

Actually, the moment these countries fail to adhere to the NATO treaty of defending their allies is the moment that NATO practically ceases to exist. No one in their right mind would bet anything on it later on.

Re: How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

He doesn't need to. NATO might prevail against Russia in the long end - it took NATO months to make Serbia retreat from Kosovo - but Russian attacks would devastate the EU industrial infrastructure, which is terribly vulnerable. Western Europe would suffer a crisis of unrecoverable proportions. We can't afford this. Over Germany? Yes. Lithuania? No.

Re:How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

Your lack of understanding of basic cryptography and PKCS#11 aside, the fact that there is absolutely zero evidence of any successful mass theft of Belgian eID data serve as evidence that you are mistaken in your assumptions. Or do you want us to believe that cybercriminals entirely have missed out on this supposedely easy to steal hoard of valuabe data?

Re: How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

Russia's aging and poorly maintained equipment would be annihilated by NATO forces long before it would have any chance of damaging anything in Western Europe.

Re:How convenient

[mardu]

If a wide-scale denial of service occurs, most of your important paperwork can still be done using pen and paper. Although almost everybody uses e-services, there are still paper forms available and regulations for dealing with these. As there are hundreds of different digital government services, some of them have or have had minor issues at some point. In these cases, people just had to do it the old way, go to a government office and fill out their forms. So a DoS would be a huge inconvenience, the country would be slower than usual but would not shut down.

Re:How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, everyone only needs to implement "the tricky stuff", i.e the stuff you sure as hell don't want everyone to implement on their own.

Listen up pal, if I had a penny every time people only had to do one thing too keep things secure and didn't, I'd be rich. Which I'm not. It goes all the way back to ancient history via the Enigma to present day, there are lots and lots of theoretically fantastically secure solutions if people only. Then reality happens.

Your faith in your government and authorities are touching. However, reality again rears its ugly head. you'd be amazed how incompetent and stupid people who supposedly are in charge not infrequently turns out to be, and how much irrevocable damage they can do. Feel free to refer the Swedish scandal at their Agency of Transportation, Transportstyrelsen. Yes, it's not Estonia, but bureaucrats are the same everywhere, and fuckups of truly epic proportions are in no way neither a Swedish specialty, nor somthing that just happens there.

Re:How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this is one of the motivations Estonia had for exploring digital technology--a public, immutable store (via, e.g. merkle trees and hash calendars) makes it impossible for even a superpower to re-write history.

Re: How convenient

[mardu]

Estonia had the luck of having no legacy regulations and basically no huge legacy databases when we regained our independence after the Soviet occupation. Everything had to be built from the ground up so it was easy to use new technology and ambitious ideas.

Re:How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not so much the problem as the risks you're implicitly taking.

These are complex systems, have you thought of absolutely everything?

What happens if something truly fundamental for the system for some reason gets broken beyond all repair, like TLS suddenly turns out to be fundamentally flawed, and you're not the first one to find out?

What happens if the people in charge turns out to be utter nincompoops like the board of the Swedish Agency of Transportation, who undermine all the work to secure the information by making asinine decisions?

There are a lot of things that can go wrong with a project like this, not all of them technical, and we all know how Murphy looooves complicated stuff.

Re:How convenient

[mardu]

Of course things can go wrong. But although the news article makes it seem like it is a new thing, the "digital government" has been around for more than 15 years. Some have tried to break in, some have tried (D)DoS attacks. People working with it already have experience with it. Although this is not a guarantee against idiots in charge, it certainly makes it less likely - experiences professionals are more likely to speak up before that. I don't think anybody has though of absolutely everything but at least so far it seems that they have thought of everything necessary. If something fundamental breaks or if found to be flawed, access to the systems can just be shut off. Paper and related procedures still exist and work, people just choose to use online services. It would make it more difficult and slow the country down but you don't have to report to the government every day anyway.

Re:How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I get the "nothing has happened so far so everything is fine" non-argument. It's a fallacy.

As for the professionals speaking up, I again refer you to the Swedish Agency of Transportation, which is the most recent and well published example I can find; The professionals did indeed speak up loud and clear about this madness. They were completely ignored and overruled, by a board which somehow had reached the conclusion that they could simply make a decision that the law didn't apply to them. Yes, you read that right.

