Switzerland votes against electronic ID system provided by private companies
swissinfo.ch
swissinfo.ch
The 7 member Executive Council is composed of the top 7 candidates from each election. The chairperson of the executive council rotates each year, so that the top 4 vote winners each get a turn at being chairperson.
This means that different social and political priorities get implemented in turn. It also means the way the government works is more cooperative, because each council member, including the chairperson, knows there will be a new chairperson next year.
So, if a pro-business candidate places 1st, and an environment candidate 2nd, and a social welfare candidate 3rd, and a libertarian candidate 4th, it is in all their interests to cooperate and create legislation that serves all of their interests as much as possible. Instead of disregarding the environment, the pro-business council member is encouraged to develop green business initiatives that will be supported for the full 4 year term under the different chairs.
The system creates a leadership team that looks for win-win, rather than a sole victor who can abuse majority rule.
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Council_(Switzerland)
https://apnews.com/article/health-legislation-coronavirus-pa...
I am not responding to your expression of opinion - just clarifying how the Swiss electoral system is structured.
That vote was a referendum, which is another component of the Swiss system, separate and complimentary to the Executive Council.
Populist ideas, can easily thrive in a direct democracy.
Every country has some clothing requirements. Some mandate headscarfs (for women only), some mandate the face remains visible. No laws were needed for this in Swiss because no people were covering up. But now this has changed, so laws come. I dont find any problem with it, and hope that the "custom" of genital mutilation done to children is next to be forbidden. You can still do it, at 18, but yr parents should not be able to decide for you. Not against jews/muslims, just in favor of childrens rights. Scandinavia is front running on this one.
A few dozen women in a country of 8.5 million do not need a law, especially one that doesn't really do anything for the victims, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26380029
(I'm a woman. I've had a college class in Women's History. FWIW.)
Which totally misses the point. You shouldn't have been importing burqua if women were already were allowed to go outside without it.
Additionally, one way to spread religion is to be tolerant of the existing culture of the people you are hoping to spread the religion to. This is Christianity is associated with a lot of holidays that have seemingly inane and random traditions, such as Easter and Easter Bunnies and hiding Easter eggs.
What on earth do bunnies and hiding eggs have to do with each other, much less the risen Christ? Not much, but it's some pagan set of traditions that got tolerated by the Christian church and that's how you have bunnies and hidden eggs all wrapped up with the risen Christ.
It's kinda sad that so many supported this and I'm happy that this wide ban would (probably...) be unconstitutional in Germany.
I don't even know how you get the leftists in there but at this point I'm too afraid to ask...
But your solution is to implement a law which punishes the victim, rather then doing anything about their presumed victimizer.
If the women who didn't want to wear the covering didn't want to wear it, what is stopping them from simply not doing it to start with? The answer of course is husband's, brothers, family etc. and probably that they'd be recognized in their community.
But this is someone's religion - a fair bit more important to them then the laws of the state in a lot of cases. So you haven't answered how you're going to protect those women from being targeted and forced to simply never leave the house, if they are being targeted by people who are forcing them to do something they don't want to.
Your law offers no solution to this - and again - implements itself by targeting the apparent victims it proposes to protect with punishment.
Setting aside that the government can stay the hell out of what I choose to wear, this is just a monumentally stupid approach to anything.
To do so creates conflict where there should be none, which is against the very purpose of a state.
At minimum, show the non-religious benefits of doing (or not doing) a thing and why it is relevant for the individual. Don’t punish the victim for doing the thing; if someone must be punished, make it the person imposing the action.
That's only slightly better than getting a fine. If gov would run a ad campaign / school program with "making women wear burka is bad" then the victims would still be the ones to suffer because it's still directed at the way of life as they know it.
This is about swiss nationality and customs. Not about women's rights.
Just like you don't go to your greek neighbor's dinner party wearing a turkish flag, there are things you don't do when you are the guest at someone else's party.
The burka represents a lot of very nasty things, in countries that the overwhelming majority (60%) believe 911 was totally OK and beheading or stoning minorities is OK.
The fact is, you don't frown on people because they are spitting on some ideal of freedom. You frown of them because they don't get the basic rules of decency.
My house. My rules.
There are countries in Europe that are majority Muslim (Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania) where nobody thinks that, and where any kind of face cover is totally up to the choice. Turkey isn't that extreme either. Neither is Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, etc etc.
Why don't people ever think of those and jump straight to the Middle East? There are just as many Muslims living in India as there are in the Middle East.
Have you ever been to the beach? Have you noticed that in many western countries, all the men have bare chests and all the women are covering their breasts? Does this custom limit women's rights? Providing that women have the same legal right as men to go bare chested, as far as I can tell no rights are being infringed.
But maybe you disagree, do you think a law banning the wearing of bikinis by women would be a victory for women's rights?
> Until 1999, the Constitution mandated that no canton could have more than one representative on the Federal Council. Until 1987, the place of origin was used to determine which canton a Federal Councilor was from. After 1987, the place of residence (or, for councilors who were previously members of the Federal Assembly or of a Canton's legislative or executive body, the canton from which they were elected) became the determinant factor. Nothing prevented candidates from moving to politically expedient cantons, though, and the rule was abandoned in 1999. Since then, the Constitution has mandated an equitable distribution of seats among the cantons and language regions of the country, without setting concrete quotas. Whenever a member resigns, he/she is generally replaced by someone who is not only from the same party, but also the same language region. In 2006, however, Joseph Deiss, a French Swiss, resigned and was succeeded by Doris Leuthard, a German-speaking Swiss, and in 2016, Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, German-speaking, was succeeded by Guy Parmelin, a French Swiss.
Since it's not done by popular vote, political games in that process are rare or just not excessive. The people trust the parliament with the process of electing their leaders, you better shouldn't fail them. So they mostly elect according to the current concordance.
"In 1991 following a decision by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland, Appenzell Innerrhoden (AI) became the last Swiss canton to grant women the vote on local issues."
Notice how it was a court decision, not a result of the political process. I'd say 1991 is a bit too late to have full voting rights for women.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl...
What I admire about the Swiss is how they live and let live - they may disagree with the neighbour, but let them be.
Please.
The idea you’re dismissing is that of allowing small groups of people rule themselves which does mean some will use unconventional ways they consider best. Note that the Apenzellers didn’t hinder anyone who disagreed to leave or refuse to trade with them. They also didn’t force their way onto others.
Switzerland was once just a bunch of small independent nations in a military alliance, which allowed them decentralisation and having multiple competing systems, without everyone having to do it one way. If you have that, you must agree that your neighbour may live in a way you disagree with - but in exchange they will let you live in a way they disagree with, as I’m sure many from Apenzell think of the Züricher.
I imagine the Apenzellers argued that the job of the state is military protection. Conscription means the state forces you to give your life for it, and voting rights for conscripts means soldiers will only go to wars they collectively agree with, effectively ruling out wars of aggression. That’s how it was in my country, but I’m not familiar enough with Apenzell (except for their cheese) to talk about their history in this depth.
