Russia Moves To Universal ID Card 200
prostoalex writes "On January 1st 2012, the Russian government will start issuing universal ID cards (Russian original) that will replace current national identification system (Russia has a system of internal passports), medical insurance cards, student IDs, public transport passes, and debit cards. The smart card contains unique personal identifiers and allows for multiple levels of authentication. The Russian government is pushing for local government agencies, transportation providers, banks and retail operators to adopt the government-issued ID to streamline their operations."
Replace debit cards? (Score:2)
will replace current national identification system... debit cards.
So it's basically one card that replaces everything? What if I want multiple debit cards from multiple banks?
I like and want to keep my multiple cards.
Re:Replace debit cards? (Score:5, Funny)
(Apologies to JRRT)
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No. Reading the Russian explanation it looks like a card that can be refused by filling out a refusal form (so not mandatory), it is only for government federal and local services, and, loosely quoting the explanation "has potential to be used elsewhere".
Since this is a company site, it is likely too optimistic about the card.
Too lazy to read the law, maybe some Russian slashdoter can step in and explain better.
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Reading the Russian explanation it looks like a card that can be refused by filling out a refusal form
this isn't a network card is it?
might then be the first (wait for it) refuse-NIC
thank you. I'll be here all week.
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Well, since its purpose is to identify by providing your name on it, I guess you could call it Name Identification Card.
Then refuse it.
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They'll just be assigned to your unique ID. Like showing your license to get a checking account. All your account link back to you.
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TFA sais you *can* connect it to your bank account. Even though this is just a translation, I have the feeling that it actually is the idea behind it. You may be able to connect it to the bank account of each bank if you want to.
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Nothing odd about it. It's harder to evade taxes without cash. Though if governments were to succeed in eliminating cash, I suspect that organized crime would likely create its own equivalent thereof. And informal barter economies would become more prevalent.
Esonia has used ID cards for some time (Score:4, Insightful)
Estonia has used ID cards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_ID_card) for some time and I am seriously surprised that more governments are not following the same footsteps. While the cards may introduce new security concerns, imagine the amount of bureaucracy that can be reduced if citizens can pay everything from traffic tickets to taxes using a simple card.
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Why even have the card? Sooner than we may think, the chips the size of a grain of rice will allow us to make payments, or identify us so we can be brought in for questioning about our Facebook postings. Think of the savings to society!
Re:Esonia has used ID cards for some time (Score:5, Insightful)
Why even have the card? Sooner than we may think, the chips the size of a grain of rice will force us to make payments, or identify us so we can be brought in for questioning about our Facebook postings.
There, fixed that for ya.
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Fuck off
Re:Esonia has used ID cards for some time (Score:5, Insightful)
Estonia has used ID cards (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_ID_card) for some time and I am seriously surprised that more governments are not following the same footsteps. While the cards may introduce new security concerns, imagine the amount of bureaucracy that can be reduced if citizens can pay everything from traffic tickets to taxes using a simple card.
"may introduce new security concerns" huh? The Russian Mob must be drooling. No more having to forge 30 different documents. 1 to crack and you own (or create) someone.
Re:Esonia has used ID cards for some time (Score:5, Informative)
Russian mob doesn't need to forge documents, mate. They're the guys in power!
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None, really, but "decent moral standards" does not apply in this case.
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the assassinations and general hellraising have been done by people acting outside state control.
I doubt that. For example, it is pretty much common knowledge that Anna Politkovskaya [wikipedia.org] - one prominent assassinated dissident journalist - was killed on behalf of Ramzan Kadyrov, the current president of Chechnya - and a favorite of Vladimir Putin.
Large parts of Russia have on many levels no governmental control at all, as I understand it.
Um, not that I know of. Can you give some specific examples?
And - evil ogliarchs "stealing state property"? Okay, Putin solved that by yanking it back from their control - and then people complains that the government stole the property?
