Japan IDs All Its Citizens 382
Edis Krad writes "While RealID in the US is a threat whose implementation is a ways in the future, the Japanese long ago implemented something similar; and there has been very little complaint raised about it. The Juki Net (Residents Registration Network — link in Japanese) has been silently developing since 1992. The system involves an 11-digit unique number to identify every citizen in Japan, and the data stored against that ID covers name, address, date of birth, and gender. Many Japanese citizens seem to be oblivious that such a government-run network exists. Juki Net had a spotlight shone on it recently because a number of citizens around the country sued against it, citing concerns of information misuse or leakage. And while an Osaka court ruled against the system, the Japanese Supreme Court has just ruled it is not unconstitutional, on the grounds that the data will be used in a bona-fide manner and there's no risk of leakage. While there is a longstanding registration system for us foreigners in Japan, what astonishes me is how the government can secretly implement such a system for its citizens, and how little concern the media and Japanese citizens in general display about the privacy implications."
Oh noes! An 11-digit number! (Score:5, Insightful)
Privacy concerns in this day and age are ridiculous. You haven't any.
Fighting the tide only works when you're on the shore. When you're at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, there isn't very much you can do.
Japanese value obedience above all else (Score:-1, Insightful)
Re:Japan != USA/Europe (Score:4, Insightful)
Different cultures, different standards (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:To what extent is privacy cultural? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think its summed up well in the saying about Benito Mussolini -- "At least he made the trains run on time!"
Re:Is it that much of a deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
All this paranoia about IDs and numbers and such, I have to ask:
1. How many people over the age of 16 or so DON'T have a driver's license or state issued ID card? Heck, even students are getting them today in the form of school IDs. I was issued one in HS, never used it other than to get discounts at a few stores that had discounts for students. I had one for college. I have one for my job.
The problem with using the SSN is that it was never designed to be an ID. There just aren't safeguards on it. By law it WASN'T to be used for all the stuff we use it for today. We'd be better off issuing seperate ID numbers for stuff like credit reports - consisting of the two digit state abbreviation then a set of characters determined by the state. Put it on the ID card. Then, for non-face transactions, have a PIN in place to prove it's yours. To reset the PIN, you'd have to go to the appropriate office that would verify your identity.
privacy? welcome to the information age (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is it that much of a deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Hehe, I didn't even want to go down in that level of detail... The nnn at the end of my number (which is oddly enough the phone code of my country) indicates the sex too. In the pattern xyx, is the y is odd, you're male, otherwhise you're female. All these numbers are indeed assigned at birth (in order of birth, AFAIK). On top of that, all people that work in my country also get one. After all, they pay their social security here.
I know quite a lot of details on that number in my country. I was involved in implementing a datanbase that stored medical information about people that had biopsies that were checked for cancer.
Here's the real issue. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is, if I don't want to sign up with your system, you get to put me in jail.
This is downright wrong and against the basic right that all human beings have to stay silent about their personal information.
Not to mention, any time in human history where ID schemes and mandatory databases have been misused they used exactly the same "what could go wrong/what have you got to hide" reasoning as they are using now.
Godwin's law be damned, how do you think the Nazi government knew where all the jews lived when they started handing out arm bands and shipping them to concentration camps?
The point isn't what today's government in today's climate will do with it. The point is that no organization should be given that much unchecked power to mandate citizens to give up their private information when it has never been proven that a government is immune to corruption and incompetence.
Governments have proven themselves untrustworthy with this level of information on the general public.
The UK government lost 28 million peoples private information LAST YEAR alone.
But the government has proven itself competent and reliable in every other aspect of its business so I guess we should trust it on this one.....
yeesh
Sources :
http://www.betanews.com/article/UK_government_loses_data_on_as_many_as_25_million_people/1195687877 [betanews.com]
http://www.news.com/U.K.-government-loses-data-on-driving-test-candidates/2100-1029_3-6223292.html [news.com]
http://www.news.com/U.K.-government-loses-pensioner-data/2100-1029_3-6223493.html [news.com]
39.296.090-4 (Score:4, Insightful)
and you know what ? IS NOT A BIG DEAL.
get over it, USians. the govt already know who you are. how many databases you're registered on ? DMV, social security, schools permanent records, with the military, and so on.
if the govt is not abusing all that info, then a national ID will be just a formality without adding any risk.
now, if they ARE using all the info they already have against the population, a new database won't make any difference. and you people should seriously start considering a revolution.