So I found your comment disingenuous and that's why I left a sarcastic remark, not aligned to HN rules sure, but yeah I did it. Also, if you think HN is an excellent place and not tainted, I have no words.
Edit: Grammar, wording.
HN is not perfect, but it’s far from the norm online regarding good faith rational discussion, and I’ve certainly witnessed people here accepting and learning facts and from rational arguments.
My point is that while the majority of Swiss cantons decided to not have gender restrictions on voting, they allowed Apenzell to keep being the weird one, and in response the people of Apenzell don’t force their way onto others. If I don’t want my neighbour to tell me how to run my household, I must also not force them. Apenzell didn’t force their way into the Züricher.
Although in the end, the people of Apenzell were forced to change their way.
You and I probably agree that a 12yo should not have the right to decide what the state should do with its might, but the argument is the same regarding how the legal voting population of this tiny state of 16k citizens decide to expand who gets to vote in their local elections.
What I say is that I’m impressed by the federal government of Switzerland for allowing even such a tiny group such self determination to select who can vote in local elections - until the UN forced them to conform in 1991 that is. I think this is why they don’t have civil wars when they disagree - they instead let others do their thing and the cantons run their competing systems simultaneously.
Regarding your question whether I would think it was ok to have a Swiss canton where local government was ran by one person, it’d be ridiculous but I would not think it’s right to use force to stop it, unless that local government hindered anyone from leaving. This is at least, as you have identified, the logical conclusion of the argument I am making, and the Swiss did until 1991. In reality no single person would likely run it well, and it would end up an economic disaster, and sooner or later change. Instead of coercion letting a hundred seeds grow, before separating the wheat from the chaff
And if the simplest solutions to problems of governance become violence, rather than the system itself, then you have failed at the main purpose of government.
Firstly "accepting a law" implies - in western liberal democracies - a legislative process in which a law is proposed and accepted by some kind of parliament. This is not what happened here - in Switzerland, laws can be given to the population directly by non-parliamentary, non-governmental organisations in referenda, which then become binding. The law you are referring to was accepted by the general Swiss population with about 51% of the votes yesterday.
2. The law is not specifically forbidding women particularly forbidding to wear burkas. It forbids anyone to hide their faces when in public (with the exceptions of traditional customs, e.g. during carnival season). The basic idea behind this is that in a free society, we meet each others face to face. This generally good idea was abused by right-wingers to point out that this prevents visible Islamisation of an ultimately christian-conservative country, and by left-wingers to imply it was sexist and islamophobic.
3. Men and women can still wear whatever they like ... in private. In public, all societies have acceptable clothing standards. Try going out wearing nothing but three straps of leather and a gimp mask in front of a school, anywhere in the world, and see what happens.
A little tyranny of the majority is not always a bad thing.
You can read this in a positive light or a negative light. I know a guy who had that surgery done as an adult and it was incredibly painful and took a while to fully heal. I want to say it was almost a month. You could certainly argue that it's a lifetime of pain if it's done and you don't like it but that's likely a slippery slope in some regard.
I can agree that we should probably be doing a better job of explaining to parents the pros and cons of each so they make more informed, realistic choices but some of the outrage rhetoric around circumcision is a bit much.
Medical science is very clear about both male and female genital mutilation: lots of risk and potential harm, not real benefits.
And this does not grow back like nails and hair. It's not a fashion. It's literally putting a knife in your baby because some old culture prescribes it. No problem with that: just do it when the kid reaches the age of consent.
Freedom of religion may not constitutionally compete with bodily integrity (nor with freedom of expression (blasphemy)).
Imho that was the deciding part.
If it's the latter, that's a reason for them to seek help from the authorities.
This is more of a tangent, but I would contest the idea that "accepting a law" implies that it is passed by a parliamentary body. This was maybe true in the 1800s, but not today when plenty of western liberal democracies have some form of direct democracy with electoral referendums on important issues. Some (e.g. California) have a system roughly comparable to Switzerland, although it's obviously at the state level in the case of CA.
The Swiss rule their house, and let others rule theirs, and this is what I mean with living and letting live.
Google returned zero results– did you misspell it? Google usually can't find documents for misspelled rare words
But that's what makes this country so great. We take our divisions, within cantons, and leverage them for positive externalities to (accidentally) benefit the greater good.
In CH, every very canton sets their own citizenship policy. Its not a coincidence. Did you hear about the woman that's been living in Zug, and been denied citizenship for years? Why? Because she's annoying. She doesn't respect her neighbor's customs. That's literally why. Yes! Our canton can't even agree between about who can be a citizen, and who may not! But we argue far more... and it won't make the papers. We argue about the standard size of doors, whether we can vote electronically, whether a free trade agreement with andorra should be allowed. Etc etc
This means, big project ambitions get cut down to size, and few grand things if any, get done at the federal level. But this is glorious: it is very hard for regulations to become calcified within the state apparatus.
So, while spain sends soldiers to die in Afghanistan, or the UK wastes decades of development on a grand EU project, or US citizens get spied on by their own govt via Patriot Act.... CH is just sitting pretty, doing its thing. Arguing about every little detail to exhaustion.
The best thing that could happen to us, is to remain just as we are. I welcome the next 800 years of peace and economic development.
The good thing that came out from it is that I realized that even Switzerland's central bank cannot be trusted, and moved to Bitcoin. I never looked back.
So in summary - The country can only do so much before the big guns aimed at it take their pound of flesh.
I am not sure the central bank is faultless in the example you cite, however, appreciate that we live in a world where other powerful people are not interested in the well being of swiss banking customers.
At the same time I was used to the trains and trams being precise by the second in Zurich (I loved taking the train to work every day), and everything being predictable, that’s why it was a wake-up call for me.
Switzerland can afford to do this because it's surrounded by countries that protect it from the real world. It doesn't have a real foreign policy because it doesn't have to.
>The best thing that could happen to us, is to remain just as we are. I welcome the next 800 years of peace and economic development.
That's not up to you. As I've said earlier, you're lucky to be surrounded by countries with bigger fish to fry as long as Switzerland toes the line.
They remain independent because they are a mountainous country that set its defenses up cleverly so that any invasion would be a pyrrhic victory at best.
Nazi Germany did not invade Switzerland, because Switzerland was actually more useful as a neutral state for Nazi Germany to exchange gold for commodities, for spying and Switzerland produced militiary equipment for Nazi Germany anyway.
Switzerland didn't end up getting divided between Germany and Italy thanks to the Red Army hurtling more humans west than the Wehrmacht could supply bullets east. Swiss munitions production wouldn't be risked.
And yet, Switzerland's nationalised train network is one of the most extensive and effective in the world.
How did that happen?
> How did that happen?