You have to understand the context. When people are complaining about oligarchs stealing property, they usually refer to privatization [wikipedia.org], which was essentially a scheme to defraud the population as a whole (
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Not quite. You see, after gangsters take the power, their habits change. You don't see that much in the first generation, but the second one is already markedly different, and eventually you get what we used to call "nobility", but nowadays more often call "elite". The gangster spirit is still alive there, but it's buried under many layers of rules, laws and duties which basically keep the whole thing more or less peaceful and civilized. That's basically where most First World countries are.
The problem in R
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This is one case in which bureaucratic inefficiency is most certainly your friend.
In Soviet Russia, if you want a cop, then there he is.
were there any advantages to Russia... (Score:3)
Were there any advantages to the Russian people of the fall of the Soviet Union? Ignore the half a dozen oligarchs whose limits on greedy and corrupt behaviour were lifted. Consider the other 141 million people.
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Er, no.
I'm going to let Google make me look smarter than I am, here, since I haven't seen this story before:
Why the FSB is not the KGB! [opendemocracy.net]
They can cite you for refusing to talk to them, but the citation comes with no punishment. And you can get a court to tell them to fuck off entirely if they're bothering you.
They can still investigate your shady neighbors, boss, and parents, but they can't lean on you to do their investigation for them.
End of an era.
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You'd trust a Russian court? Last week some guy was convicted for the crime of having completed his previous sentence, which was bogus to start with.
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I don't trust any court. That's why I bring my own lawyer.
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Any evidence that 141 million people spied on each other? I'm happy to compare and contrast Soviet surveillance in the 1980s with US surveillance today, if it puts things into context.
Perhaps you're thinking of the GDR? We're not talking about whether Soviet satellite states are better off today.
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You're happy to compare and contrast with whose data?
You seem to be willing to push the former satellite states under the rug to make your point, with data that is pretty much known to be unchecked and uncheckable, whether you take the one side or the other in the debate.
We know that the records that can be had must be taken with more than a few grains of salt. Likewise, the current reports, either way.
We also know that security is a siren song.
And we know that freedom sucks. So what?
The debate itself is pr
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And do you have any evidence Russia has changed a lot?
I am not suggesting that State Capitalism/Stalinism/USSR style communism are good things, merely that it seems Russia has had these kinds of problems since time immemorial.
Re:were there any advantages to Russia... (Score:5, Insightful)
That post was a whole lot of appeal to emotion (ignored) plus half a dozen examples (quoted below) of corruption and incompetence which are nothing to do with communism and everything to do with typical behaviour of humans in power.
a year's supply of anti-magnetic paint is used up whitewashing rocks because an admiral wants an improved-looking coastline; thousands of tons of chemical fertilizer are dumped into the Volga River (creating an environmental catastrophe) because the Party didn't make adequate preparations to store it; military exercises are run which leave the country defenseless; soldiers are sentenced to barbarous punishments for the slightest infractions; generals keep private harems and use military resources to construct fabulous dachas; incompetent drunks are promoted to important posts simply to get rid of them.
So, is your argument that similar inefficiencies and corruptions cannot be found in Western governments and corporations? Or what exactly are you trying to say?
Note that I didn't say "Soviet communism was great; capitalism sucks!" I asked whether the people of Russia are any better off now than before the Soviet Union. I've asked it lots of times to many people. I've heard lots of "yeah it's much better!" from those who have prospered financially, and lots of "no it sucks!" from those who have lost various securities. I've never been provided with a well-researched answer which tries to make an objective study of the change in quality of life throughout the country. Surely someone, somewhere has been interested in answering the question from a sociological/psychological/anthropological point of view rather than taking the opportunity to start a political rant.
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dunno, i guess at least the basic needs where covered.
All of the basic needs? (Score:3)
I know I'm making myself look a little naively retro by saying this, but just how do you define "basic needs"?
Is it reasonable for a government to refuse to recognize the fundamental freedom of the individual, when the people in power are using their own inherent freedoms to give themselves a false sense of security at the expense of the other individuals?
The present case in the US, where the government officially recognizes freedoms, but the people in power are lining their nests at the expense of the "lit
Ever heard of Maslow? (Score:3)
It's easy to talk like that when you've got a warm house and a full belly.