Re:Is it that much of a deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's my understanding that they want to tie bank accounts, driver's license, social insurance / security (I'm Canadian), passport etc. to one single card.
If you lose this card you are completely fsck'd. And if someone wants to steal your identity all they have to do is either steal or forge your card. And before people say that forging cards is theoretically as difficult as forging a credit card I'll just point out that that's extremely little comfort. Forging credit cards is one of the most common credit card scams. All you need is an account number and the PIN and you can make a card to use in any ATM. It won't fool a person but it's not meant to. Since ATM machines can read credit cards all it needs is the magnetic stripe with the account # + PIN encoded on it. With systems designed in such a brain-dead way with a complete lack of thought put into security the idea of a real ID scares the crap out of me because idiots will be designing them and more idiots will be assuring the population that they're hack-proof.
Re:Is it that much of a deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
That would really assume everyone would base themselves just on a number. It really isn't like that with national ID cards: you're not going to use an ID card with a picture that doesn't at least resemble you vaguely. Replacing a picture on a stolen card seems nigh to impossible to me. They aren't even comparable with credit cards. Apart from having an ID Card (one of the true ones, like implemented in Japan), I have a drivers license (with a different number) a social security card (with another number) and my bank merely has a photocopy of the ID card I had when I opened the account. Which is (oh, my God!) 15 years ago! T
It really doesn't work that way..... There are surely databases that could connect all of it together, but I have worked for the state and I can assure you: they are so incompetent they won't manage....
Re:privacy? welcome to the information age (Score:3, Insightful)
Anonymity breeds abuse (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is it that much of a deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Few, but some (I doubt many Amish have driver's licenses). But the ID card isn't the problem. It would be entirely possible for the state to issue an ID card which merely associated a name and date of birth with a photo, and had record keeping.
The problem is the ID number assigned on that card, and the tracking database to which it forms the key, and the nefarious uses to which this database can and will be put, ranging from bad cops stalking hotties to presidents tracking and harassing their political opponents [wikipedia.org].
Re:Is it that much of a deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ask the Jews... well, the ones the German government didn't murder, anyway.
The innocent have nothing to hide, until the day the government turn them into criminals (making merely being alive a capital offence in the case of German Jews); then they suddenly realise why bloated government databases and ID cards were a really bad idea.
Re:Japan != USA/Europe (Score:5, Insightful)
What's so irrational about it? They didn't always have such an acceptance. This is a country that has existed for thousands of years, the first couple thousand of which were spent in a state of near-constant civil war without any centralized government. It was only after a strong central government was formed - and further refined with our help - that they became a prosperous, peaceful country with one of the highest standards of living in the world.
Acceptance of authority and conformism has brought them peace, prosperity, high educational standards, low crime, good health and long life expectancy. They are no less "free" than we are, either. Their government does not wiretap their citizens' phone calls or endorse torture, and their taxes do not go to supporting a massive military industrial complex or a set of oil cartels. So in what way is their culture "irrational"? Especially in comparison to ours?
Accept the fact that not everybody thinks the way Americans do. We are not the center of the universe and the way we think is not the "right" way.
Re:Is it that much of a deal? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is enough information available for any government employee to determine when you are on holiday or away on a business trip to know when to send their mates round to burgle your home.
Re:Is it that much of a deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Based only on the article description, Japanese citizens are being assigned ID numbers, not ID cards. Using an ID card to authenticate yourself works well because it probably has a photo and maybe a fingerprint on it, as well as some other personal information. If someone uses your ID card, it's easy to catch them. On the other hand, using an ID number alone to authenticate yourself is a terrible idea because it's a lot easier to match an ID number with a person than using their ID card. The ID number is treated as a kind of password, as if only you could possibly know your own ID number, despite the fact that you give it to anyone who wants to know who you are (which they assume also proves that you're you). The odds are high that eventually someone, maybe even you, will make a mistake and someone else can then tie you to your ID number.