Two hypothesis:
a) The railroad net in Switzerland is fairly small when compared to Germany.
b) The numbers in the punctuality statistics are skewed. For example, once a train from Germany is late and wants to cross the border to Switzerland (e.g. Freiburg-Basel crossing), it is put on hold and has to wait until it falls into the next swiss train slot, entering Switzerland "on time". In Germany, this would be counted as a delay.
Source: Lived in Switzerland for a while.
>While European rail operators such as French SNCF and Spanish Renfe have emphasised the building of high-speed rail, SBB has invested in the reliability and quality of service of its conventional rail network.
As a Brit I'd probably prefer that to £100bn on HS2 and god knows what on the proposed Boris Burrow.
The executive council is elected by the parliament and also contains candidates that haven't been member of that parliament. This election takes part "seat by seat", so every member has to be explicitly re-elected.
If the proposal had been for the government to issue and control the identities, it may well have passed.
Ironically, there's a >50% chance that the solution will entail 1) privately hosted platforms like AWS and 2) privately hosted support services and 3) privately written core modules (McKinsey business strategy, Accenture implemented etc.) and 4) at least some privately contracted IT people to manage the solution.
There's no reason to believe the gov. will make a more robust, scalable and secure solution that other entities.
A better approach might even be to mandate very specific identity protocols, and then allow citizens to chose their own identity provider among those that fit the regulatory requirements and oversight.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Post
It's owned by gov. and effectively independent. They could be an identity provider. They are already close to being able to do whatever need be done.
Having to create new government bureaucracies to do things is hard.
That would be in the US, with it's shit managment and governance culture of no expertise being required. The Wwiss are explicitly rejecting such willy-nilly privatization; did you read the article?
> There's no reason to believe the gov. will make a more robust, scalable and secure solution that other entities.
Again this is US ideology about US government. In another places they have something closer to actual democracy, a robust civil service, and an awareness that some things are too important to risk the profit motive sliding to rent-seeking.
> A better approach might even be...
I actually agree with you here. The next step after centrally planning how electronic identity should work is to realize many things don't need to require an "official one true personhood" surrogate key, and can make due with something weaker and more friendly to anonymity. The same functioning society that can figure out devolved cantons and federated cooperatives would be excellently prepared to figure that out.
It improves security through the reduction in the scope of harm and eliminating single points of failure. If someone compromises your Candy Crush login they can't drain your bank account.
> and raises the thirst for more intensive surveillance to counter the inefficiency with which the data is used. (Consider the talk after 9/11 on the FBI and CIA not sharing info, and then we get the Patriot Act.)
Your argument in favor of centralized ID is that otherwise nefarious spies will lobby in favor of something equivalent to centralized ID so they can correlate everything? That's the argument against it.
"Security through ad-hoc redundancy" is going to replace one possible-good auth systems with a gazillion shity ones that no one has the budget or interest to secure. It's a greater attack service.
> It improves security through the reduction in the scope of harm and eliminating single points of failure. If someone compromises your Candy Crush login they can't drain your bank account.
No, by all accounts FBI and CIA still hate each other and keep secrets. What we got is more surveillance (NSA dragnets), not more efficient use of the data they already have.
Or we could just not do that anymore and still not have centralized authentication.
> "Security through ad-hoc redundancy" is going to replace one possible-good auth systems with a gazillion shity ones that no one has the budget or interest to secure. It's a greater attack service.
You mean attack surface. But that's the trade off.
Because none of them are actually secure. Even when you have a full time security team, there are still vulnerabilities. Before the attacker had to find a vulnerability at the DMV, then start over at the bank, then start over at every company's file server. Now instead the attacker only has to find one in the central authentication system and they get everything at once. Even if there aren't as many vulnerabilities, if there is even one, you're screwed beyond comprehension across all systems everywhere.
On top of that, widespread use cuts the other way. Suppose the system was originally deployed using sha1. That starts looking pretty weak so you begin the decade-long process of transitioning literally everyone to a system using something else. Then suddenly sha1 gets completely broken beyond all hope, but you can't stop using it because 15% of people haven't migrated away yet and that's too much of the world to abruptly cut off.
Whereas in the decentralized system only 15% of things would be vulnerable because the other 85% had already migrated and disabled sha1, and the important stuff like banks who have their own security teams would be in the 85%.
More to the point, there are other ways to reduce vulnerabilities without centralization. Use simpler, more stable software from vendors who spend more time on security and less time on feature bloat. Restrict local services to local users so they're not exposed to the internet. Use defense in depth so that a single vulnerability is not enough but the expense of finding five stackable vulnerabilities is uneconomically large relative to the value of compromising an individual system.
Whereas the only way to avoid the ominously large scope of compromise of centralized authentication is to decentralize it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Documents_Act_2010
I've been formulating my thinking around it and I'm starting to think that this is some sort of new-age "luddism" at play, coupled with some odd distrust of government for this particular problem, as if government is trustable elsewhere.
Verification is done by third-parties in conjunction with government data. At the moment it’s only used for government services, but there has been talk for half a decade about expanding it to the private sector.
Indeed as you say, a subgroup of the largest Swedish private banks own the ID system in Sweden - for profit, and without any serious democratic oversight.
Edit: I forgot to add that the system allows these private banks to see into almost every aspect of a person’s life: where they shop, where they are, who shares their household and so on. Almost every aspect of a Swede’s life can and is tracked by this system.
Every time someone identifies themselves with this system, it costs the retail merchant or service a non-trivial amount of money. Because it’s effectively a private monopoly, that price is set by the banks, and often involves a lot of secret horse-trading behind closed doors (I’ve been involved with some aspects of this in the past).
The secret negotiations also include terms that are not open to public scrutiny. One example, is that the merchant or service isn’t allowed to blame BankID for any problems such as downtime or any other technical problems.
btw I’m curious how you get all your receipts digitally. There are some services such as Kivra in Sweden, but they definitely don’t cover all stores.
BankID doesn't store any information, and I have no problem that the stores I'm a member in store my shipping history.
I think you are overstating the scale of the surveillance. I don't think the different entities share data with each other.
Edit: try live in a country like Switzerland once you have gotten use to all interaction being online. It's horrible.
Edit2: actually other stores provide digital receipts without Kivra. You just have to be a member.
Edit3: This has nothing to do with patriotism, there are many things that I don't like about Sweden. But the fact that we have taken digitalisation seriously since the 90s is something I think is great.
I work with systems that use BankID identification, and know for a fact that you are wrong, because many (though not all) of the data-points collected by the banks can be retrieved for payment.
For instance, if you just logged-in with the service I work with, I can retrieve your full-name, birthdate, your marital status, name of your spouse, their birthdate, any children and their IDs and names, where you live, your home and cellphone number, and many many other data points.
From a service owned by a small group of private banks.
Remember that personal ID numbers are not a big secret in Sweden as well, and still we don't see any big problem with that.
Those things have nothing to do with BankID and everything to do with the government person-number database. They were available as open data before BankID existed
i think the state of things is just already quite efficient without such an id. thus people are not willing to give that data away to a private monopoly. imo for good reason.