The lesson is that professionalism and knowledge isn't worth a damn in organisations where deluded people are in charge, especially not when what they are doing is so ludicrous that the people who are supposed to stop them basically don't react because they can't believe what's actually going on.

Well, it's good that you think not everything has been thought of, but do you really think

1. "we think we've thought of everything we at the moment thought necessary is good enough?
2. Are you prepared to be bitten in the ass by what you, or they, didn't think of?
3. Do you have any concept of how bad of a bite it would be?

That's what worries me every time I see this "now we are going to network and digitize everything". Because usually the answer is a) "Yes", b) "No", and c) "Not a clue, don't care", which usually turns out to mean that there are critical flaws in the system, which not only someone has to fix, usually under great pressure, but also with irrevocable and even dangerous consequences.

Going back to the Swedish example, it potentially exposed people working for the government with protected identities. There is a good chance some of them might get killed because of this breach. You think you can recruit people if the best you can offer them is "we think we won't leak your identity to the opposition"? And however cynical it might sound, that's just something that might affect a small part of the state; what's proposed here is, if I get the right impression, something much more ambitious.

Murphy says it's going to leak like a sieve, whether you know it or not.

Re:How convenient

[szabo.m.peter]

I think you are right in that having paper based processes is harder to disrupt. My point, is that there are hardly any "pure" paper based processes left (1), and that the economy (outside of government) depends on information processing systems anyway (2).

Short unavailability of government services is acceptable (as the benchmark paper processes rarely give real-time results anyway.) A sustained DoS on the other hand will harm the operation of the government also in the current case, as most of the time the information I provide on forms ends up in a government database already... The paperwork is mostly just an "input/output queue". As the queues fill up, the machine will halt.

Re:How convenient

[GNious]

Why bother with Estonia? Just go to Belgium.

As someone from a 3rd country, living in Belgium and very familiar with Estonia: No

Stay the fuck away from Belgium, it's a hostile little shithole of a country, you're better off pretty much everywhere else, and especially better off in Estonia

Re: How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

Article 5a. Unless a Putin Puppet dissolves NATO first before being indicted for collusion.

Re:How convenient

[Kjella]

This happens all the time. You just don't hear about it.

No it doesn't. That they compromise individual accounts, sure. That they compromise the bank itself via phishing or hacking yes. But those attacks pretty much never go through the front door, like you go to their public web server and run an exploit.

Re: How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

On american poorly-written technothrillers maybe. Reality says NATO made a very poor show in Serbia and was defeated in Afghanistan and Iraq. Europeans are not willing to bet their well-being on the laughable mental masturbations of armchair generals. Go back to your Call of Duty games, kid.

Re:How convenient

[Kjella]

Those are token forces. Unless the Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian armies are able to deal with massive armour and airborne invasions and delay the Russians for a significant amount of time while NATO forces deploy to the theatre the Russians can overrun those countries in hours and judging from what I've seen in terms of training of Baltic forces by NATO that seems to be the strategy.

They're token forces in military terms, but not in political terms. Pretty much all the front line troops are there to escalate it to a proper war and invoke Article 5, there's no country in Europe that can defeat Russia alone. And while the US might drag their feet on becoming involved in another overseas war no country in Europe is going to let Russia go on a Hitler-like series of annexations. They can take the Baltics, but then WW3 has begun.

Re:How convenient

[AHuxley]

Re 'Those are token forces."
Thats all NATO needs as part of its eastward expansion to drag the rest of NATO into action.

Re:How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

When are we finally going to grow up?
If there are still people that would want to explode with some bombs. It is technically possible to explode with some atomic bombs. And crack the planet in pieces.
Please, people, let's grow up.
There is a lot of work for us all to do.

Re:How convenient

[Anonymous Coward]

What is your fixation with Russia? They are weak, poor and feeble. They have the economic output of Spain, a fraction of the military power of the USA or any significant NATO member and the country is predominantly empty with a scattering of piss-poor farmers.
Where is this giant threat? What is their track record compared tot the USA? How many wars started by the USA v Russia?

You are dillusional and should stop drinking the Neocon's kool-aid.

Re:How convenient

[houghi]

If you are a hacker and need to go to the country itself, you are doing it wrong. Just stay wherever you are and hack the planet. HACK TEH PLANAT!!11!11

Re:How convenient

[dinfinity]

And while the US might drag their feet on becoming involved in another overseas war no country in Europe is going to let Russia go on a Hitler-like series of annexations. They can take the Baltics, but then WW3 has begun.

