8 ms·

> The flaws of the ID-card is a very politically charged topic to discuss in Estonia, having any doubts about the ID-card or e-voting will make you a persona no

> The flaws of the ID-card is a very politically charged topic to discuss in Estonia, having any doubts about the ID-card or e-voting will make you a persona non grata. I somewhat disagree, the discussion tends to get bent by some populist agent provocateurs and some of the initial reactions from the private sector media. (In Estonia, the government media is the most centered out of all news outlets, go figure). What these statements usually are is that "ID card has a flaw X, therefore we should immidiately ban it, close the R&D and burn it with fire", forgetting that crypto and computing in general, changes over time. My view is that, of course each flaw has to be resolved and sometimes this is political, but this just means the work has to continue.

C1sc0cat 6y ago
Thinking that compulsory id cards "Papers Bitte" are not a good thing is not an uncommon view.
- ZWoz 6y ago
  ID card is mandatory by law, but there aren't sanctions (in my knowledge). You need some kind document though, in US that is usually drivers license. I don't see big difference here.
  - bennylope 6y ago
    In the US you are required to have your drivers license while driving, but I do not believe there are any blanket requirements (since it would vary from state to state) that you must be able to furnish identifying documents at all times.
    - ZWoz 6y ago
      Documents are two way streets. You need them to prove your rights. You need document to prove your identity to bank or notary. If you are younger side, document helps validate your age in liquor store. I trying use "american" examples here, but other countries can have other regulations or customs. Document, especially digital one, is very useful. For example, I like do encrypt with id card, when sharing materials over untrusty medium. You don't need worry about key exchange, you don't need to teach or install software to other party devices: they already have knowledge, how it works. It's also very comfy that I can send digitally signed documents and that isn't fringe thing, there is knowledge and bureaucratic processes, how to handle it.
      - C1sc0cat 6y ago
        I take the view that rights are inalienable, I don't have a problem with documents but with Id cards. Given the structural deficiencies of the US police (And other police forces) giving them an excuse to stop people is to be avoided unless strictly required.
- bragh 6y ago
  It's not about it being compulsory, but the system being unverifiable end-to-end and any criticism of that being laughed at. If you put it into business terms, would you trust an employee or vendor who told you that everything was alright, did not allow you to perform checks and audits and mocked both your and external partners concerns [0] about it? I don't think so. If the government is indeed for the people and not vice versa, then this is not acceptable. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs Tom Scott's video about e-voting. Funniest rebuttal I saw on Estonian social media was that we are secure, since he is talking about e-voting, but we have i-voting. So I guess once we will call it c-voting, it will be even better...?
  - likelyunaware 6y ago
    That video had outdated information regarding the Estonian e-voting system. The report from 2014 has been invalidated by the newer system, IVXV, which has been redesigned to address previous criticism. The newer system is open source, available at https://github.com/vvk-ehk/ivxv https://github.com/vvk-ehk/ivxv. A good source to quickly familiarize yourself with the architecure, is "Improving the verifiability of the Estonian Internet Voting scheme"[0] by Jan Willemson et al [0] https://research.cyber.ee/~janwil/publ/ivxv-evoteid.pdf https://research.cyber.ee/~janwil/publ/ivxv-evoteid.pdf
  - aj3 6y ago