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And it's easy to criticize the past when you were not one of the ones sent to Siberia.
Maslow's context dependent theoretical prioritization of needs notwithstanding.
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And that final line is what has scientists puzzled about the latest crisis. Where before there would be calls for a collective reaction, now all they find are talk about personal responsibility.
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And that may be why one find people that continue to do low level crimes, as then they may get a warm room and food for a while.
Yes there are answers (Score:5, Informative)
Plenty of people have studied it. The rough answer is that 40% of Russians are much much better off, and 60% of Russians are worse off financially. Overall, this amounts to a net gain, but it isn't evenly spread. Crime is higher today than it was in the Soviet Union. There is more freedom of speech today than there was before. You don't have to look very hard to find these numbers - don't take my word for it, do the research.
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And if you aren't happy you are free to leave.
I have known a number of ex-soviets over the years--I even knew one of Gorbachev's translators. He was thrilled by the collapse of the soviet union because of the summary executions by the KGB, restrictions on speech and opportunities to leave and pursue his interests outside of Russia.
Then again when he moved to the US he was shot a few years later by a random drive by gang--you win some, you lose some.
Personally I'm pretty liberal and believe in well funded
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And the 100+ million in the former soviet satellite states are doing much better than during soviet times.
impatience (Score:2)
The problem is that you (and they) are asking the question too soon. Learning how to deal with a government that recognizes the inherent freedom of the individual is scary, and takes some time, even when the people are brave enough to go for it.
Whether they will end up better off or not is up to them.
We used to say that and know, deep inside, that we were lying. Now, there is a chance, even if it doesn't yet look very promising.
To my way of thinking, that such a question can even be asked is indication of a
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Is that "the narrative" these days? That the world was better off when the Soviet Union was around?
He didn't say anything about "the world". He did say "Russian people".
Viktor Suvorov (real name Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun)
... is a known falsifier of history who has been exposed by numerous credible researchers in the field, both Russian and Western.
Re:were there any advantages to Russia... (Score:5, Interesting)
Suvorov is a notorious defector who has a massive axe to grind. I would not take his words at their face value without a boulder-sized grain of salt.
I've talked to a few ex-USSR folks at work. They say for most people life was better back then. Social safety net was stronger, there was certainty in the future, there was industry (yes, including the massive military-industrial complex), people were generally paid well, science and engineering were strong, and there was no shortage of work. In fact by law you could end up in jail for _not_ working, but the law in question was rarely applied. You basically could say, with high probability, how your life would play out. I.e. finish high school, go to the university, become engineer or a scientist, get employment, get paid 150 rubles a month as a start (+yearly bonus), get in line for government subsidized housing, eventually get an apartment, buy a crappy Soviet car, work until you're 60 years old, retire.
Sure, the opportunity to get rich wasn't there, and sure you couldn't buy much in the way of western stuff (except for perhaps jeans), but realistically, only a small percentage of people become really rich, and they weren't into "stuff" back then anyway. Many compare USSR to North Korea, but really, there's no basis for such comparison. There was no "dear leader", no cult of personality and no famine (not since the 30's anyway, but then again the US was pretty shitty in the 30's as well).
Compare it to now: Moscow is really prosperous, and the rest of the country can barely make the ends meet. Those in power steal astronomical sums of taxpayer money (remember the old apparatchiks didn't need to steal, they were set for life by the government) with impunity. Corruption is horrifying, everything is bought and sold, and in some cases you don't even need to pay - just get the right guy to make a phone call. Government pensions to the retirees are laughable and impossible to live on. Oligarchs illegally privatized people's property (through rigged auctions etc) for pennies on the dollar, and now exploit those same people, paying them barely enough to buy food. Infrastructure is crumbling. And so on and so forth.
In other words, it's pretty bad there right now. But on the other hand, the folks at least have an opportunity to leave, which wasn't the case before.
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1, cult of personality? Have you heard about Stalin? And there was some even after him.
2, famine: look up Holomodor
You obviously don't know what you're talking about.
