tracking people

Japan has started officially tracking people without installing a privacy policy or discussing what would be collected. And, i’m quite happy to see that people are upset and rebelling. In my dreams, i still hope that Kate’s little fantasy comes true…

Japan in an Uproar as ‘Big Brother’ Computer File Kicks In
New York Times; New York, N.Y.; Aug 6, 2002; James Brooke;

Copyright New York Times Company Aug 6, 2002

Japan put into operation a national computerized registry of its citizens today, provoking two un-Japanese responses: civil disobedience and a widespread feeling that privacy should take priority over efficiency.

Yokohama, Japan’s second largest city, made the national government’s registry voluntary, and half a dozen other cities refused to be included in the computerized system connecting local registries, effectively leaving four million people out of the system.

But a much larger mass of angry public opinion was behind this visible resistance. Critics noted that the government had labored for three years to produce the system on time, but had been unable to produce a privacy law that was to accompany it.

In a survey of 1,948 people conducted two weeks ago by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, 86 percent of respondents said they were concerned about misuse or leakage of information, and 76 percent said the posting of the database should be postponed.

At a “disconnecting ceremony” this morning, Nobuo Hoshino, mayor of Kokubunji, one of the cities that refused to take part, said to television cameras, “Residents are sending us their views by e-mail, fax and various other ways, and almost all of them support us.”

Under the system, all citizens, from babies in hospital nurseries to elderly in nursing homes, have been assigned individual 11-digit numbers. For now, the number allows retrieval of only basic information: name, address, sex and birth date.

The information is only to be available to government employees for official use, and is not on the Internet. Furthermore, all the information and more is already in government hands, in the creaking 19th-century era “koseki” or paper registry, which is scattered around city halls across this nation of 126 million people. The new system is intended to cut red tape and to make it easier for citizens as well as officials — by registering a change of address in only one place, for example.

But the government’s zeal in creating the system was not matched by its zeal for pursuing a personal information protection bill, which died last week as Parliament ended its summer session.

“I am sure the information will be expanded, so privacy is the most important issue,” Takaharu Yoshioka, a landscape gardening company executive, said in a random interview that seemed to capture popular mistrust. “We can’t get rid of the hacker problem, so it is not safe. We need to take more time.”

Despite near 100-degree temperatures here, Japanese have been moved to protest, sometimes dressed up as bar codes or computers.

Makoto Sataka, a social critic who is leading a campaign against the system, warned, “In the resident registry network system, the state will become a stalker with control over personal information.”

Today, protesters compared the residential registry to a 10-digit computerized identification system for cows, which was adopted last fall in an effort to contain mad cow disease. “Cows are 10-digit numbers and human beings are 11 digits,” read one protest banner outside the Public Management Ministry, the agency responsible for creating the network.

Inside, the minister, Toranosuke Katayama, met reporters and appealed for “more dialogue” with opponents. His spokesman, Yoshiuki Baba, stressed that even without a new privacy law, people convicted of leaking personal information face up to two years in prison and a fine of $8,300.

Japan’s new registry differs from the American system of Social Security numbers, said Koji Ishimura, an information law specialist at Hakuo University. The Japanese number is mandatory and universal.

“Right now, the government is saying that the card will be used for 93 types of administrative matters,” he said, referring to such steps as obtaining pensions and passports. “But in the future, the government has a bigger project, named “E-Government” which will have 16,000 administrative usages.”

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5 thoughts on “tracking people

  1. k

    “The Traveller’s Diarrhoea Network, by which the Infectious Disease Surveillance Center is electronically connected with two major airport quarantine stations and three infectious disease hospitals, was launched in February 1988 in Japan. The data on travellers’ diarrhoea detected is reported weekly by e-mail.”
    [this is how the system was tested]
    *
    The only difference I perceive, between these new events in Nihon_Ga and what is going on in the States is that :: there are no privacy policies or a privacy policy alliance to gently equalize matters. In may ways the Japanese system by++++ is more sincere. The states have a privacy policy alliance but still it is at the mercy of Executive Order 12949 – signed by Clinton, where the mandate of the FISA court was greatly enhanced: It has since then, legal authority to approve black-bag operations + without obtaining a warrant in open court it has the power to authorize department of justice requests to conduct physical as well as electronic searches, all this without notifying the subject, without providing an inventory of items seized… and so forth.
    Aware – I frown upon, disagree and feel a slight headache on both policies and systems, but the Japanese seem to be more honest – because now, implementing a privacy policy alliance will be a more transparent (i mean translucid) matter.

    “Fukuyama (1995), postulates that social capital allows the creation of prosperity. In other words, a high level of social capital enables business firms to take risks and stretch networks fully in the creation of wealth on a large scale for a prolonged period of time.” this is the japanese government’s goal, and it breaths uncontested by the majority. So states Takashi Inoguchi.

    [If you look at who ran the Infectious Disease Surveillance Center, and who is behind these events you will find the same person.,,]

    k

  2. danah

    Ah, i’m by no means suggesting that America’s notion of privacy is at all in tact. In fact, i couldn’t disagree more. There is something fabulous about transparency, but i’m still not thrilled when it reveals terrible practices.

    One of my favorite stories came from some researchers that i worked with at Intel. They were studying TV usage around the world and in one of their conversations in a Chinese household, the interviewers asked how they felt about the lack of freedom of press in China. The respondent, an older man, laughed at the interviewer and his response translated approximately to “At least we *know* that we don’t have freedom of the press; you are too foolish to realize it. When our news spends 30 minutes talking about cows, we know how to read between the lines and know that something big is happening; you think that cows are suddenly important.”

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