    I watched the video. It's a load of crap. I mean, here are his arguments (feel free to tell me if I missed something): - voting systems inevitably have to be closed source, loaded on easily compromisable USB stick, connected to internet unguarded and sitting that way for years. In what reality is this nihilistic fatalism a reasonable expectation? - voter has no way of independently verifying that their vote has been processed correctly. First of all, this is simply ignorant as there are many cryptographical schemes that allow verification, but most importantly - how do you know that your vote has been processed correctly in our current system? You don't, there is no way for you to do that. - US hacking machines are routinely exploited at Defcon. That's right. You know what else is routinely exploited there? Physical safes, which are used for storing you know paper ballots. Also cars. And Air Force has promised to bring a fucking satellite next year. Something having vulnerabilities in the past does not mean it still has them, something having vulnerabilities currently does not mean they are easy to exploit in practice or can't be detected and mitigated, some products in a certain category having vulnerabilities does not mean all products in this category will inevitably have vulnerabilities in the future and we should just give up on ever fixing them. - trusting a person in a voting booth to vote for you would be ridiculous, but filling a ballot yourself and trusting that it will get counted correctly along the way is somehow self obvious - I guess because in the first case you clearly see that a human is involved in the process and in the second example it sort of feels like the process is finished once you physically put your vote into a box? - the average voter won't understand checksums. Well, maybe the average voter shouldn't worry about bad bytes in that case? And how come deterministic and auditable cryptography is a problem while demonstrably non-deterministic process of current paper voting (look at how results always differ ever so slightly when votes are recounted) is a non-issue? - transferring votes over internet is problematic because you can't trust software on either end. Right, because you know (never mind trust) everybody that will handle your vote on the path from voting booth to the whatever-governing-body-is-announcing-results-in-your-country? - central computer could be manipulating your votes and only a few people will have an opportunity to inspect it. Well, how many voting boxes have you been allowed to inspect in your life? Are you allowed to go to the central location where your votes are aggregated and recount all of them personally? How do you know that officials in your voting location, precinct or at a national level haven't agreed to manipulate the results? - casting doubts on the election is easy to do with electronic voting and nearly impossible with paper voting. Have you heard this cute story about medical masks becoming a conspiracy and symbol of oppression among certain population in US? Has nothing to do with electrical circuits and everything to do with politics. If a current incumbent happens to lose an election there you can be sure that election results will be called fake, no matter paper or digital. - malware exists, so voting from personal devices is ridiculous. Just as ridiculous as doing e-commerce or banking? Or in case of Estonia getting pretty much any other official business done, or so I hear. - a single vulnerability in someones computer can be scaled to millions of computers. Ok, let's say someone is still using Windows XP and got infected with something after downloading GTA from Pirate Bay. How does that affect people voting from their iPhones? - anecdotes, anecdotes, anecdotes tl;dr: Stop spreading FUD.
- 8organicbits 6y ago
  Correct, wikipedia even documents this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_papers,_please https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_papers,_please
- zo1 6y ago
  Wow - that's like 3 negative "modifier" words. I don't actually know what you're saying with that sentence and I've been reading it for about 3 minutes now.
- p_l 6y ago
  It's an american view, mostly due to having only experience with ID documents through WW2 movies or cold War propaganda, mixed with religious voices against it ("mark of the beast", wish I was joking). Elsewhere, "Papers, please" tends to be sign of excessive "stop-and-frisk" or movement restrictions, and the idea of having basic ID card seems to not have much of an opposition. Especially since it's much simpler than sometimes circular requirements of "web of trust" confirmations like in UK (though I heard it got better)