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Grandparent said "not since 30's" so s/he definitely knows about the Holodomor which happened then.
Stalin's personality cult was at about the same time. During the WW|| the cult of his personality had waned significantly. And it had been officially denounced in 1956 by Nikita Khrushev (who introduced the term "personality cult" in the first place, BTW).
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1, Still after the death of Stalin the personality cult started to center about the new leaders (it did in Hungary e.g.) Krushev failed to reform the system.
2, Holomodor was a man made "catastrophe" (genocide, if you like it better that way), it didn't have anything to do with the stock market crash, so I don't see a reason to dismiss it, even when it was in the '30ies.
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There was no "dear leader", no cult of personality and no famine (not since the 30's anyway, but then again the US was pretty shitty in the 30's as well).
"Pretty shitty as well"? Really? The man-made famine [wikipedia.org] that killed millions of people in the Ukraine was implemented by the Soviet communists.
Yep, that just sounds like shades of grey to me.
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Assuming that the Depression is wholly responsible for the upper rate...
That's a rather large assumption and it appears to be incorrect. If you look at Figure 2 (pg 41) from your linked PDF, it shows that non-infant death rate declined during the Depression.
So, not only is it incorrect to compare the deaths caused by the policy-based Holodomor in the USSR to the total death rate in the US (you don't believe that everyone who died during the decade of the Depression died because of the Depression, right?), it appears that the stats wouldn't even support a claim that the Depre
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How the hell was it "horrible" if the economies of most of the Soviet republics in the USSR were heavily subsidized from the RSFSR's budget?
Is life great there right now? And I don't mean life is great for the top 0.5% of the country by income, that's pretty much a given, but for the common man.
Also food coupons were only caused by Perestroyka spiraling out of control, and they were given to everyone, not just CPSU members. No one knew what food rationing was since the end of WWII.
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what happens when the extreme left jumps in the saddle is rarely discussed in any detail, perhaps because 90% of university professors in America label themselves as being "liberal or very liberal" in their political opinions, and are generally sympathetic to the iconic figures of communism (Che, Castro, Marx, etc.) if not to communism itself.
90% of American university professors are sympathetic to Che, Castro, or Marx? You sound like an Eastern European who hasn't yet adjusted to life in the West. Support for USSR-style Communism has never been more than marginal in the West, partly because people here just plain don't like that ideology, but mostly because we really, really hate totalitarianism.
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TL;DR especially without the benefit of useful things like paragraphs but it looks like the usual righty crap about commies being given a free pass by all these commie academics. You're delusional if you think that the majority of us who lived under the threat of Soviet Russia think that it's demise was a bad thing, Che t-shirts notwithstanding. I don't see students wearing Stalin t-shirts anywhere.
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ID cards can be wonderful for privacy (Score:3)
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Eventually, you'd see a little EULA on a screen where clicking yes means they can share their key with a group of others businesses, to "serve you better". Eventually, some terrorist attack will occur and the government will decide that it should have a master key to track all spending in order to search for suspicious purchases. Eventually, the IRS will access all of your income and spending and property records and w
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It's a great idea. I'd like to see one additional factor added -that through crypotographic means the system would require that the recipient of an unique ID also provide some sort of key unique to that transaction in order for the central database to reverse the unique ID back to the "citizen ID" - that way it would be impossible for anyone with access to the central database to just generate a list of all unique IDs for a specific "citizen ID." That would still serve the purpose of dealing with individu
In Soviet Russia (Score:2, Insightful)
You must wear the Mark of the Beast [wikipedia.org] in order to buy or sell.
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Bring it.
Ha! (Score:2)
In Soviet Russia, er, uh... hmm.
Of course, this is Slashdot ... (Score:2)
... but if you read the title it clearly says it is an ID card, not a debit/credit payment card.
I live in Russia. This article is sensationalist. (Score:5, Interesting)
First, this is NOT an ID card (at least at first), it's just a government-mandated standard card. Second, Russia _already_ has a universal ID system - internal passports, which have nice unique ID numbers and every citizen by law must get a passport. A lot of things (bank accounts, phone numbers) are already linked to passport serial numbers, so it's not like it's hard to correlate these data.
