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Comment by cycomanic | Hacker News Reader

I always discover how Estonia is really amazing for lots of technology things. AFAIK they are by quite a margin the most advanced country in Europe when in comes to egovernment services. Moreover my (admittedly outside) impression is that they often go for technologically sound solutions not the ones which some large lobby organisation pushed for. This is particularly remarkable considering how small the country is, and in stark contrast to the mess that is egovernment services in Germany the richest country in Europe.

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Probably because they're so small they're overlooked by the salespeople and lobbyists from the big corps. I imagine that helps a lot. In the UK there are plenty of smart people in Government who can and would build things in a sensible way (and sometimes they do!), but there are also legions of smooth talking salespeople who usually bend the ministers' ears more easily.

The self developed UK government online services tend to be pretty good (sometimes very good!). It's the stuff they outsource to government contractors whose CEOs play golf with government ministers that are universally terrible.

This "playing golf with government minister" should be called out for what it is: a probable or possible bribe. It won't be money in a brown paper bag but the result will be the same. It's endemic. We like to think bribery and corruption happens to other countries but there's plenty of it in the UK: it's just higher up the totem pole and largely accepted.

Agreed, though I've always had this thought: How do we know it's not money in a brown paper bag/briefcase. I mean, could they not transfer physical money as easily as they transfer words and secret deals. Golf courses are huge, golf carts can have large compartments and be loaded up directly from a car. I know the thought is, "well why would they do that, surely there's an easier alternative", but my point is that it's not would, it's could.

And I guess my counterpoint is that could is a very very large potentially unusably large category of possible actions, and would is a much more tightly controlled set of realized actions we believe might happen again.

But then would has the potential of misdirection. Your believed set of would's might be entirely separate from the realized would's of the individual. Could is wider but has less room for interpretation or propagandizing. Exactly my point in the above post: why wouldn't they be able to transfer money. My set of would's include those deliberate obvious actions, especially if all kinds of other things happen on golf courses. Anyways, I'm rambling, have a nice day. :)

> How do we know it's not money in a brown paper bag/briefcase

One of the problems is that some of these checks can only be performed much later.

The most common currency of choice, for modern bribes, is the promise of a fat gig in the private sector when the political career ends. As the public demands younger and younger political classes, with lower and lower salaries, while maintaining an appetite for career-ending scandals and relatively short terms in office, it's inevitable that individuals will tend towards ensuring their future survival. Such promises need no paper trail, are trivial to keep, and are effectively invisible for years. When they're realized, it's typically too late to do anything about the original source of corruption, and the new guys in power have no incentive to cut that income source for them; in fact, they now know it works and are more likely to tap it for themselves.

> As the public demands younger and younger political classes, with lower and lower salaries

Looking into the US senate, I fail to see that trend. In the last presidential election, both candidates were older than my grandparents.

Even in my country, seeing a really young person in a political position is very rare. They exist (if you define "young" as under 40), but they are rare. I don't think age worries are a factor at all.

In the US there's a huge disconnect between national and local political positions; the national politicians are largely 80 years old and have enough muscle from their party structure and the media to be essentially scandal-proof. The voters don't like that but can't really fix it; local politicians, who are younger, see the big-time corruption in Washington and assume that's how things get done, and all of a sudden you have things like a majority of Cincinnati city council being investigated by the FBI.

You're not paying attention to the salaries part, though.

Look at the pay for members of the House and Senate, in real dollars, over the last 50 years. Also pay attention to how much stupid noise there is about how members of Congress are supposedly overpaid. The pay for all US Senators combined (under $18M) is less than half of what LeBron James makes (over $41M) in salary alone in a year.

That's not a very informative comparison. LeBron James is a outlier's outlier in a sector that already has exceptional pay. Senators' salaries would more usefully be compared to the (upper) middle-class white-collar workforce that they would most likely occupy if they weren't in office.

I don't see how you can compare being a senator to being a middle manager at some bank. The problem is that the banker faces huge consequences if they do something stupid to earn a little money by abusing their position and the upside isn't even that big. By comparison, senators have the opportunity to earn literally millions by doing things that aren't even technically illegal, like being given a wink-and-nod promise of a revolving door-style highly paid position in industry, "insider" trading that for some reason just doesn't count, etc.

The parent comment was talking about Congressional salaries, not all potential income.

But until relatively recently (2018 perhaps?) Congress was legally allowed to profit with insider trading (probably due to Article I, section 6, paragraph 1 of the Constitution).

Sure. My point is that we should pay Congress more so that they have less incentive for wrongdoing of various kinds.

My outlook is European. In the US the political career is indeed longer, because there are effectively more levels (EU Parliament and Commission are still largely considered a step down from national-level politics, silly as it might sound). But the selectiveness (only two senators per state, often lasting decades) makes it similarly treacherous at the mid-level.