What's funny is that the U.S. government discourages you from using someone's social security number to both identify them and authenticate them, because of the obvious security problems we see every day. Yet businesses continue to use those numbers for authentication. An easy fix would be for the government to simply publish everyone's SSN at once. Then any business that uses SSNs to authenticate people will be castigated or lose business for being idiots.
I think it would be cool to separate authentication from identification. Everyone gets a unique ID number and chooses a private code that together produce a public code, or maybe many one-time throw-away codes, that you can use to identify yourself without giving away control of your identity.
Ach (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Is it that much of a deal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Inaction at least has parsimony on its side.
Re:Is it that much of a deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
I consider that a minor problem. The more major problem is that the logic that created this security scenario is inherently faulty.
There is no reason why a person with a photo ID card is somehow less dangerous/less risky than a person without a photo ID card. The cheap plastic card does not make the person any safer.
Japan much less Orwellian than the US or UK (Score:4, Insightful)
Jukinet has been up and running for years, but the central government has been unable to force take-up, just as they cannot enforce take-up of the so-called compulsory social security or health care systems, or just as NHK cannot force people to pay the compulsory subscription. If Japan were the USA they would just put a gun to people's heads, so-to-speak, and enforce participation.
The way it has worked up to now is that individuals elect to sign up for the Jukinet smart card, and less than two percent of the population has done this. There's no actual requirement anywhere to get one, and it seems to be regarded as a slight potential convenience.
My theory is that there are are at least a couple reasons why the Japaneese government seems so ineffective in putting teeth into enforcement of compliance with such systems.
1) There is a lingering sense of respect for "rights of the individual" that remains since the various reforms after the War, and it's tied in with left wing politics. This is why it's taken 30 years to build the second runway at Narita airport.
2) Second reason is bureacratic turf wars. Jukinet is the pet project of one not-particularly-powerful ministry, and they do not have the power to enforce take-up, although they certainly did manage to get to the Supreme Court in this case (which has handed down a judgment that is rather short-sighted about privacy, given the history of privacy problems that we have seen in Japan in recent years).
In short, Japan has all the privacy problems of other developed countries (and perhaps even more so, given the ubiquitous video surveillance), but has soft spots in its central adminstration in unexpected places.
Incidentally, if it were my job to increase Jukinet card takeup, I would offer people the option of getting them in a design theme of Hello Kitty, or Snoopy, or Audrey Hepburn or something such, and then add electronic money and/or train pass functionality, slightly discounted. WHOOOOOSH, massive take-up overnight.
Japan != Anything you want to emulate (Score:5, Insightful)
People miss the point of citing statistics like wealth and crime. Wealth and crime in it of themselves are worthless. Crime in particular is a silly stat to obsess over. If you want to eliminate crime, just knock everyone into a coma and keep them alive with feeding tubes. The reason why we want wealth and low crime is to bring about happiness. When your pursuit of these things fail to produce more happiness, you are failing. The real purpose of a government should be to bring about the greatest happiness for their citizens and sustain their happiness. All the wealth and low crime in the world won't make a damned bit of difference if you are so miserable you throw yourself off a bridge.
If the point of life is happiness, the Japanese fail spectacularly. The Japanese are roughly the last people in this world we should be seeking to emulate. Don't get me wrong, a lot of great things come out of Japan that I have met have been great people, but the emulation of their miserable and unhappy society ranks roughly last on my list of things to do.
Re:Is it that much of a deal? (Score:-1, Insightful)
If you lose this card you are completely fsck'd.
You aren't, because the data still exists in the databases themselves. You simply go to the police, tell that you lost your ID card, and they provide you with a temporary one while a new one is being created. The old one is rendered invalid in the same way a lost credit card can be blocked. This is exactly how it works in my country, where we have electronic ID cards for years. Notice that, just as with credit cards or driver's licence, people tend to be very careful not to loose their ID card, so it is not a very common event for most.
And if someone wants to steal your identity all they have to do is either steal or forge your card.