Interestingly enough, it's not used for oppression of political opposition. Mostly because it's not of much use to know where your political opponent is.
In my opinion, ID cards are better than paper passports - they are physically smaller and easier to carry and do not fray around the edges as easily as paper documents. A major boon of ID cards should be the ease of cancellation. A stolen paper passport is a disaster, a stolen ID card should just be a nuisance.
However, though internal passports are a legacy of the USSR, they have some advantages too - they can contain more "naked-eye visible" information than a credit-card-sized ID card, like marital status, information about children, blood type, etc.
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Re:I live in Russia. This article is sensationalis (Score:5, Informative)
A little more depth. There is a talk about deprecating internal passports and replacing them with ID cards, however as far as I understand this card will not yet be the national ID card.
I'm reading specifications for this card, and so far it seems that government is just mandating a single standard for micropayments and ID transmission info. Which certainly makes sense (I hate buying subway passes every time I visit Moscow).
Internal passports are interesting in themselves. They were first invented during the USSR era as means of migration control. In order to get a job each citizen of the USSR had to have a local registration ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propiska [wikipedia.org] ), it's a stamp on a passport page. And to get a propiska one had to have a local job - a nice Catch-22 scenario. And living without registration in the USSR was actually a crime that could get you behind the bars. With the fall of the USSR, both of the requirements for propiska were lifted, even though the requirement for the mandatory local registration remained in place (though now punishment for living without the local registration is trivial, about $15, AFAIR).
But local registration has been transformed from a barrier into a bureaucratic nuisance (or hell). It's now a classical Brazilia situation - state can't nominally refuse you to register, but it can make it thoroughly unpleasant.
The proposed ID card will _finally_ kill off the propiska for good. As a citizen of Russia, for me it's much much much better than nebulous additional threats to privacy.
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So? You can be tracked just as easily by your mobile phone (linked to your internal passport). Also, making a centralized database of micropayments is not a trivial task in itself.
The other argument that sometime in future some dictator might reintroduce the propiska is irrelevant, since it can work just as well with paper documents. In fact, something like this had already happened in 90-s in Moscow when Luzhkov started to enforce the rules for mandatory local registration.
Really? (Score:4, Funny)
I mean, the universe is pretty big.
Excellent news! (Score:2)
But seriously, adopting such a scheme nation-wide has numerous scary aspects, starting with privacy and then branching out into security, abuse, impersonation, spoofing, data theft, management, technical implementatio
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The EU hasn't adopted a single ID card yet because it simply doesn't have the power to do so.
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This is excellent news as we can now learn about all the ways such an ID system can (and will) malfunction and can (and will be) be abused (from a safe distance).
Wasn't the British experiment [wikipedia.org] enough?
So basically... (Score:2)
...if the government doesn't like you, all they have to do is dig into your activities to find something illegal and use that as a reason to disable your ID-card and transform you into a second-rate citizen?
I'm sure they won't do this the first ten years, or at least until everyone is used to having a chip inside their bodies, but once the chip is the only way to be part of society, they can do whatever they want. And that's scary.
In Soviet Russia (Score:2)
Does the system to maintain it run on Linux? (Score:2)
If so, the system is *good*. If not, it's *bad*.
HELLO! - 1984, NWO??? (Score:2)
Hello! This is the start of 1984, New World Order stuff. This is a BAD idea!
The Answer to 1984 is 1776!
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:5, Funny)
In Soviet Russia, card identifies you!
Meanwhile, back in the States: "Yes Mr. Bank Teller, that is my card. Oh, you need a second form of identification? My wife says that card is mine, too!"
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The problem is not whether the card identifies you or not. It's that you can misplace or have the card stolen for multi-level inconvenience.
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Funny)
Double sided tape. Forehead. Problem solved.
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Embedded cards?
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I don't have a big problem with embedded cards; but its the watchdog that keeps me up at night that I *do* mind.
