4 ms·

Official documents are marvelous. Once you have lived in a country where you can get official documents for pretty much anything you care to prove, it feels li

by kijin 10y ago

Official documents are marvelous. Once you have lived in a country where you can get official documents for pretty much anything you care to prove, it feels like going back to the stone age when you move to a country where you can't. Case in point: a Korean relative of mine was recently invited to join the board of an organization based in the UK. The UK org's bank wanted proof of address for the new board member, in the form of a notarized translation of a recent utility bill or credit card statement. In Korea, you can walk into any local government office and use a 24/7 self-serve kiosk to print out an official proof of your address. Not some random address like the Japanese koseki, but the actual address where you pay all your taxes and are registered to vote. You can even get it in English if you want. It comes with an official stamp and a cryptographic signature of its contents. But no, the UK bank won't take it. They want your fucking credit card statement. Ditto for marriage certificates, death certificates, driving and other licenses, public education, land ownership, car and boat ownership, tax returns... pretty much anything a person might need to prove in the course of their lives. Lost the original? No big deal. You can get a new one whenever you want, wherever you want. You can even get the government to prove your employment history for you, if you're worried that your last employer might go bust and become unable to provide references. And I don't think this makes us any more of a surveillance state than other countries, because the government is supposed to retain official records of all these things anyway. It's just a matter of letting citizens export their own information in a convenient and reliable format.

grzm 10y ago
That does sound convenient. Are there safeguards in place for personal privacy? Can anyone look up information on anyone else?
- kijin 10y ago
  Most information is only available to the person whom it concerns, or close family members. Some information, such as land ownership, is publicly available. If you're printing out a document for the purpose of proving something specific to someone else, you can often request that irrelevant information (such as ID numbers) be redacted for privacy.
- yongjik 10y ago
  Yes, privacy is a problem. Of course not just anybody can look up anybody else, but the workers in the town office (who have to issue these forms) or police officers can look up a lot of information. (In theory, they are prohibited from looking up information unrelated to their duty. In practice, I'm not sure how well that is enforced.) On the other hand, as kijin said, government is going to have that information anyway. Better put it to some use. So it's a tradeoff, and the system has problems, but for the most part it's a reasonable tradeoff, IMHO. (For example, all the current debate about "voter suppression" (aka voter ID law) in the US strikes me as completely bizarre. In Korea, if you're in the voting age you have a government-issued ID. You use that ID card to vote. End of story.)
  - kijin 10y ago
    Even if you're under the voting/driving age, any Korean citizen over 9 years old can ask to get an ID card for opening (non-credit) bank accounts, taking tests, getting discounts, and accessing various government services. I live in a low-income area where lots of kids are on their own because their parents are alcoholic, disabled, always away, etc. The underage ID card helps them navigate the world. It baffles my mind that anyone in the developed world in 2016 should be unable to prove such basic things as who they are and what country they belong to. If we're going to have pervasive surveillance, at least we should get some benefits out of it!
    - Annatar 10y ago
      It baffles my mind that anyone in the developed world in 2016 should be unable to prove such basic things as who they are and what country they belong to. In the U.S. the problem is not proving basic things, but preventing the government from building up a huge profile of everything about you, from what you ate and where you've been to the size and color of your underpants. Even that wouldn't be such a big deal if the government wasn't ultra paranoid and just constantly spied indiscriminately on everyone, actively trying to use that information against you, under the auspices of "protecting" you. Bureaucracy in the U.S. is actually pretty simple and straightforward, and it works. For example, every time I compare how easy it is to buy, insure, register a vehicle, and renew its registration in the States, and then compare with a certain country in central Europe, I just want to scream and tear my hair out. In the States, it's a straightforward, practical, uncomplicated matter: after all, owning and driving a vehicle isn't a big deal, and shouldn't be one. The European country in question? WOE TO YOU: prepare for a protracted ping-pong between the local police station, the central police authority (ministry of