The Estonian president wants a more digitally-integrated Europe | Hacker News Reader

The Estonian president wants a more digitally-integrated Europe

arstechnica.com

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The article is so much more than what the headline indicates.

I wish more politicians were like this man.

Yeah, Mr. Ilves is even doing DJ-gigs: http://metropolitan.fi/entry/president-of-estonia-to-throw-a...

We changed the title to a shortened version of the subtitle.

I started watching this video expecting for him to be like all of my politicians are. I am happy that I was wrong.

He seems to actually understand the underlying technology that he is pushing, and it seems like it is working.

Is anyone here from Estonia who could comment on these new systems?

My girlfriend is Estonian, and she finds life incredibly complicated in both the UK and Sweden-

I just asked, she misses that there was never a need for a government office, no queuing and everything was centrally managed, as long as she has her ID card and her "pin".

She is mentioning the arduous processes we have for validating identity in Sweden and looking up financial history.

Part of me feels like this is a double edged sword, but she seems to genuinely miss it.

Yea there are some privacy concerns and some social concerns but the way I see it is that our government already has all of the data they are looking at. In many cases, it's data they have generated about you.

No matter how hard you try, I don't think that there is much of a way to hide prescriptions and taxes from any government.

I'm just amazed that it "just works."

The digital systems work pretty well.

The digital prescriptions are definitely convenient, especially as you can get them renewed via e-mail to your doctor and thus skip any visitation bills.

I also still remember my amazement when it took me literally 5 minutes to register a new company online, 10 years ago. Not that much different from opening a Twitter account.

An even older system is the tax one, where everything is automated and I don't have to even think about it. I can just annually review the automatically calculated data and press accept to get some money back.

That's amazing. It seems like a polar opposite from the USA.

I'd not trust my government to develop any software for me to use but it seems like your government has an idea of how to make that work.

He mentioned it was all open source in the video. That's really cool and helps go the extra mile in my opinion to make it more acceptable to the end user.

There is a campaign collecting signatures to end geoblocking within EU: https://endgeoblocking.eu/

I'd like to add that geoblocking also exists for physical products, as unlikely as it seems. I recently wanted to buy a new car in one EU country, with my company from another EU country paying for it(it's complicated, but suffice to say I live in one country and run a business in another) - only to be told that the manufacturer forbids all dealerships from selling new cars to someone without an address in the same country, even if they are paying cash. It's ridiculous. Fortunately later on I found out that many dealerships found out how to get around it, they just order the new car for themselves and sell it to you as a "second hand" car the day it arrives from factory - and the manufacturer cannot stop them from selling used cars to whoever they please.

Why is there no verification of email adress you submit? Sadly it's hard to take seriously such a petition.

Would it be easier to take seriously if there were verification of email address? It's not like there's any requirement for identity verification before provisioning of an email account.

Perhaps they do not like his money and are trying to convince him to torrent the music.

But this has nothing to do with credit cards and everything to do with the media industry. It's the exact same thing as those braindead DVD regions, or youtube restrictions in Germany, or netflix national catalogues.

No, it's not just about the media industry. He also can't buy Angry Birds to gift to his wife either. Again, because she would have an iTunes account from another country. And not because Rovio asked Apple to block such a sale.

It might not be mentioned in the article but a lot of online retailers, including with 50% of the purchases I try to make on Amazon.co.uk, refuse to ship to Estonia. Even digital good can often be difficult to purchase.

I agree on further digitalization of public services and stuff - come on, ... here in Germany you must store every kind of receipt for tax declaration (I don't know how this works in other countries, I just find it ridiculous nowadays). However, what the president of Estonia is talking about is basically not applicable to most of the current European countries, where people/countries raise walls, other countries threaten to leave, or where national interests are way higher than European ones.

In addition, I would also like to say that it's important to keep in mind that Estonia is a smaller country compared to others in Europe (it has ~ 1.5 million people, more or less the amount of people living/working in Cologne/Amsterdam/Milan). This means that they can be more focused and can invest more selectively. If you want to digitalize a country like Germany you need to change how many cities and towns? And ... how many laws that require still "paper" proof? It's not impossible, it just takes more time. That's it.

I hope that the president will be able to convince European countries to improve their IT infrastructure. That's cool. However, bigger countries won't see that coming in the next 5-10 years at least.