Once these systems are in place they will be under the control of the great unelected, the civil servants, it will not be the subject of any political party policy again and so how exactly will you assert the voting based democratic control upon it?
'Cost' is going to be a part of the equation, there is no avoiding that, but access can be regulated, as can oversight (i.e. transparency) with respect to transactions.
And: "merchant or service isn’t allowed to blame BankID for any problems such as downtime or any other technical problems"
Will Swiss private individuals or businesses be able to 'sue' the Swiss government for downtime? Like late trains? Invariably not. They'll just get the service they get and that's it.
Sweden provides a pragmatic demonstrable example of what can work, it shouldn't be dismissed.
My gripe with BankID is that it's a monopoly and it's tied to having a bank account. It's easy to fall into the cracks. For example, I know first hand more than one foreigner that moved to Sweden and couldn't do basically anything online because they didn't have BankID and couldn't get one because they needed to visit a bank branch and have an appointment, and they couldn't get one without having to wait for 2 months or more (partly due to COVID-19).
The system could be much better if there were many accredited providers of digital ID (this is somewhat already the case, there's Freja now) and there was a mandated standard protocol that the accredited providers implement, so you could have the ID from any provider and that ID would work on any site. The latter is not the case to the best of my knowledge: although many government websites are supporting Freja, most private ones like Kivra or Klarna and of course the banks only support BankID. This is not great.
It also forces you to have an Android or iPhone, and basically have a relationship with these foreign tech giants and accept their policies in order to be a "digital citizen" in your own country. If they ban your account for any reason, and you lose access to the store without any recourse, and you can't install the app, you are basically SOL. This is a trickier problem to solve, and it's not exclusive to BankID by any means, but if there was competition it would be more likely (at least on paper) that somebody might provide an alternative.
My take is that indeed: the system mostly works, it is convenient, but it's not perfect by any means. There's plenty of room for improvement. Just having real competition instead of a de facto monopoly would fix most issues.
For me this is mind-boggling. Could you please elaborate or link to a resource on that? Do the respective apps work on rooted phones? Regarding the Bank ID: I worked as an intern in Sweden in the 2002 and this sucked already then. As a foreigner you got an ID that somehow "almost" matched the normal way the number was generated (an offset on the YOB if I remember correctly). It was always an interesting experience to find out if an office/application supported such foreigner ID or not. Hopefully this got fixed in the meantime. After all my yearly letter from pensionsmyndigheten is at least partially translated in multiple languages. Good for me as I lost almost all my Swedish.
> Could you please elaborate or link to a resource on that?
Not sure what exactly you're looking for. There are 3 types of BankID: "on file", "on card" and "mobile". The first two are seldomly used and not all banks offer it (mine doesn't). I believe that most sites only support the mobile version. The mobile app cannot be sideloaded on iOS, and requires Google Play Services on Android. (For now it works on rooted phones. For now.)
Although technically minded people can still find a way to sideload the Android app without having to have a Google account, this is far from being mainstream. For most people you have to agree with Apple or Google's terms and have an account with them. If you're banned and lose access to the store, you can't install BankID any longer. It's not fun to live in Sweden and not have access to BankID.
I don't like the idea that you have to establish an asymmetrical relationship with a foreign conglomerate to be able to identify yourself in your own country and use digital services.
I think that having competition at least opens up the possibility that one of the players will introduce a mechanism that does not rely (solely) on Apple/Google technology. For example, a simple hardware token could work.
Regarding IDs for foreigners, I believe that the EU cracked down on Sweden and at least the government websites allow other European digital IDs nowadays. At least the option shows up in the list of authentication choices, but since I can't use that flow I cannot state how well it works in practice.
>I don't like the idea that you have to establish an asymmetrical relationship with a foreign conglomerate to be able to identify yourself in your own country and use digital services.
The general acceptance of this in Swedish society boggles my mind. But hey, I am not a Swedish citizen, so it's not my job to tell people what to do.
I love my country but the continuing parceling out of everything to private companies has been greatly negative to many public services. See, as an example, the DOT syndicate, which has made it prohibitively expensive to commute via public transit (why in God's name is it cheaper to travel to Germany than take a train from Copenhagen to Odense?) or the bridge to Sweden we're still paying truly insane toll fees for despite having paid for its construction years ago.
In Sweden, you are absolutely reliant on private banks. This gives those select few banks a position of power which they can - and do - abuse.
It's convenient, but it's an absolute travesty that we've left such an essential part of digital infrastructure to big banks.
So do I. In Switzerland.
Yeah, it really works fine. Fortunately, it wasn't too difficult to find another bank that didn't want to blackmail me, but the system has such obvious flaws that it shouldn't exist.
To make matters worse, the current chairman of Swedbank is Göran Persson, a previous prime minister. I fear that there is some ugly corruption involved here.
Try to have anything to do with the government without a bank account. The processes and system are today so integrated that many aspect of being a citizen are today impossible beyond giving the power of attorney to someone who do have a bank account and then let them do it. (Not hypothetical as this was the recommendation given by försäkringskassan).
I would be much more happy with the system if the government operated a customer facing bank as a fallback, one which laws dictate so that all citizen critical functions are guarantied without a customer contract between a profit seeking company and a customer. It does not need to deal with loans, or give people interests, or handle stocks or any other aspects usually associated with banks. It just need to do basic banking for which everything else depend on in a cashless and internet based society.
Until then, what we have is the merge of private banks, beholden to non-elected owners, and government. It is very hassle free as long one don't mind the soft version corporatocracy.
The US has an incoherent assemblage of spare parts for an ID system and it's been years since I've seen the inside of a physical bank.
You have bank credentials and use them with with the bank. You have post office credentials and use them with the post office. This is far better from a security and privacy standpoint that any kind of centralized ID. If someone steals your post office credentials they can't drain your brokerage account, ransomware your employer's cloud services in your name and take out a home equity loan against your house and convert it into Bitcoin.
Centralized identity is a bug, not a feature.
The payment processor, in turn, just needs to know that you're authorized to draw on that account, which they know because you have the credentials established when it was opened.
Functionally none of this actually uses your name for anything useful. Even giving it to them at all is, at best, a password reset method, and there are a million other ways to do that which don't require a centralized ID.
(said by a jealous French citizen)
As you said overwhelming majority, are there any countries that have direct democracy or come close?
EDIT: In practice, larger cities in California seem to have a comparable number of referendums as well. Unfortunately, they're all bundled into an election every 1-2 years rather than the Swiss system of elections every 3-4 months. This has its upsides, mainly in turnout which is still low in much of Switzerland, but also means many "less-notable" issues often aren't discussed in CA to the same degree that they seem to be here.
And of course, CA still has daylight savings time because this proposition required two thirds vote.
Taiwan (the Republic of China) is another jurisdiction with direct democracy elements. Direct democratic rights have been in their constitution since 1940s, but they weren't seriously implemented until 2000s. The exercise of these rights is still relatively new in Taiwan.