internal affairs), the insurance company, back to the local police authority, then the technical inspection station, then the local police authority, and let's not forget at least two trips to a notary public. Oh yeah, and I almost forgot to mention at least one trip to the tax authorities. Payment to authorities? Not before you've been sent several times to a local newspaper kiosk, after waiting for up to two and a half hours in a line, to buy special government stamps, which then only the bureaucrat is allowed to affix and annul with a seal on the actual documents. And the entire time they all arrogantly stare at you wide-eyed, "but sir, what are you getting upset over?!?" Oh yeah, and your documents, like a birth certificate, aren't allowed to be older than six months. I mean that's "completely logical", because we all know that the place and time of one's birth is an ever changing variable, right? And yet, my driver's license which I've had since well into the last century isn't up for renewal until 2069... but get this, if you're tech savvy enough and get a login and a password(!!!) in a special governmental database (only in person at a physical teller, of course!), you can print some of these documents at home, SHA-1 check summed with a crypto key from the ministry of internal affairs, gratis... super consistent and fair to all citizens, huh? In some things, U.S. is light years ahead. And when I see how easy it is to do things like that in the U.S. I feel I'm completely justified to question why the process cannot be as simple and as uncomplicated as it is in some other countries. In Singapore for example, it's enough to fill out one paper and get a company registered in up to 15 minutes; if it works there, it can work everywhere.
henrikschroder 10y ago
Had a similar culture clash when I moved from Sweden to the US, and some part of the process required a marriage license. Marriage license... No, we don't have those, and we don't have birth certificates either. But what you can get is a print-out from the government registry, complete with a signature from some clerk (important!) and a stamp (super important!), except it's all hilariously rudimentary, it looks like a print-out of an ascii text file, super basic, no care for formatting or line breaks to make it pretty or official-looking. The stamp is just the really basic logo of the Swedish Tax Authority, and some bored guy who did the print-out and stamped it, scribbled his or her initials next to the stamp. It's a perfectly legal document of course, but it just reeks of "oh god, do we really have to deal with these uncivilized barbarians that want stuff on paper?" The second culture clash was signing up for various services and having to give out my name and address, and getting my first electric bill with my name spelled wrong. (In Sweden, you would just give whatever company your personal identification number, and then they can pull your name and official address. There's even a push service built into the system, so if I change my official address, most companies' computer systems would get the change, and just update my address automatically)
- rtpg 10y ago
  Wait so any company can look up where you live? Sounds like a nightmare with debt collectors , stalkers, and spammy services.
  - tristor 10y ago
    Well the last two things are or should be illegal. If law enforcement in the US actually cared about enforcing the bulk of the law instead of only the parts which are personally profitable (drugs), you wouldn't really need to worry about them. Regarding debt collectors, well predatory lending practices are illegal as well, and beyond that its your personal responsibility to pay your debts.
  - xorcist 10y ago
    In Sweden anyone can look up where you live. And your earnings. And your grades from school. All government data is public, unless it is secret. (If you live under serious threats you can apply to get your data classified, in which case it is only allowed to be handled by people with clearance for that, which tend to make your life a bit complicated.) Since it is the same for everyone, including the prime minister and the king which is kind of the point for a society that wishes to be transparent, it doesn't make much difference for the prevalence of spammy services. Except maybe lowering the market value of address registers.
DanBC 10y ago
> And I don't think this makes us any more of a surveillance state than other countries, because the government is supposed to retain official records of all these things anyway. England has a frustrating situation where the government collects all this stuff, and stores it all on computers, but in separate data centres in different databases and in incompatible formats. So anytime I need to interact with them I have to fill out bizarrely long paper forms. I work a bit in suicide prevention, and the length and complexity of the disability benefits forms[1] are implicated in some deaths by suicide, as well as some attempts. [1] as well the brutality of the system. They have a lot of rules, and fiercely enforce those rules, but the first two lines of advice workers often don't what those rules are.