Germany is ridiculously far behind. It's partly because of federalism, but mostly because of the fear of the state and desire for extreme levels of privacy. Here in Sweden, everything is digitalized and it makes life easy. I think of this externality of managing your taxes and stuff like that as "societal tax". Time is money, and countries like Germany and the US have ridiculously high levels of "societal tax" - you have to think so much to make simple decisions. Can i fix this problem with the govt in an afternoon, should I save this receipt for my tax declaration, to things like do I trust the taxi will turn up on time, will the train arrive on time?

> Germany is ridiculously far behind. It's partly because of federalism, but mostly because of the fear of the state and desire for extreme levels of privacy.

I think you are missing the elephant in the room: our (German) complete and utter incompetence when it comes to software development.

Declaring taxes for my business still involves mailing many dead trees around the country, and I hate it. But what's the alternative, sinking billions of euros into a public software project that might be as crappy as Toll Collect?

I agree with you, and the only way to improve that is to invest more in "software" (in general), although things are moving slowly, yet they move.

I also want more digitalization, BUT. If this has to cost my own privacy then I would like to have the time to think about it. I would not like to see my personal/financial data online because a hacker found a hole in the system, or something like that.

Ah, and by the way, what people don't seem to understand is that it's also thanks to laws about privacy that Germany (and Europe in General) is funding more and more companies. People don't use Google Analytics due to that most of the time. Microsoft had to open a data center in Frankfurt, and so on, and so on. All this has diverse implications: hiring a company that keeps data in Germany. Who does it? German companies (or European companies). And money flows as it should. The country grows, people learn software, new jobs are created, and so on.

I would be not so hasty about changing privacy laws - they are there for a (good) reason (actually, more than one). Maybe in the next 10-15 years, when European (and German) software companies are more stable, then yes why not? But now, I am not so sure about it.

Great push for use of latest technologies, especially for government sector.

I skimmed the article, and I do not see a mention of Estonia's e-voting. AFAIK, they are using (IMHO) flawed system, that they just believe it works (i.e. it was not breached). Estonia is very innovative in technological sector, but their e-voting system is a very risky play with their democracy.

I was watching this just yesterday, a thourough (it seems) review of the Estonian system.

https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6344_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412281...

I haven’t seen the video, by my feeling is that there’s no need to “review” any e-voting system, since the very concept is irredeemably flawed. If a person can in any way prove to a third party what they voted on, then the system is wide open to coercion of voters. If I can e-vote, then someone could force me at gunpoint to log in and e-vote to their liking instead of mine. If the system allows changing my vote later with some sort of password, they can simply take my password away from me. If changing one’s vote is hard, like having to actually going to a poll booth, then they could make sure that I am either watched or made unavoidably busy for the duration. I could easily see these techniques being deployed at scale towards more easily cowed sections of the citizenry, like the poor.

Oh nice, your technique could then be used succesfully against ANY voting. Right? Just watching the boots. Because keeping the poor or 30% of population watched at gunpoint 24/7 for 2 weeks in Europe so that nobody notices is perfectly easy.

Not exactly, because of ballot secrecy. Nobody, not even you, can prove what you voted (or didn't vote) with a paper ballot. This is the primary countermeasure against coercion and bribery of the electors.

With e-voting, providing ballot secrecy becomes much more complex because at the same time you need to prove that every voted is counted as it was cast.

> Nobody, not even you, can prove what you voted (or didn't vote) with a paper ballot.

More importantly, nobody is allowed to enter the voting booth with you. However, there's absentee vote by letter in practically all european voting laws that I'm aware of and that can be used as an attack vector since you can fill it in at home.

taking a selfie with your filled in ballot is easy measure for vote buyers. There also exists a practice of exchange ballots, when you go into the booth with already filled in ballot and have to bring back to buyer empty one as a proof. No system is perfect.

A prime comparison is a local employer bussing everyone from their village to the tactically most appropriate voting location and paying them a bit of money and/or alcohol to vote properly - despite being generally illegal, when it happens in a paper ballot system, these people can and do vote as they please anyway. (I recall a case in local municipality elections where there were criminal charges for such actions, but the vote counting in that district showed that most of the bussed-in and paid voters actually voted against the organizer).

Since there is no way for anyone, including themselves, to get to know how their vote went, if the voting stations are run properly, can be monitored by all constesting parties, yadda yadda, we know how to run this process even in cases where the opposing parties are openly hostile and attempt dirty tricks.

