[pp.int.general] Agora Voting System for a Liquid Democracy at FOSDEM

[Daniel Riaño]

I (too) don't quite agree with the idea that the DNI is a very good thing.
It is a useful thing, but not so great.

On the one side, it is a very good thing for enterprises large and small,
but specially large: DNI is a very efficient way to keep track of their
clients, regardless of their changing their address, name, nationality or...
sex. If Americans with their clearly suboptimal
just-one-family-name-please-and-you-can-change-it-when-you-get-married
person-naming system, manage to keep their clients databases updated, then
there is no further proof that you don't need something like the DNI. But,
you can believe it, business save hundreds of billions with this simple
method of identifying persons, and customers are less frequently billed for
other people's expenses. And specially the government *saves* lots of money,
which is good considering the tendency of the Spanish governments to take
the less efficient solutions to many problems.

On the other side... Is the system abused? Routinely, on an every day basis,
by every big business and every level of the administration. You are
expected to show your DNI when there is no real need for that whatsoever.

Is the DNI intrusive? Probably you can't imagine how much. In addition to
the photograph, your fingerprints, a built-in chip with personal info (date
of birth, address, name of your parents, no DNA data, to date), the modern
procedure includes the insertion of the police files of a specimen of your
manual writing.

Is the government careful in handling such information? They have routinely
printed, and make available to everyone via Internet listings of persons,
paired with their DNI in every kind of official procedures, from the results
of public examinations for employment to the Traffic Bureau listings of
people fined for that reason or another.

Will the DNI be of some use for the spreading of some kind of direct
democracy? The encryption system chosen for the digital DNI suggests
otherwise.

I don't think this is a case of Spain being a country specially indifferent
to public intromission in private affairs. In fact, Spain is a very
individualistic country. British people used to boast about their high
levels of privacy (they still do) but there is no other city in Europe, so
much CCTV spyed than London. (And Spain has nothing comparable to the FBI)

Probably both countries are cautionary stories about how easy is to fall in
comfort with government sponsored measures that pry into the privale lives
of their citizens, as long as they offer some kind of social advantage.

daniel

2011/1/31 José Manuel Goig <hosemanuelgoc at gmail.com>

>  On 31/01/11 04:04, Richard Stallman wrote:
>
> I find credit cards less of a concern, for the ironic reason
> that they (1) they track you anyway, and (2) if you don't want
> to be tracked, you do have the alternative of cash.
>
> The uses of DNI for which there is no anonymous alternative
> are therefore more harmful.
>
>
>  I totally agree with Richard Stallman here.
>
> I know that most of my Spanish fellows don't agree with me. I understand
> them, we are taught to be submissive from our childhood. We are taught to
> never ask why things are the way they are. Then, the seed of control enters
> into our brains and keeps inside silently as part of ourselves.
>
> You all see how having an state imposed ID card is considered as a great
> thing!
>
> I know by experience that it's impossible to convince them otherwise. They
> even defend how practical it is to use those ID cards to identify others, "
> *many people see this as a more secure procedure*", they say. It is not
> that it's "*difficult to comprehend for a foreigner*", it is that it's
> difficult to comprehend for anybody with a free mind of his own.
>
> Well, of course, as a Spaniard I know my ID card number by heart: it's my
> real name whenever I go to a state office. In Spain is like when people were
> forced to be marked with a number in their skin, only that we call it DNI
> card and it's very useful, as it seems.
>
> Sad that the roots of dictatorship never died and propagate further with
> every new generation, even among Pirates.
>
>
> José Manuel Goig
> Pirate from Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
>
>
> ____________________________________________________
> Pirate Parties International - General Talk
> pp.international.general at lists.pirateweb.net
> http://lists.pirateweb.net/mailman/listinfo/pp.international.general
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.pirateweb.net/pipermail/pp.international.general/attachments/20110201/fda22ca8/attachment.htm>