I dunno, man. Europeans have gotten quite nationalistic and selfish of late. I know many of my fellow countrymen don't give a rat's ass about pretty much the entirety of Southern Europe, let alone the Balkans or the Baltic states. They see them as freeloading countries whose inhabitants only 'steal our jobs'. They refer to the EU as the EUSSR and would all rather retreat onto the island they regard their country to be.

Remember that one of the major reasons why Hitler could get so far as he did was that nobody wanted to get involved (with WWI fresh in the minds of their citizens). I have family in Estonia, so I dearly hope that Europe and NATO will stand strong as they should. I wish I could be as sure of that as I want to be, though.

Foolish

[Anonymous Coward]

You put everything on the Internet, you open it to an attacking nation:
https://www.bbc.com/news/39655415

"Online services of Estonian banks, media outlets and government bodies were taken down by unprecedented levels of internet traffic."

"Massive waves of spam were sent by botnets and huge amounts of automated online requests swamped servers."

"The result for Estonians citizens was that cash machines and online banking services were sporadically out of action; government employees were unable to communicate with each other on email; and newspapers and broadcasters suddenly found they couldn't deliver the news. "

"The 2007 attacks came from Russian IP addresses, online instructions were in the Russian language and Estonian appeals to Moscow for help were ignored. "

Russia is a rogue nation at this point, and people like Rand Paul, and Devin Nunes should not put their political careers above their country.

It's to save on personnel costs

[Anonymous Coward]

In France they're doing more of these things. I don't see what's so great, computers haven't changed that much in the last 15 years. Smart cards are 30-year-old technology. People will have to use this crap on their own with Windows 7 computer that fail to download security updates and Android 4.2 phones.
Government / social security sites have me connect to google lately. They're showing a youtube video! I don't know is Estonia avoids doing this, but here a government site loads third party assets and code from a foreign entity. So, you have to turn an old desktop into a hardware firewall/proxy to block shit. That's too complicated.

no more posting /. leaps into censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

ruth+mercy=justice

cease fire stand down.. conspire to occupy the truth. no heart no spirit no life. grow more trees & bees based food/packaging? help us escape 'recycling' asphyxiation etc.. components. some of us old people remember the real weather? the air/water was clearer, the seasons more distinct. we didn't have to wipe the crud off our glasses/eyes every few minutes. giant earthquakes/storms were quite rare. morgellons was just a rumour from yet another old wmd on credit greed fear ego based war.. the lights are coming up once again all over now.. don't miss it.. like an audition for breathing or star gazing & hand waving, it's not that difficult. as the spirit moves us..

next; /. deleting unfavored posts again? + is the market for missing hymen replacement (revirginization?) surgery all it's cracked up to be? + are the test tube/lab rat mutant monkeys really created from/in our own image?

Re: no more posting /. leaps into censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

I do in fact remember the weather quite well. And you are right: it was fabulous was it not? I would also like to propose a corollary to Godwinâ(TM)s law that involves the word morgeons, something like every slashdot thread will eventually end in someone talking about morgelloms. I still want to know what happens when the Estonian government goes over its plan. Is the government automatically given more space by the cloud provider?

ruth + truth

[Anonymous Coward]

i meant?

Lies, damn lies, government propaganda

[Anonymous Coward]

"Going digital" actually makes it even simpler to bother people with more and more complex rules. "For lookie here, we made you a webform!" Yeah, but that's not where the problem is.

I think it's swell and dandy if you pull out all the stops to improve your own organisation. But don't bother me with it. Go digital on the inside, but give your citizens a choice. They should be able to get anything done from the government, like anyone else, regardless of whether they do it "digitally" or not. Fully automated on the citizen's end would be nice, sure*. A hand-written letter ought to suffice, at need. If you can't support that, then you're doing it wrong.

So far, basically all "government go digital, hurr durr"-initiatives have been lots of make believe "look we have a website, we're digital nao!" and that just isn't enough. It isn't even the right end to start with. Maybe Estonia can get it right, despite their obvious eagerness to chase "digital" for its own sake. We'll see.

* That means that the shtick you so often see of "we made you a website that you now must use" doesn't remotely start being enough.