In e-voting, there is no good way against this approach, and local "strongmen" are a realistic threat that actually will get used in contested elections if they are able to. They'd have everyone from their factory to either vote in their office with the supervisor watching over the shoulder or get fired, and there's no good way to prevent that from happening.

Yes, this is exactly the sort of things I was thinking of.

In e-voting you can change your vote unlimited times. I think it is pretty good approach against your example.

No, I addressed this argument in my original comment above. If you need a password to change a vote, someone can take the password away from you after you voted the first time. If you can show up physically at the polling place and change your vote, your hypothetical corrupt employer can simply announce crunch time at work and effectively keep you on the premises. It might also be as simple as them not paying for the bus to to polling place, so you have no way to get there.

You're effectively making the case that e-voting is flawed, because a completely controlled slave who has Stockholm syndrome can't vote for whom they want.

1) It's possible to revote unlimited times. In the overwhelming majority of cases, you would get an opportunity to revote in private.

2) If your ID card gets taken away, you can get a new one from the government.

3) If you lack the funds for the necessary travel, the government will provide that.

4) If you're being held locked up against your will, you can call the police.

5) If you're worried about getting murdered after you visibly vote for someone who you don't want to, you can set up a cron job to change the vote after even if you're no longer breathing.

In addition. If there truly is such an adversary that can completely control your life & silence any requests for help, then that very same adversary is also capable of requiring you to wear a hidden live streaming camera when you go to paper vote, so that they can see you really cast your paper vote for the candidate they insist on.

Dreaming up such astronomical edge cases can be useful, but in regards to e-voting, I have yet to see a scenario that has a negative effect on e-voting while the same effect doesn't exist on classic paper voting.

The described system is absolutely great for selling your vote, as you can prove within 30 minutes of voting who you voted for. It also allows you to change your mind an unlimited number of times until the voting deadline.

It is a very inconvenient system for buying votes though, as the voters can pick up your money and then go vote for whoever they wanted to in the first place.

Your arguments against e-vote can be used in regular voting also.

You can take photo of your vote to prove it to 3rd party. Also it is easy to buy votes from poor in regular voting.

For e-voting you can vote 1000 times and when you still feel need to vote 1 more time, then it is possible to use regular voting. E-vote period ends before regular voting.

It all goes to trusting the government. I trust my government and I e-vote.

Same ID-card is used for e-voting, banking & pretty much everything. It would be easier/more profitable to steal money from bank accounts than mess with these small elections.

"they are using (IMHO) flawed system" Care to elaborate on this?

The reviewers found terrible opsec, lack of an appropriate threat model, and demonstrated the feasibility attacks both on the vote counting server and on the voting client.

For more information you can watch the video I linked above or read a summary here: https://estoniaevoting.org/findings/summary/

E-voting is flawed by design. The voting secret is lost.

(What is to stop the husband to control who the wife votes for, or vice versa?)

Don't vote remotely.

https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mp...

"and the only way to force individual voters to vote as you wish is to physically watch them vote."

Yes, exactly.

You can change your vote in private. If you're worried about getting locked up and/or murdered by your wife after she has seen who you initially voted for, then you could set up a cron job to change the vote even if you're no longer breathing.

In addition, the same problem applies to paper voting. What stops your wife from demanding that you wear a hidden live streaming camera when you go to vote, so that she can see you really cast your paper vote for the candidate she insists on?

That sounds like a wonderful idea in general but I wonder how the legal issues would play out? If a company offers music for cheaper than would be legal in France in Estonia then a French citizen buys it for themselves would the company be liable under French law? How about a video game that involves shooting Nazis and which has a swastika in it but some German citizen buys it? I'm not sure how this could work without integrating European legal systems more.

Hrm I'm struggling to see how it is/was any difference from years ago when games/movies were region locked. Protectionism has always been the name of the game.

One must remember that Estonia started from zero, as regards to bureaucracy. I wish had a picture of Estonian coast guard 1991, schoolkids in wooden WII soviet gasboat. But very serious and with AK-47, so I do not have the picture.

But the biggest problem is that iTunes itself is badly developed? Apple way is that each user has a Macbook which has an iTunes to which user can sync her/his iPhone. Syncing many mobile devices into one machine with one iTunes gets messy.

I'm guessing you didn't get past the headline.

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