And without a standardized ID card system, it is easier to steal somebody's identity, because you only have to fake one of the documents that can be used to identify you. And since those were not really designed as an personal ID mean, they often lack proper security measures to make forging more difficult. Think about it: in a lot of countries that are not using ID cards, the driver's licence can be used to identify you. In how many of those countries is the driver's licence more than a piece of plastic or printed paper with a picture glued on it, something a ten-year-old child could easily duplicate with a good printer ? And I'm not speaking of the increased complexity for the administration that has to deal with multiple ID documents.
And before people say that forging cards is theoretically as difficult as forging a credit card I'll just point out that that's extremely little comfort. Forging credit cards is one of the most common credit card scams. All you need is an account number and the PIN and you can make a card to use in any ATM.(...)
Yet it doesn't prevent most people to use bank cards on a daily basis, with the added thread that your personal data is not exposed to the government, but to a private institution whose sole goal is to make money. And just as a side note, forging a properly designed ID card is much harder than forging a credit card. In many countries, the access to the government databases is based on an assymetrical private/public key system similar to PGP. It means that even if you can fake the external appearance of the card, you still need to get a hold a copy of the key of the citizen you're trying to fake the identity of. See for example http://www.cosic.esat.kuleuven.be/publications/article-769.pdf [kuleuven.be] , which is a good example of an ID card designed with security in mind.
Now, you could say that it is not "100% secure". Sure - nothing is absolutely forging-proof. But multiple unsecure documents are in no ways better than a single one designed with security in mind.
Re:Japan != USA/Europe (Score:3, Insightful)
Where by "further refined" you mean "tried to brutally conquer a hemisphere", and by "with our help" you mean "was effectively replaced after their surrender from years of war was finally forced via the nuclear incineration of two cities".
This is not a shining historical beacon to the values of conformism and obedience to authority.
Your American examples are effective at illustrating the point that the Japanese aren't specially susceptible to those failings and that the United States is not immune to them; but they're not very good pro-obedience lessons either. If it wasn't for the worship of authority here, we'd have impeached and imprisoned the torturers and unwarranted wiretappers years ago, and we'd at least be able to have a reasonable discussion about military and economic power without one side being constantly accused of "hating America".
wrong idea (Score:4, Insightful)
It's my understanding that they want to tie bank accounts, driver's license, social insurance / security (I'm Canadian), passport etc. to one single card.
Right now, everything is "tied" to your name. The problem is that for many people the name isn't unique. That's why a unique number is a good idea.
If you lose this card you are completely fsck'd. And if someone wants to steal your identity all they have to do is either steal or forge your card.
Huh? An id card merely says "John Smith (23984211038) was born on 4/1/1981, is a US citizen, looks like this, has this signature, and resides here." The cards are hard to forge. Such cards aren't used to replace ATM cards or anything else. They are used when you go to the bank in person and interact with a teller, in which case they are no worse than a driver's license. In the future, these cards are going to have more biometric identifiers (in addition to face and signature), meaning that they are even harder to forge and for people to pretend that they are you.
Id cards are reasonable protection against identity theft. They are used when you need to identify yourself uniquely to another person, and for that purpose, they are a whole lot better than the alternatives (driver's licenses, birth certificates, utility bills, etc.). And if security is really important, people can require those alternative in addition.
Now, there are some civil liberties arguments that one should not be able to identify people uniquely with ease. But those arguments are the opposite of yours: you want sound identification, you simply misunderstand how id cards provide it.
Inevitable (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead, rely on proven methods like encryption, legal assurances, and simple discretion about what you put in the public eye, with an expectation that public starts where your walls end. We're approaching a small-town expectation of privacy, applied globally. You can't hide from your neighbor.
Re:Is it that much of a deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
Put the responsibility of a fraud onto the person that checks the ID:s. And never forget that an ID card is just the key to unlock more verification data of an individual - it's no proof of validity itself.
And you will still have a different linkage to your bank account etc. It's no real difference between a national and a state issued ID card. The state issued cards may actually be worse since it's harder to spot forgeries.
There is actually a reason why all dollar bills of today look identical. Earlier there were several different printers for the dollar bills and that was heaven for forgers since a dollar bill produced in California could be easily passed in New York regardless of if it was a forgery or not.
Of course that's my $2 [wikipedia.org] thoughts about it.