Re:Lies, damn lies, government propaganda

[mermeid007]

In DC, since they have no local government to speak of, they often have to choose between automating part of a process for some tangible improvement and changing nothing. Of course, they also have such a small population that in the past they simply did away with any paperwork or services that were not needed. I think various agencies would complain when they didn't get the data they needed, and this really is what drove their decisions on automation. A pull not a push.

Orwell had the top of the line Tardis.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really. Fuck.

Registering your child

[110010001000]

"The Mother looked on proudly as the Father inserted the chip under his newborns skin. After enabling the connection to the laptop, the programming of the child started. Within 10 minutes, the child was fully programmed and was now a full Estonian citizen. On his 17th birthday he would be eligible for ration level B and military service."

Truly a glorious accomplishment.

Re:Registering your child

[Anonymous Coward]

Estonian compulsory military service is at age 18, not 17.

Re:Registering your child

[cascadingstylesheet]

"The Mother looked on proudly as the Father inserted the chip under his newborns skin. After enabling the connection to the laptop, the programming of the child started. Within 10 minutes, the child was fully programmed and was now a full Estonian citizen. On his 17th birthday he would be eligible for ration level B and military service."

Truly a glorious accomplishment.

Meh.

What they are actually doing - as opposed to your dystopian fantasy - is an electronic version of birth certificates and ID cards that is nothing really new, just a new implementation.

It carries its own risks (and benefits), sure, but is nothing like what you are describing.

Do you object to birth certificates and ID cards in general? (Perhaps you do, some do.)

We're all still in the steam age ...

[Qbertino]

... compared to Estonia. What they're doing in terms of digital government is groundbreaking and has been going on for a few years now. All digital zero-fuss bureaucracy. Very nice and an example I'd wish some German authorities would follow more eagerly.

Re: We're all still in the steam age ...

[madsh]

Well.... I think a lot of the ground has been broken somewhere else :-) Denmark is a bit more sutle on the PR but we sure have the same level of digital services ... and might be a few steps ahead here and there

Re:We're all still in the steam age ...

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I don't find the current system at all onerous. Hence, I'm happy to avoid the probable issues behind what Estonia is doing. For instance, I don't particularly want the government to have my fingerprints on file.

Re:We're all still in the steam age ...

[szabo.m.peter]

Well, when I get a passport my fingerprint is taken (-->my government has it). I am pretty sure other countries also have "biometric" passports already as it seems to be the norm nowdays.

Then, I travel to the US, where my fingerprint AND my retina-scan is taken (--> the US has it)

Then, I use a smartphone (--> who knows who has my fingerprint & retina data).

Then, I log in to my laptop with a finger swipe (--> only god knows who has that data)

I think we are all way past the point where our biometric data is not shared with governments, businesses, or the neighbor's cat. When you try to avoid the "possible issues", you are already having all the possible bad consequences while missing out on the good ones.

Governance is the bottleneck

[wisse]

It sounds really simple: all information in one place, you own your own information (including your health information). And techniscally it *is* simple. But the governance can be made so complicated that no other country has pulled this off yet. Getting all your national institutes to work together on one digital government is no small feat.

Re: Governance is the bottleneck

[madsh]

And the problem scale exponential with population size.... Estonia is about 1.5 million people

Re:Governance is the bottleneck

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds really simple: all information in one place, you own your own information (including your health information). And techniscally it *is* simple. But the governance can be made so complicated that no other country has pulled this off yet.

Dunno about that "no other country".... In Finland we have it pretty nicely covered as well. Everything with government is digital, including taxes, transport agency (i.e. driver's license), building permits, population registry with online access for editing one's information there, etc, etc...

It is about the same as with banks, it has been 10+ years since last time visiting a bank or a government office. Last time was in 2008 due to having a notary to confirm the transfer own a property (my house+some land) after the purchase. And even that process was digitized back in 2013.

Re:First post from Tallinn, Estonia

[Applehu Akbar]

...and thumbs down on where this country is going.

In a backward and paper-based country, a cyberattack that disables things properly will hurt. Over here, it will cripple.

But at the same time, online access to government offices is a huge time saver. When people get it, they don't want to go back, any more than we would want to go back to having to schedule a library visit to look up any kind of reference information.

We can't avoid having to fix the online security problem.

