The Estonian president wants a more digitally-integrated Europe(arstechnica.com) |
The Estonian president wants a more digitally-integrated Europe(arstechnica.com) |
I wish more politicians were like this man.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6344_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412281...
For more information you can watch the video I linked above or read a summary here: https://estoniaevoting.org/findings/summary/
(What is to stop the husband to control who the wife votes for, or vice versa?)
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.
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?
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."
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.
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?
https://roamingaroundatrandom.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/an-mp...
Yes, exactly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.