C1sc0cat 6y ago

Thinking that compulsory id cards "Papers Bitte" are not a good thing is not an uncommon view.

ZWoz 6y ago
ID card is mandatory by law, but there aren't sanctions (in my knowledge). You need some kind document though, in US that is usually drivers license. I don't see big difference here.
- bennylope 6y ago
  In the US you are required to have your drivers license while driving, but I do not believe there are any blanket requirements (since it would vary from state to state) that you must be able to furnish identifying documents at all times.
  - ZWoz 6y ago
    Documents are two way streets. You need them to prove your rights. You need document to prove your identity to bank or notary. If you are younger side, document helps validate your age in liquor store. I trying use "american" examples here, but other countries can have other regulations or customs. Document, especially digital one, is very useful. For example, I like do encrypt with id card, when sharing materials over untrusty medium. You don't need worry about key exchange, you don't need to teach or install software to other party devices: they already have knowledge, how it works. It's also very comfy that I can send digitally signed documents and that isn't fringe thing, there is knowledge and bureaucratic processes, how to handle it.
    - C1sc0cat 6y ago
      I take the view that rights are inalienable, I don't have a problem with documents but with Id cards. Given the structural deficiencies of the US police (And other police forces) giving them an excuse to stop people is to be avoided unless strictly required.
bragh 6y ago
It's not about it being compulsory, but the system being unverifiable end-to-end and any criticism of that being laughed at. If you put it into business terms, would you trust an employee or vendor who told you that everything was alright, did not allow you to perform checks and audits and mocked both your and external partners concerns [0] about it? I don't think so. If the government is indeed for the people and not vice versa, then this is not acceptable. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs Tom Scott's video about e-voting. Funniest rebuttal I saw on Estonian social media was that we are secure, since he is talking about e-voting, but we have i-voting. So I guess once we will call it c-voting, it will be even better...?
- likelyunaware 6y ago
  That video had outdated information regarding the Estonian e-voting system. The report from 2014 has been invalidated by the newer system, IVXV, which has been redesigned to address previous criticism. The newer system is open source, available at https://github.com/vvk-ehk/ivxv https://github.com/vvk-ehk/ivxv. A good source to quickly familiarize yourself with the architecure, is "Improving the verifiability of the Estonian Internet Voting scheme"[0] by Jan Willemson et al [0] https://research.cyber.ee/~janwil/publ/ivxv-evoteid.pdf https://research.cyber.ee/~janwil/publ/ivxv-evoteid.pdf
- aj3 6y ago
  I watched the video. It's a load of crap. I mean, here are his arguments (feel free to tell me if I missed something): - voting systems inevitably have to be closed source, loaded on easily compromisable USB stick, connected to internet unguarded and sitting that way for years. In what reality is this nihilistic fatalism a reasonable expectation? - voter has no way of independently verifying that their vote has been processed correctly. First of all, this is simply ignorant as there are many cryptographical schemes that allow verification, but most importantly - how do you know that your vote has been processed correctly in our current system? You don't, there is no way for you to do that. - US hacking machines are routinely exploited at Defcon. That's right. You know what else is routinely exploited there? Physical safes, which are used for storing you know paper ballots. Also cars. And Air Force has promised to bring a fucking satellite next year. Something having vulnerabilities in the past does not mean it still has them, something having vulnerabilities currently does not mean they are easy to exploit in practice or can't be detected and mitigated, some products in a certain category having vulnerabilities does not mean all products in this category will inevitably have vulnerabilities in the future and we should just give up on ever fixing them. - trusting a person in a voting booth to vote for you would be ridiculous, but filling a ballot yourself and trusting that it will get counted correctly along the way is somehow self obvious - I guess because in the first case you clearly see that a human is involved in the process and in the second example it sort of feels like the process is finished once you physically put your vote into a box? - the average voter won't understand checksums. Well, maybe the average voter shouldn't worry about bad bytes in that case? And how come deterministic and auditable cryptography is a problem while demonstrably non-deterministic process of current paper voting (look at how results always differ ever so slightly when votes are recounted) is a non-issue? - transferring votes over internet is problematic because you can't trust software on either end. Right, because you know (never mind trust) everybody that will handle your vote on the path from voting booth to the whatever-governing-body-is-announcing-results-in-your-country? - central computer could be manipulating your votes and only a few people will have an opportunity to inspect it. Well, how many voting boxes have you been allowed to inspect in your life? Are you allowed to go to the central location where your votes are aggregated and recount all of them personally? How do you know that officials in your voting location, precinct or at a national level haven't agreed to manipulate the results? - casting doubts on the election is easy to do with electronic voting and nearly impossible with paper voting. Have you heard this cute story about medical masks becoming a conspiracy and symbol of oppression among certain population in US? Has nothing to do with electrical circuits and everything to do with politics. If a current incumbent happens to lose an election there you can be sure that election results will be called fake, no matter paper or digital. - malware exists, so voting from personal devices is ridiculous. Just as ridiculous as doing e-commerce or banking? Or in case of Estonia getting pretty much any other official business done, or so I hear. - a single vulnerability in someones computer can be scaled to millions of computers. Ok, let's say someone is still using Windows XP and got infected with something after downloading GTA from Pirate Bay. How does that affect people voting from their iPhones? - anecdotes, anecdotes, anecdotes tl;dr: Stop spreading FUD.
8organicbits 6y ago
Correct, wikipedia even documents this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_papers,_please https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_papers,_please
zo1 6y ago
Wow - that's like 3 negative "modifier" words. I don't actually know what you're saying with that sentence and I've been reading it for about 3 minutes now.
p_l 6y ago
It's an american view, mostly due to having only experience with ID documents through WW2 movies or cold War propaganda, mixed with religious voices against it ("mark of the beast", wish I was joking). Elsewhere, "Papers, please" tends to be sign of excessive "stop-and-frisk" or movement restrictions, and the idea of having basic ID card seems to not have much of an opposition. Especially since it's much simpler than sometimes circular requirements of "web of trust" confirmations like in UK (though I heard it got better)