Re:In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Informative)
To be honest, there is no country that I know of where identity theft is a problem as big as it is in the US. I have a national ID card here in Poland, and you know what? It's a HUGE bitch to fake, I suspect it would be easier to steal my identity by faking my passport and driver's license. That still wouldn't do you much good, since I could have any of those three documents invalidated - when you sign any sort of contract here, you put down both your ID/Tax number and your ID number. The corporate equivalent of identity theft is much more prevalent over here.
The US is a red herring right now. (Score:2)
Just because USians are trying to throw their freedom away in over-reaction to an act of war about ten years ago does not mean that the principles of freedom change.
On the other hand, whereas an ID card in the US is still a huge problem, relative to maintaining the freedoms recognized by the Constitution, the cultural context is different in Russia.
Single points of failure are always a weakness in a system. They are also sometimes expedient, the issue being whether they can be implemented now in a way to al
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In Germany, he would have to have the number, the card itself, AND he would need to live at your place and look like you.
Any company that wants to make sure you are really you and it's impractical for them to request that you come in in person with your ID card can send a "PostID" form to your residential address. The mail men then checks if the address on your ID card matches, writes the check number of the ID into the form, and returns it. (If your not home he puts a card in the letterbox, and you can go
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I bet the CCC already has a list of ways how that online card check could be tricked.
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If you have estabilished relation with your bank, it's according to however you have agreed to identify yourself. Of course, it wouldn't be only ID's - your wife or your father would likely know them, and they can't do stuff in your name. A code calculator issued by the bank would be the most likely way for small issues.
If you don't have such a relation, or larger amounts are involved, you'd have to come in person, show secure physical ID, and sign papers. Bank would require it, check it for forgeries (e.g.
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Actually, there was one idea I liked... (Score:4, Informative)
There is a PIN to use it, of course, but there is supposed to be a "decoy" PIN, so if you are forced to enter your PIN by the bad guys, it, apparently, looks like it was successful ("buys you some time") but (in theory) alerts someone and triggers police response.
Paul B.
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And then, once everyone knows there is a decoy pin, they will threaten to hold you hostage to be sure you didn't enter it.
Will you enter the regular pin and lose 250$ or will you enter the decoy one and lose much more?
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Frankly I'm pretty annoyed we haven't got one of these in my country!
I don't even care if my country gets one card, I just wish the branches of government would talk to each other so any change doesn't require a million calls.
When my wife and I got married it took two separate government organizations just to make the marriage official, then she had to contact six of them to let them know her name had changed. When we moved we had to update our drivers licenses, health cards, income tax info, etc.... Meanwhile half these services were in the same building.
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Ah that is bureaucracy working for you. Because they don't talk to each other it is that much harder for the government to get information about you.
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Senator Edward "Teddy" Kennedy was hassled at the airports because "T Kennedy" was on one of those no-fly lists. It was the wrong Kennedy, of course, but better safe than sorry.
Don't assume that the government won't act on the basis of incomplete information. A cudgel can be as effective as a scalpel, in the wrong hands.
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That's exactly what's it about. And it's not just Russia that wants this.
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There's no line at the Pearly Gates. If for no other reason than lack of customers. No matter what the guy in front of you says, that inscription above the entrance, "Lasciate ogne speranza voi ch'intrate", is not Church Latin for "Welcome to the Kingdom of God".
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It's not Church Latin at all, unless you're the kind of person who refers to the language I'm writing in as Late Insular Saxo-Normannic.
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Actually, (Score:2)
If you read the material they are providing, they are saying the right things.
That is, if such a card must exist, they seem to be saying that they will do it the right way.
In the US, no, this would be a bad idea.
In Russia, it might be an improvement. That remains to be seen, and I would hope for them to have plans for doing away with the card at some point in the future, but I can't say it would not be an improvement.
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In fact, just the other day I read an article about a Master's Thesis that described how to use a certain British bank's card without knowing the PIN, and the company's attempt to hush it up. The University told them to get stuffed; i
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Nice to see the university had the balls to defy the credit card companies, unlike the Discovery Channel...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-St_ltH90Oc [youtube.com]