> They exist (if you define "young" as under 40)

In political terms, at the (European) national level, "young" is typically under 50, and "old" is over 70. Acquiring reputation and solid power base takes time.

Looking at the UK: Tony Blair was considered very young when he became PM at 44; Thatcher was 53, Major 57, Brown 56, and most of their predecessors were much older. Cameron was 43 but again May was 59 and Johnson 55. Backbenchers will typically enter Parliament around 35-40.

In Italy you can basically add 10 to all those numbers; the current PM (or PdCM, for the purists) is 73.

Senators are old but many of their staffers are young, underpaid, and, through their job, well-connected to industry. Perfect recipe for a revolving door.

Their staff- who do the research and write the laws- are almost entirely under 30 though.

Same thing in the US. I always laugh whenever I see a list of corrupt countries and the US isn't near the top. Codifying bribery into law as lobbying and superpacs doesn't make it not bribery.

Spot on: "Codifying bribery into law as lobbying and superpacs doesn't make it not bribery"

That's because the US has a low amount of corruption on the positions that face the public.

It's also because most of those lists are ordered by a "perception index", that is the kind of bullshit that increases if your government does an awareness program and if corruption fighting gets on the news.

So, ironically, corruption reduction efforts can raise a country's rank on such lists.

Exactly. Not only "can", but will on almost every case. Some times I wonder if it's on purpose.

Ha, do you have any experience doing business with those countries top of the list to say so?

This is the right answer.

If I'm Fujitsu or Accenture and I lose $BigCountryContract, it's a Big Deal and somebody is not going to get his fat bonus. If I lose Estonia, "Whatever, it was pennies anyway". Smaller orgs also don't have the sort of complex bespoke requirements that allow consulting firms to really entrench themselves.

Decentralization is the way forward

Yep, we already have the most resilient, decentralized and safe public key infrastructure in place working in the real world for more than a decade now ;)

Good for our neighbors (And Hi!). Latvia is also advanced in regards to eservices :)

We also get state issued ID card with PKI. We can access tons of services. Last I read I can buy a house, fully remotely. Including notary services via video call + all parties need to sign stuff with our ID card.

We get health results via email as an encrypted pdf, where password is given at the time when I submit samples.

Many business also use ID card to sign contracts between parties.

Bank transactions involve Smart-ID, 2FA app that I have to authorize via ID card for remote setup for any new device. (It involves generating new certificates) Smart-ID is developed by Estonia and is very convenient, secure way to authorize payments.

As of communication, no state issued email. However we usually get email notifications, for example from state tax service, that we should log in and read whatever we have to.

The application allows Latvian ID card to be used in the Settings tab. So I learnt that it's applicable to your country too. I recently moved to Tallinn and just became a resident. The thing is they are capable of doing lots of things. And still, there are many things that can be improved.

Estonia is the founding member of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence... they've been at the forefront for a long time. https://ccdcoe.org/

It’s partially the result of the 2007 cyberattacks they endured. After that, they started taking cybersecurity very seriously.

https://www.bbc.com/news/39655415

Their development of IT public infrastructure is a bit more complex. The first thing was the political situation in the 90's during the transition. As they wanted to go as far away from communism as possible, they sliced away all the political tradition and old politicians. A lot of young people got a chance in politics and public policy making. They somehow understood that investing in technology is the way to go. But the real starter was the Progertiger program, which brought computers to public schools. By 1999, almost all the schools were connected to the internet (about 98% of them and you have to understand that Estonia has a lot of countryside and forrests).

[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09523987.2020.17...

Their e voting system source code looked pretty bad.

Quite apart from that, if they really took cyberattacks seriously theyd be voting with pen and paper.

I haven't seen the code nor read about it. But I'll have a look at it after this comment. Thanks.

The e-vote thing seems like an issue of reputation now. I don't think any politician would dare to change this. It would be possible only if a huge campaign involving a foreign interference becomes successful among the voters.

Size of the country is also something to consider. Population of the whole Estonia is fewer than population of a single city in other country. Area of the Estonia is also minuscule.

What works for a tiny state isn't always appropriate for a big state.

If we are to believe the EU, they are #1 in digital public services and have a respectable place in overall digitalisation of society: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_...

Yep - Here in Finland, just over the bay in the north, the Estonian e-prescription system is often quoted as much leaner, meaner and more functional than our own borked attempt, at a fraction of the cost.

But Estonia has vote by internet, which guarantees that it’s possible to forge an election. Just this item brings them back to pre-democracy times.

Estonia is the one that also provided digital citizenship, right?

Yes

Not citizenship but residency, hence e-residency[1]. It actually means you can start a business here and pay your taxes here but you can be anywhere else in the world.

[1] https://www.e-resident.gov.ee/

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