by kijin 10y ago

grzm 10y ago

That does sound convenient. Are there safeguards in place for personal privacy? Can anyone look up information on anyone else?

kijin 10y ago
Most information is only available to the person whom it concerns, or close family members. Some information, such as land ownership, is publicly available. If you're printing out a document for the purpose of proving something specific to someone else, you can often request that irrelevant information (such as ID numbers) be redacted for privacy.
yongjik 10y ago
Yes, privacy is a problem. Of course not just anybody can look up anybody else, but the workers in the town office (who have to issue these forms) or police officers can look up a lot of information. (In theory, they are prohibited from looking up information unrelated to their duty. In practice, I'm not sure how well that is enforced.) On the other hand, as kijin said, government is going to have that information anyway. Better put it to some use. So it's a tradeoff, and the system has problems, but for the most part it's a reasonable tradeoff, IMHO. (For example, all the current debate about "voter suppression" (aka voter ID law) in the US strikes me as completely bizarre. In Korea, if you're in the voting age you have a government-issued ID. You use that ID card to vote. End of story.)
- kijin 10y ago
  Even if you're under the voting/driving age, any Korean citizen over 9 years old can ask to get an ID card for opening (non-credit) bank accounts, taking tests, getting discounts, and accessing various government services. I live in a low-income area where lots of kids are on their own because their parents are alcoholic, disabled, always away, etc. The underage ID card helps them navigate the world. It baffles my mind that anyone in the developed world in 2016 should be unable to prove such basic things as who they are and what country they belong to. If we're going to have pervasive surveillance, at least we should get some benefits out of it!
  - Annatar 10y ago
    It baffles my mind that anyone in the developed world in 2016 should be unable to prove such basic things as who they are and what country they belong to. In the U.S. the problem is not proving basic things, but preventing the government from building up a huge profile of everything about you, from what you ate and where you've been to the size and color of your underpants. Even that wouldn't be such a big deal if the government wasn't ultra paranoid and just constantly spied indiscriminately on everyone, actively trying to use that information against you, under the auspices of "protecting" you. Bureaucracy in the U.S. is actually pretty simple and straightforward, and it works. For example, every time I compare how easy it is to buy, insure, register a vehicle, and renew its registration in the States, and then compare with a certain country in central Europe, I just want to scream and tear my hair out. In the States, it's a straightforward, practical, uncomplicated matter: after all, owning and driving a vehicle isn't a big deal, and shouldn't be one. The European country in question? WOE TO YOU: prepare for a protracted ping-pong between the local police station, the central police authority (ministry of internal affairs), the insurance company, back to the local police authority, then the technical inspection station, then the local police authority, and let's not forget at least two trips to a notary public. Oh yeah, and I almost forgot to mention at least one trip to the tax authorities. Payment to authorities? Not before you've been sent several times to a local newspaper kiosk, after waiting for up to two and a half hours in a line, to buy special government stamps, which then only the bureaucrat is allowed to affix and annul with a seal on the actual documents. And the entire time they all arrogantly stare at you wide-eyed, "but sir, what are you getting upset over?!?" Oh yeah, and your documents, like a birth certificate, aren't allowed to be older than six months. I mean that's "completely logical", because we all know that the place and time of one's birth is an ever changing variable, right? And yet, my driver's license which I've had since well into the last century isn't up for renewal until 2069... but get this, if you're tech savvy enough and get a login and a password(!!!) in a special governmental database (only in person at a physical teller, of course!), you can print some of these documents at home, SHA-1 check summed with a crypto key from the ministry of internal affairs, gratis... super consistent and fair to all citizens, huh? In some things, U.S. is light years ahead. And when I see how easy it is to do things like that in the U.S. I feel I'm completely justified to question why the process cannot be as simple and as uncomplicated as it is in some other countries. In Singapore for example, it's enough to fill out one paper and get a company registered in up to 15 minutes; if it works there, it can work everywhere.

henrikschroder 10y ago

Had a similar culture clash when I moved from Sweden to the US, and some part of the process required a marriage license. Marriage license... No, we don't have those, and we don't have birth certificates either. But what you can get is a print-out from the government registry, complete with a signature from some clerk (important!) and a stamp (super important!), except it's all hilariously rudimentary, it looks like a print-out of an ascii text file, super basic, no care for formatting or line breaks to make it pretty or official-looking. The stamp is just the really basic logo of the Swedish Tax Authority, and some bored guy who did the print-out and stamped it, scribbled his or her initials next to the stamp. It's a perfectly legal document of course, but it just reeks of "oh god, do we really have to deal with these uncivilized barbarians that want stuff on paper?" The second culture clash was signing up for various services and having to give out my name and address, and getting my first electric bill with my name spelled wrong. (In Sweden, you would just give whatever company your personal identification number, and then they can pull your name and official address. There's even a push service built into the system, so if I change my official address, most companies' computer systems would get the change, and just update my address automatically)

rtpg 10y ago
Wait so any company can look up where you live? Sounds like a nightmare with debt collectors , stalkers, and spammy services.
- tristor 10y ago
  Well the last two things are or should be illegal. If law enforcement in the US actually cared about enforcing the bulk of the law instead of only the parts which are personally profitable (drugs), you wouldn't really need to worry about them. Regarding debt collectors, well predatory lending practices are illegal as well, and beyond that its your personal responsibility to pay your debts.
- xorcist 10y ago
  In Sweden anyone can look up where you live. And your earnings. And your grades from school. All government data is public, unless it is secret. (If you live under serious threats you can apply to get your data classified, in which case it is only allowed to be handled by people with clearance for that, which tend to make your life a bit complicated.) Since it is the same for everyone, including the prime minister and the king which is kind of the point for a society that wishes to be transparent, it doesn't make much difference for the prevalence of spammy services. Except maybe lowering the market value of address registers.

DanBC 10y ago

> And I don't think this makes us any more of a surveillance state than other countries, because the government is supposed to retain official records of all these things anyway. England has a frustrating situation where the government collects all this stuff, and stores it all on computers, but in separate data centres in different databases and in incompatible formats. So anytime I need to interact with them I have to fill out bizarrely long paper forms. I work a bit in suicide prevention, and the length and complexity of the disability benefits forms[1] are implicated in some deaths by suicide, as well as some attempts. [1] as well the brutality of the system. They have a lot of rules, and fiercely enforce those rules, but the first two lines of advice workers often don't what those rules are.