I suggest you google the definition.
It's definitely a bad idea, but just because something is a bad idea does not magically make it facism.
If you think stuff like this being okay in the hands of a government then you might want to reexamine that line of reasoning, given that most governments are barely any better than corporations at the end of the day...
The companies (mostly banks and insurances) lobbying for the e-ID have already implemented a similar project called "Swiss-ID" which was supposed to be used across a majority of service providers. From the point of view of the user, it looked and behaved a lot like OAuth.
What I am afraid of is that the e-ID will be implemented in a similar way, and data will be stored centrally. That's a big difference to the classic physical ID we have, because while the government controlled some data centrally (name, year of birth etc), no information about banking or illnesses was ever stored in a central place.
If there was an indication about how the e-ID was going to be implemented, and if there was a reasonable effort to make sure data is being kept isolated (e.g. by issuing a physical tokens and encrypting the data with them) I might have voted yes. But there was no such information, and I expected the worst.
Article 13: Right to Privacy
1. All persons have the right to receive respect for their private and family life, home, and secrecy of the mails and telecommunications.
2. All persons have the right to be protected against the abuse of personal data.
Also the constitution can be only changed by voting.
This should not come as a surprise either, since it's essentially the implementation of Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Where it usually goes wrong, is with the interpretation of the words "privacy" and "communication". Also, governments have a habit of defining exceptional situations in which these laws can be violated in the name of some supposedly higher purpose (e.g. national security).
Strictly speaking, the UDHR is rather clear about one thing: the declared human rights are inalienable (meaning, they can neither be taken away nor be given away freely), so all the exceptions are essentially bullshit excuses. Those should not exist in the first place, at least not according to the "inalienably" part of "inalienable human rights".
Additionally, there is no law/treaty that explains why modern technologies should not be subject to Article 12. While plenty of governments/businesses would like to convince people otherwise, almost everything we do online is strictly speaking telecommunication of some sort or another.
The sad truth is that pretty much all of today's online privacy issues are strictly speaking in violation of the UDHR. There is just way too much at stake for businesses and governments alike for them to ever acknowledge it. It doesn't change that they are blatantly violating a treaty they signed, ratified and should be upholding though.
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The alternative "right to privacy" has been found by other cases in the generic 9th amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.
One reason for this has broad applicability: Even inalienable human rights can be in conflict with each other. So solutions must weight them against each other, but will ultimately violate one or more of the clashing rights.
The UDHR also recognizes the that even the article 3 "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person" is limited as in so far people may be arrested (and therefore deprived of their freedom) by giving the explicit article 9 "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile." Again, with the arbitrary qualifier.
I believe, recognizing that even these funamental rights clash with each other is important. Often I feel that online discussion have each side pick the one in favor of their position and ignoring that other rights are in conflict with that position.
But as you said, it is also important to recognize that there are bullshit excuses.
[1] https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ind...
My main reason for not bringing up the internal complications of the UDHR was to not add confusion, but you are completely right about how some of these rights can conflict.
You are equally right about the "arbitrary" part. However, when it comes to today's trade in personal profiles and governments scooping up everything they can get their hands on (legalized or not), I very strongly believe that all of it rather clearly fits the classification of "arbitrary".
I will even agree with that I picked an (extreme) side. But maybe not because I can't see nuance or because I ignore (at least not in private) what conflicts with my position.
It's more about being sick and tired of listening for decades to blatant privacy abusers arrogantly (and incorrectly) claiming that what they do is legal .. and how we just all should accept this new reality. It sure didn't help to see governments either buying that bullshit or simply not deal with it because of how it could harm their own (surveillance) interests.
Considering the now obvious rampant abuse and how far I believe we have veered off from how all this probably should have developed (in an ideal world), I'm convinced that the time for being nice and nuanced about all this has long passed.
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” ― Benito Mussolini
Note: such a merger does not have to be overtly voluntary. It can also be a government seemingly dictating corporations or corporations covertly running a government. It's all about the two somehow joining forces (even if only because of shared interests and possibly still for different reasons), especially when against the interests of most citizens.
Arbitrary doesn't just mean treating individuals differently (discrimination) without a proper legal justification. It also applies to any government or business that overextends their legal mandate, by subjecting people (even if equally) to limitations that have no legal basis.
I'm well aware that this rather quickly conflicts with some almost religious belief that anything can be limited through contracts, EULAs and TOSes (as long as its done voluntarily).
When people have alternatives, without such limitations, one can argue that people still have a freedom to do things differently. When a product or service becomes some kind of necessity, or not using it somehow becomes a personal limitation of its own, then such contractual limitation essentially have just created a new "law" outside of the only official process that is supposed to govern the creation of laws.
Businesses who create rules that essentially function like "private law", and governments who create laws without proper legal mandate/justification, are guilty of arbitrary behavior. Not because they treat individual people differently, but because their treatment all people is itself an arbitrary choice. As in, it lacks legal justification and goes beyond the legal authority that such a government or business has.
I really wish the US had this. Here, even simple acts like registering to vote or getting a driver license, bank account, credit card means your personal residence gets leaked to spammers, scammers, data brokers, and eventually, stalkers.
There really should be laws saying that personal addresses cannot be given to third parties without explicit, optional, opt-in consent.
As much as I think voter turnout is important, making personal addresses accessible to the public crosses the line for me.
Most places that ask for utility bills will accept a phone bill or insurance bill or some such which you can have arranged to be sent to that address.
I'd be interested to know if there are similar services that are cheaper and ideally less well-known than UPS but equally reliable. Delivery to my real address with the ability to trust them with my real address would also be cool to have.
BTW -- if you have cash to burn, I'd think that renting a cheap studio somewhere that you don't actually live in (and as a bonus, can use as a storage unit, or sublease to someone if the lease allows) would be cheaper and more peace-of-mind than dealing with property taxes, crime, pests, and other issues around an uninhabitable house in your name.
USPS maintains a very immaculately curated list of CMRAs (Commercial Mail Receiving Agents). It's not hard because they need to register with USPS in order to receive mail on behalf of customers who pay them for mail-receiving service. USPS is allowed to deny them mail delivery if they refuse to register, and does.
Every place that wants to know your residential address, and insists that it is actually residential, checks the address you provide against this list.
Side note: I knew a woman who bought a storefront that had previously been a mailboxes-etc type place. It was a complete nightmare for her, none of the banks or insurers or credit card companies would believe that was her business' physical address because it was on that list. Apparently it takes 1-2 years to fall off the list. Eventually she had to switch to a small local bank and have the bank manager come to physically inspect the location so they could override the databroker software.
> renting a cheap studio somewhere
That's an ongoing recurring cost. Also nobody will rent a place unless it's (somewhat) inhabitable; buying an uninhabitable toxic dump is actually cheaper than renting anything that can be advertised as inhabitable.
