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May 9, 2002

The Road to Dystopia

As national ID smartcards become a reality, you must ask the question: How much information can the government control?

By Joe Celko

I got a surprisingly positive response to my Jan. 14, 2002 column "This Perfect Day." Since writing it, I became very scared again as truth catches up with dystopian fiction.

The New York Times ran a story that was right out of "This Perfect Day." In Hong Kong more than five million people cross the border into mainland China to visit family on the Chinese New Year. In 2003, Hong Kong plans to introduce a smartcard with a digitized fingerprint that can be matched to the bearer at a self-service kiosk. People will hold the card against an optical reader while placing their thumb on a screen. If the prints match, the traveler can cross.

The trick is that the algorithmic encoding will let the scanner match the fingerprint and the digital signature of the fingerprint but won't have enough information to reconstruct the original fingerprint itself.

Card Controversy

Hong Kong has had ID cards for more than 50 years, but not a digital version. The current ID is a simple laminated card that looks like a driver's license and has a photo, biographical data, and the cardholder's residency status. "We're not opposed to people having to carry ID cards," said Sin Chung-Kai, a prodemocracy member of Hong Kong's legislature who led the debate on the issue. "The crux of the controversy is how much other information about a person should be stored on the card" ("Fine-Tuning for Policy, Hong Kong Plans Digital ID," The New York Times, Feb. 18, 2002).

Hong Kong awarded a $21 million smartcard contract in March 2002 and plans to distribute them to the 6.8 million residents over four years.

"It's a contract with a lot of possibilities," said Frederick Ma, the executive director of Pacific Century CyberWorks, Hong Kong's flagship telephone company, which leads the group of international companies that won the contract. That's an understatement. Mainland China requires its 1.3 billion residents to carry ID cards now. But the government is eager to issue multipurpose smartcards. Not a bad market for Larry Ellison and his central database.

Malaysia has introduced a national ID card, known as MyKad, which also serves as a passport, electronic purse, and driver's license. When prodemocracy lawmakers raised privacy concerns over the Hong Kong card, officials shelved their more ambitious proposals, but they plan to save 20 percent of the chip's memory for "future applications."

Our Dystopia

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood is a near-future dystopian novel in which the Unites States has become the Republic of Gilead, a Fundamentalist Christian theocracy. One of the crimes of theocratic dictatorships is defacing works of art. In Afghanistan, the Taliban began each day with prayer and then one morning blasted ancient Buddhist statues along the silk route with artillery and painted over all the human figures in the artwork that was still in their national museum. But things of this nature don't only happen on non-U.S. soil.

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There's a briefing room at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in Washington, D.C. with two 12-feet high art deco aluminum statues first installed in 1936. One is a nude entitled Spirit of Justice and the other is a male in a toga entitled Majesty of Law. Edwin Meese, a former U.S. Attorney General (AG), once released an antipornography report while standing in front of the statues, giving reporters a wonderful photo opportunity.

On Jan. 28, 2002, DOJ officials put up giant blue curtains at a cost of nearly $8,000 to keep the offending statues out of sight. Aides deny that U.S. AG John Ashcroft ordered the covering, but the curtains remain. Americans need to look closely at how other countries are dealing with privacy and censorship, or walk the road to dystopia themselves.

Joe Celko [71062.1056@compuserve.com] works in the Professional Services Division at Data Junction Corp. He is the author of Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1999).