Soon on Slashdot...

[grumpy-cowboy]

Estonia government servers have been hacked and ALL citizen's private information is available online.

Re:Soon on Slashdot...

[mardu]

No centralized data storage (each government body manages their own databases), so pretty much impossible to read about ALL private information being publicly available. Some, possible, but not ALL. Also, not much to do with this information as in Estonia you cannot steal someone's identity just by knowing some data about them. Identity codes (the closest thing to an SSN here) are public information and basically nobody validates identities without a valid ID card or passport (or another equivalent document). Maybe the most delicate piece of information could be medical records but... this digital service does not properly work because the doctors are too lazy to fill the forms (althought mandatory by law).

Estonia's System Is Unique and Interesting

[organgtool]

There are a lot of comments here talking about hacking government servers and getting everyone's data. This is based on a misunderstanding of the Estonian digital record system. I've read several articles about it and if I understand it correctly, the system is more of an authentication system and records interface. Your data isn't stored on a single set of government servers - instead, public and private entities store their information about you on their own servers and are required to use the government's digital authentication system for access. The records are required to have access control layers so that citizens can control which people have access to their records. I believe there is also a required interface for presenting history data so that a citizen can see all attempted access to their records. It's a very interesting and pragmatic approach and it'll be something that people should watch closely and learn from.

Re:Estonia's System Is Unique and Interesting

[Danielsen]

His father turns on a laptop. "Now we will register our child,".

Pretty standard.. But why do the parents need to register..
In Denmark the mother is registered during prenatal care, and she also informs the social security number of the expected father.
One of my colleagues girlfriend gave birth to there baby a Sunday night, and they were unmarried.
The midwife registers the childbirth.
One hour later the father got a message from the 'stats amt' where the had to sign for the paternity.

Re:Estonia's System Is Unique and Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

If you'd read the entire summary, you'd see they were moving to a system like this very soon.

Re:Estonia's System Is Unique and Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

... citizens can control which people have access ...

Hey USA, say again, "Capitalism will provide": Cause, I'm not feeling it.

Re: Conspiracy angle

[del_diablo]

Could you reference anything? Like, i get the white hat angle where you hack the core and add a pop up.
But the way i understood it, as its presented in the media is that your goal as a hacker is to acquire unique information(i.e bank account number+ persona) and then you need a hack to get past the 2 factor authentication. And as the experts know, they are not that secure even if its unique password + offline key generator device
Once that is done, the goal is then to empty bank account as far as possible. Which means to 0, or to whatever the credit limitation is.
And thats a fairly common occurrence due phising and false webpages, among other things.

But the bank angle?
I am not even sure what secure measures there are. Transfer taking a word day might be one of them, for secure addresses. But i don't know any other security measures.
I guess i would love to get a idea of the tech level, and the obscurity vs security level.

Bio-chip

[p51d007]

Might as well have them implant a bio-chip in your skin. THAT would be the logical next step. No muss, no fuss, NO PRIVACY.

Re:First post from Tallinn, Estonia

[zlives]

move along non-citizen, we have no record of you

First Shithole Country To Erase Citizens

[Anonymous Coward]

Watch this space in 6 months for more details.

when did the Taliban start reading Slashdot?

[Anonymous Coward]

nomsg.

Back to your goat herds, everyone.

It's Like Spike and Chester

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course. Big Giant Orange Head has a serious case of Dictator Envy when it comes to Count Vlad Putinator.

"Hey Spike, how about we chase cars, huh? Does that sound like fun?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAgfPHP1w0I

Poor Estonia

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel bad for the tiny Baltic country. First they got all but destroyed during the Cold War, with Russia importing settlers to eventually replace the locals. Now they are the favor target of NWO psi-ops, testing out their cool new authoritarian control systems and multi-kulti shenanigans.

Eestonians are always slow

[Anonymous Coward]

Believe or not, Russia has the Electrinic Government portal for years now. Everyone is using it, very powerful stuff.

Nothing will ever boost any booms in Baltian states. Which fell into the Hopeless mid-income country trap. For Americans, they are fine without any electronic government staff, still using cheques. For Germans, its all over the Fax machine. No sane German or American is going to a dull hopeless place like Estonia for any sort of web portal.

Sorry but that's the reality.

how cute

[Anonymous Coward]

cia agents since birth, imagine that