Last of all, I am completely fed up with landlords insisting on credit checks. The data brokers exploit this like you wouldn't believe. That's why they have such perfectly accurate residential addresses for all renters.
> peace-of-mind than dealing with property taxes, crime, pests,
Property taxes are beyond easy. You don't even need to receieve the bill! The amount you owe is a matter of public record, and on the web in almost every jurisdiction. Once a year: look it up, buy a postal money order with cash, write the parcel number on it, mail it, done. Property taxes are also based on the value of the property, so for a toxic dump the taxes are tiny.
Crime and pests don't matter if you don't visit the location. Take the mailbox off the front of the house after closing so no mail can be delivered there by accident.
Definitely buy it through an LLC so that long-tail events (it burns down taking the neighbor's house with it, kids break in and injure themselves, etc) don't come back to you.
Technically counties issue "situses" and the USPS adopts those as delivery addresses. Most/all counties won't hand out a situs without a building permit and completed inspection. USPS can create addresses without county situses (for example, military installations or federal hydroelectric projects) but I don't think they will do it in any situation that's applicable here.
Considering I'm in the bay area, land alone is actually expensive here so that doesn't really work. Is there any way to buy this unhabitable dump in a remote area and have the mail picked up and delivered to me? Are there any businesses doing this?
I'm not sure how you'd deal with vehicle licensing. In WA, all the paperwork I've received has been marked "Do Not Forward".
I need to receive everything from packages to ballots to credit cards to legal documents.
A lot depends on what you think you're guarding against and how many compromises you're willing to make. For example, you can't actually buy a house and remain anonymous unless you set up some shell company which I assume is expensive and probably has tax consequences.
I agree that buying a foreclosed property sounds like a massive headache and doesn't even really solve the problem of having to give your address to someone if you want anything delivered.
It is not. Under $100/year in most states.
> and probably has tax consequences.
It doesn't. The LLC has no income (assuming you're not renting that "decoy house"), so there's nothing to report to the IRS.
> doesn't even really solve the problem of having to give your address to someone if you want anything delivered.
That's what a PO Box or rental mailbox is for.
Just keep in mind that you won't be able to hide the fact that it isn't your residence from the data brokers or anyone else who demands a "residential" address and is willing to spend a few dollars verifying that.
Also, what do people usually do if they don't have a residential address? (specifically for example people who live in RVs or off-grid but maintain a modern lifestyle with driver licenses and credit cards and all)
There aren't as many of those as you might think, and they've all had this problem in a big way since the PATRIOT act nonsense happened.
Most of them give a relative's address as their residential address.
I'm aware that he's been the target of at least one mugging attempt, and I think he even maintains a list of people who were robbed as a result of being high-profile early adopters of bitcoin.
But the CIA? Are you sure aliens weren't involved?
Swiss discretion is not only a marketing tactic, it is also a good habit many people keep.
I would hope that schools teach "don't publish anything you don't want shared" that would be smarter.
If I post an add in a newspaper, many copies are sold, and then someone copies my add that should be expected. The Internet is one big newspaper it's a public forum and privacy shouldn't be expected or assumed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...
There was so much misinformation around mostly due to lack of technical understanding (e.g. "it's a digital passport!") and the (yellow) press heavily pushed for a yes.
It’s usually free, but there’s also certified email (PEC) that costs from 5€ to 30€ per year. Also required by the government in some cases and also offered by a small number of companies.
Does Estonia offer their digital IDs directly?
Some services may offer alternative logins, but my guess is that they’ll be phased out like INPS is phasing out PIN-based logins.
Looks like anyone can become an e-resident and apply [1], I'm unsure if this extends to the e-identify cards also or if they're for Estonian nationals only. I remember previously that anyone could apply for one however you had to go to an Embassy to submit information and biometrics.
[0] https://e-estonia.com/solutions/e-identity/smart-id [1] https://e-resident.gov.ee/become-an-e-resident/
Why?
Every process that currently involves reams of paperwork (like the ~20 page tax declaration that is due this month - yikes) that can be done digitally instead saves the taxpayer or customer money.
And the Swiss do like their money.
Another example, comparing how digital COVID payments in South Korea were a lot simpler and faster than in paperwork-heavy Japan: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-20/in-virus-...
Tax offices are fully digital since at least 10 years. If you file with paper it‘s scanned and destroyed. Your local tax office receives all the documents digitally. Of course this could vary by canton.
It does. Zurich still sends me a thick envelope with the 20 pages and tells me to throw away 90% of it if I do my taxes digitally.
What they send out (and yes, in the canton of Zürich) is two A3 pages (printed on both sides) a form informing you how to extend sending it in and, most ironically, an A4 page informing, why they send out less paperwork
It's right in front of me. So feel free to prove me wrong.
Socialized health care? There's no such thing in Switzerland.
Sure, health insurance is mandatory. No question that it's heavily regulated (i.e. basic insurance can't rule you out or discriminate against you for pre-existing conditions).
But socialized health care? Give me a break.
> like the ~20 page tax declaration that is due this month
The actual declaration is covered by 4 basic pages. In addition there's a declaration of assets and a couple of helper pages for deductions.
You can download tax declaration software for free (at least in the canton of Zürich) and using it for your declaration takes all of 20 minutes.
It may be a bit more complex if you own real estate, or if some other complexities are involved.
You either don't have a clue or you're massively over-exaggerating for reasons, which elude me.
Most everything being decentralized maybe makes nationwide digitalization slower, but that is crucial aspect of the political system.
It has occured to me though that one thing that makes automation and digitalization of society "affordable" by comparison to human labor is -- skimping on security, building this giant house of insecure fragile IT. If we were to actually pay for reliable secure systems we probably couldn't afford the computers-replace-person-hours version either, not sure where that would leave us.
The USA-ians definitely like their money as much as the Swiss.
Because that is life in Switzerland.
But the fact is you won't be doing that anywhere near as much if the way of doing the errands works against seeing people as if it works for. Defaults matter, a lot.
Busywork and drugery should not be the foundation of social interaction. Period.
Maybe ZH does things better, but I still feel like it's a shame there is not more standardisation. I understand why politically this is difficult though with the independence of the cantons.
It should allow more security, because digital signature is harder to forge than previous physical securities. But also you could use them more easily in other countries, as it can be read by a computer, and not a human that speaks a finite set of languages.
Lastly, you could use them for authentication for various online and daily services, such as banking, taxes, creation of companies, digital signature,... that are said to save time on logistics.
Yet there are countries running 3072-bit RSA on Infineon chips, because their 3K keys are least broken. Discovery also entailed country-wide certificate revocation, which IIRC happened days if not weeks after the flaws were public, while the law states a digital signature has the same bearing as a physical one.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifiers
On the plus side all the lobbyist that were involved in this story have been recalled to order.
So much for the will of the people.
