Most states rely on paper bureaucracy to ensure that the state can function and provide services. Paper bureaucracy has been part and parcel of how we maintain states and corporations since the Chinese invented the first paper bureaucracy systems of management 3000 years ago.
But as you all probably know, bureaucracy kinda sucks. It costs a lot to maintain, and in the worst cases bureaucracy can turn a state into a labyrinthian monstrosity that can be near to impossible to navigate.
Estonia is a Baltic country that in recent years has been embarking on reform programs that are intended to change this. Estonia is a “Paperless state” meaning a state that has effectively removed all paper from it’s bureaucracy and replaced it with a digital state structure. In this short video I would like to introduce you to the digital state and argue for it.
As long as this digital infrastructure is developed by the administration itself, I find the idea of a digital bureaucracy great. But relying on proprietary products would undermine its purpose, imho.
It scares me, honestly. The level of security for this to be viable is insane. Imagine some flaw or accident or attack that would erase me as a citizen. Scary thought.
This is one place where blockchain is actually useful. No one entity is responsible for the integrity of the "ledger". Of course it wouldn't be publicly writable so not exactly like the blockchains you normally think of.
I can't see how the blockchain would be particularly useful here either. The security features of the blockchain come at the cost of extreme energy usage. Storing documents using simple public-private key cryptography is waaaay more than enough imo.
It's just that I don't want my own country to get any wild ideas. I mean, the ideal digital society utopia is an amazing thought experiment. But it feels very fragile for us at this time. We are still in our technological infancy as a species, even if we feel very advanced.
I find it funny that people who think like that are from countries like the US and UK where you can live without an ID/passport your whole life. Identity theft in such countries is very common, while it's pretty much impossible in Estonia. You should be afraid of living without a digital state and a passport in your pocket.
It wouldn't really affect u even if ur id got deleted. Let me explain. Ur id is nothing but information correct (your name, address, etc.). The same goes with contracts. What makes ur id special is that the government has verified it to be legit.
A very simple way of doing this is by making the government cryptographically sign ur id/contact. I would really recommend getting a functional understanding of how public-private key cryptography works. Basically, the government just has to put up its public key online. If u have ur id, u can verify if the document is issued by the government using their public key.
As long as the public key stays there, and u don't lose ur id and contracts they won't technically be lost.
Also, if the public key suddenly changes/disappears without being notice, everyone would know that something's up. It's like ur government building's staff was suddenly replaced.
One thing I commonly hear as an argument against electronic voting is security and ease of vote tampering. Is Estonia solving this issue and, if so, how?
I watched though about half of it, before concluding that this video is only going to be a summary video that won't answer my questions fully.
Digital ID and Digital signature are absolutely necessary, though depending on how those two are implemented I could still see fraud and vote manipulation being feasible. I was hoping someone with more knowledge about how Estonia is doing its security and verification systems to ensure records aren't being modified maliciously.
Turkey has been doing it for more than a decade. It is very convenient, but now you can find tons of info about every citizen on the web because of leaks.