This is in part because no score is ever released related to prior delivery (ie, no central assessment record), and attempts to include it get tied up in process issues (ie, rights to respond, litigation) or claims it is subjective. It also overlaps with govt agency disfunction around scope and requirements and no govt manager wants a failed project, so everyone just sweeps them under the rug and keeps moving. It is crazy though, you are literally hiring the same HORRIBLE firms over and over.
What is PARAMOUNT is that you be willing spend absolute metric tons of UNPAID time responding to RFP's, have enough money in bank to lose 4 out of 5, be willing to go through 2 year RFP processes, be willing to agree to every item on the requirements lists filled with further buzzwords and "standards". This does NOT attract high performing companies, no competent engineer would even put up with this / sit through this. So you get body shop type consulting firms, using giant java framework and other solutions, and everything is insanely siloed.
The crazy pricing is often justified because the hassle in dealing with these contracts from a contract admin overhead can absolutely DWARF actual deliverables, and nothing has to be logical (and sometimes is not).
My recommendations here would be either:
a) just pay to bring stuff in house so you get cooperation, develop open source apps and prohibit any scope creep outside of absolute minimum needed until project is in operation. EVERY freaking agency hangs 100's of new requirements they never even used before onto these projects - solutions can be undeliverable and unusable as a result, for example 40 questions PER VACINNE SHOT here in California is the height of stupidity to make these idiots feel important.
b) pay for actual use / adoption, and let there be a somewhat free market. A lot of time the users of any govt system have ZERO input. Oddly, if they let agencies find their own solutions on a smaller scale, whatever you lose in "efficiency" by not having the megaproject (hint nothing - mega projects = disaster in govt land) you would see some natural winning solutions start to bubble up. I worked with an agency with a totally fantastic contract management / invoicing system, and I kept on wondering, holy hell, they actually got it right. I started to see other agencies use it in neighboring govts - it was great - people really liked it (super easy use, allowed users to do the google, Microsoft etc login even which is unheard of) and it was fast which is also rare.
But then someone convinced the head tech folks they should stomp on everything with the new and improved people. They actually had to roll back the mega project for another year (after years of dev) because it didn't even cover a fraction of what old systems easily did.
The reality is that you only hear about failed projects. When was the last time that you heard about taxes not being collected or welfare payments not being paid or SNAP cards not being refilled?
It’s all background activity, and those awful contractor companies are often responsible for material aspects of delivery.
And they're usually pretty competent, especially the few ones that work for the federal government.
for every single job you have to answer 30+ questions. no getting around it. my friend who is a vet just thinks this is normal. lol
No.
https://www.reuters.com/article/estonia-gemalto-idUSL8N1WD5J...
> Estonia's Police and Border Guard Board (PPA) said in a statement Gemalto had created private key codes for individual cards, leaving the government IDs vulnerable to external cyber attack, rather than embedding it on the card's chip as promised.
"Much cheaper" here means we might expect criminals to break the RSA key for an individual Estonian ID card for less than a million bucks, whereas by design this ought to be impractical at any plausible price. It doesn't mean your bored teenager can make a fake ID on his laptop on a Friday evening. As a practical matter it seems likely key officials & police could be bribed for less than a million bucks, but forging RSA signatures might still be desirable in some circumstances, and anyway of course the mere possibility of this happening ruins public trust in the scheme.
Estonia switched to P-384 keys on the same platform. Unlike choosing random RSA keys (which involve finding large primes) choosing a good P-384 key is trivial so there's no temptation to come up with clever but insecure algorithms to mint keys.
What's interesting about this flaw is that it only happens because the keys are minted on the Infineon device you own. But we know Estonia has historically had some weird incidents which are best explained by keys not being minted on device but instead burned into the ID card after being made (and potentially recorded) elsewhere. Estonia's laws establishing these cards are clear that mustn't happen (if it did the government can seamlessly impersonate any ID, including ID issued to citizens, non-citizen residents and diplomatic staff) but evidence suggests it did, at least a few times and at least on some older platforms.
Estonia's IDs are all public using a very different scheme to Certificate Transparency, since it assumes you trust the Estonian government to decide which IDs exist - but with similar effect, if anybody is minting bogus IDs there would be a smoking gun in the official public records of Estonia.
On the other hand if the government (or a government agency perhaps without wider knowledge) has copies of some or all keys, they would be able to decrypt messages sent to citizens/ residents using the embedded PKI. We would not necessarily have any public evidence that this was happening if indeed it was happening.
You should probably be confident in Estonian IDs as proof of someone's identity in the usual course of things, but it may be prudent not to rely on this to keep secrets from the Estonian government or its allies.
I think you may underestimate the system needed. Identity management is the tip of the iceberg: this needs to tie into any future digital currency, income taxes, property ownership, government benefits, and who knows what else. Any off-the-shelf product will need customization. I’m not saying it can’t be done.... it SHOULD be done. But not in 6 months.
> Identity management is the tip of the iceberg: this needs to tie into any future digital currency, income taxes, property ownership, government benefits, and who knows what else.
I'll put my shoe on my head if you can find me a private company that can do this in six months. Previously on HN: CDC website built by Deloitte at a cost of $44M is abandoned due to bugs (technologyreview.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25975110
1167 points by donsupreme 35 days ago
664 comments
There is no way it could be done in 6 months given any reasonable parameters you care to throw at it.
And we're talking about Italy, not some first rated technological paradise.
also, the government already owns all my data, from birth onward. the authentication system makes it so forgery is much harder from the officials themselves, so this protects me from that as well.
For how it is designed, there are a dozen companies that offer this service. The citizen can choose the one they trust more (there are some small differences between them; some require to pay a small fee; others require you to physically go to an office to be recognized; others offer you an app to login through a QR code...) BUT they are all required to implement industry-standard security. At one of my past jobs, many years ago, I had to implement this login system in a public portal. It was a mess (the technical specification was on a PDF written in bureocratic language) but shortly after a new team overtook the project and created a proper website with SDKs etc. To this day, the only known attacks to SPID were Phishing attacks, that require the user to do some dumb action on their side.
There's actually nothing new here: digital IDs were already a thing, corruption has always been a thing, and the referendum process worked correctly to remind the politicians who is in charge.
No they don't but I can see why you might think that.
ePassports (the ones with the stylised "chip" image on the cover) do have X.509 certificates baked into them. And ePassports do say "We are the government, and this is Jeff" (if you are Jeff) but that's not what the X.509 certificate says.
Each X.509 certificate is one of a relatively small number minted by your government which says "We are the government of country X and this is a public document signing key".
Then the passports all contain raw data (such as a photograph and summary information about their subject) with this certificate and a signature over the raw passport data that can be authenticated with the public signing key.
So there's an X.509 certificate but it isn't for Jeff, and there's data about Jeff, but it isn't in an X.509 certificate.
That 1% though, is going to have all the weird edge cases.
... I mean, as a French citizen who kind of wants my government to keep existing, I also agree with the statement you quote?
Our government's public-facing IT systems have gotten better over the last few years, but my default expectations for any new projects would still be for them to mess it up.
Of course, the problem is I'd also expect the average contractor to mess it up in very similar ways, for similar reasons.
So, like the US?
It's has all the modern postulates of liberty & governance that most countries are striving for without the "scam orchestration"
The University of Lucerne ran a study and came to the conclusion that there are around 20-30 women in all of Switzerland who wear a niqap or a burqa.
I would take the view that banning the form of your religious buildings (and implicitly, to your comment, being hostile to Muslims who in your response you seem to equate with a culture that destroys the possibility of liberty) seems more of a betrayal of the principle of liberty and freedom for all than allowing different people to pray and associate as they wish, providing they follow basic tenants of human law (not harming people etc).
Going back to GP's point, the deeper issue is that people thought this was worth writing in the constitution. Other countries apply such laws in different ways, so I don't think the Swiss direct democracy is to blame here.
A simple Google search shows that the referendum passed with 57% of the voters support, so that leaves us with a 43% who thinks it's a bad idea for one reason or another. Since around 5% of Switzerland is muslim, one could argue building minarets is not such a scandalous idea for Swiss voters.
OP seems to be suggesting that people should "do as the romans do", and I said while I agree with the general idea, his suggestion doesn't fit the case in hand.
In this case half of romans are verifiably not bothered [1] by the act of building minarets, then this simple act doesn't signal that people "go there without a degree of humility and willingness to adapt", in his words.
Or you could turn it around and say, if (having ability to) building minarets was such an unacceptable expectation to a point of painting one as a colonist, it wouldn't gather the support it gathered from the local community in the first place.
[1] to the extent of participating in a political process to explicitly disagree with the ban.
I've been seriously considering leaving the USA permanently because I'm having a difficult time reconciling my morals and ideals with the taxes I pay. Ballots and debates aren't enough. I'd rather vote with my taxes and my feet, and start helping a county I believe in.
(I'm not Norwegian btw.)
It also make any change, for the good or the bad, very very slow, which can be frustrating at times. So if stability is not high up on your list of life’s values it might not be the best place to be.
Do you admire denying women the vote until the end of the 20th century?
It would if the federal government was shrunk back to what it was designed to be in the first place and states where given actual governing power.
I agree there should be safeguards against a rogue or even non-rogue person modifying these records to hurt someone.
> having a central ID for each citizen at birth, and then a way to prove that you match that ID
This seems a trivial and no-brainer and yet you will be surprised how many Americans will be simply denied this sort of service after birth. Racist law makers would put severe restrictions on people they dont like. If they don't get this ID soon after birth they don't get anything. They will be illegals in their own country.
Entire song and dance around illegal immigration, e-verify and all that crap was needless if there was no concept of SSN.
The whole "centralized ID means your government will oppress minorities" narrative seems like a mostly american concept.
I imagine part of it is due with the US's particularly bad history with minorities, and part of it is a general defiance against any kind of centralization that also seems kind of unique to american culture.
Speaking as someone living in a country (France) that has had centralized ID for decades, it feels really weird to see people describing what a dystopian future American would become if it did that thing we do right now.
(and yes, ID card checks are used as an excuse for racial profiling; and the lack of an ID card is used to track down undocumented immigrants, and that's bad; but it's a symptom of other problems, and it's nowhere as bad as "centralized = black people are denied access to social services")
Authoritarian countries have combined a cashless society with 24/7 surveillance of all kinds to create a black mirror style social credit system.
None of this would be possible without first having a form of centralized identity. This will likely be coming soon to a democracy near you due to the level of state control it invites. Someone needs to get working on an ad blocker we can use in real life. I suspect it will be built around aluminum foil.
But for things where requiring an ID is already accepted (banking, etc) or inherently necessary (interacting with the government, like filing taxes), a robust, digital ID system would be much better than a paper-based system vulnerable to fraud and human error.
True. It is an American experience.
Different admins have harassed different Americans at different points in time. Jews, Blacks, Chinese, Indians (India) and so on. Donald Trump showed us just how much evil US admin can get on matters of paperwork. Since he could not legally stop legal immigrants from working, he changed rules and created such a long backlog that it takes now 24 months to renew some work permits which use to take 15 days 4 years ago. Immigrants were deeply hurt. He also adopted several tactics which can be called "voter suppression". He used ridiculous logic such as "extreme vetting" to deny visa approvals for 4 year old children of an already approved immigrant.
Trump admin harassed a lot of Hispanics born in border towns of USA, refusing to use their birth certificates as evidence of citizenship.
>it feels really weird to see people describing what a dystopian future American would become if it did that thing we do right now.
USA is much much larger and far diverse than France. It also does not have the groups who hate each other as Americans have. I highly doubt if there are any French politicians who bear certain hatred for specific groups.
I am not at all denying that centralized IDs are bad for everyone, but for Americans it is going to be pretty bad.
But few years ago this was definitely a problem and especially in border towns of Texas and Arizona.
But not just about brith certificates. You can look at legal immigrants. A lot of them are forced out of job because USCIS is taking their own sweet time of 24 months to approve their work permits. This means these legal immigrants have to quit their jobs, they can't drive as their driving license is expired and so on.
This is sheer caprice enabled by a hostile administration.
I am not against Americans having tighter immigration. Pass whatever tough laws you want and enforce them to hearts content. But when you have an admin that can be hostile to specific groups you have to be really suspicious of all government powers.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/politics/vote-march-4--2018_att...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
my bad !
I will elaborate and be "more thoughtful and substantive" as written in the guidelines, next time
I didn't know where to place the cursor, since the issue was inherently politic and not about technology, as the article states
But this article deserved political comments, nonetheless
It's understandable people fear Google/FB etc., but an entity contracted by the state to do digital ID services is not going to be selling your phone number if doing so would put them out of business and land them in jail.
Sadly, the notion of basic digital ID would be very useful for so many things and maybe even help with privacy if content providers switched to this kind id vs. social logins.
Ironically, these 'government IDs' may be a vanguard in the fight for privacy because they establish a privacy-based alternative that doesn't currently exist.
(Edit) There are already private institutions that manage ID data (Finance, Health) no our behalf and generally we are not concerned. (Although VISA is owned by banks and that's a concern). In Canada, they have temporarily allocated ID literally to the banking system - you can login to the gov. tax portal using your banking login. So, de-facto, the banks provide ID services to gov. already.
It's irrational populism. ID services are sensitive obviously, but governments already deal in such types of sensitive information and there's no reason 3rd parties can't manage those services with the right kind of oversight.
It's as though citizens have no understanding of how contracts, oversight and regulations work.
If the government requires certain parameters to be kept, they will be.
The notion that these ID providers are going to 'abuse the data' is conspiratorially absurd to the extent that basic information control is written into the process.
If the financial incentives for 'abuse' don't exist, then really it's a matter of operational capability and pragmatism, in which case, private sector is an ok choice, just as it is for so many other things.
The government could feasibly do it, but there's no reason it can't be outsourced.
It's a bit short-sighted.