National ID and decimal editions are technically human rights and privacy

01/06/2017

Tawfiq al-Baghdadi


Referring to the guidance of the Iraqi Council of Ministers in its meeting held on 30/5/2017, which includes speeding up the implementation of the national card project, I would like to refer to an important aspect related to the method of issuing the national card, which if studied in depth by the specialists will reach the appropriate decision of Which would speed up the issuance of the card and reduce expenses.


This aspect of the process of capturing the decimal editions of every Iraqi citizen wants to obtain the national card, where we clarify some technical details related to this technology and address the relationship of the tenth editions of the subject of human rights and privacy and why not resort to capture only one edition.


The question that comes to mind, why pick up the tenth editions of the citizen now? This means technically that the system must have the property and the techniques of conducting research and match and match the decimal periods Anya, which is very expensive and must be justified for technical adoption, and need software for processing and matching. We do not know what is the technical need for the decimal version of the national card system where technically one fingerprint is very sufficient to achieve personal and give the necessary authentication and reliability, and accelerate the procedures of collecting citizen data and issuing the card, and thus ensure that the national card holder is the right person. In addition, the decimal editions belong to criminal systems and law enforcement systems. It would have been more effective to turn the fingerprints of criminal evidence on paper into the AFIS system, and to add the fingerprints of those who commit an offense according to the law or who enter the country through border crossings and airports. Or cases of residence or naturalization.


Therefore, there is a technical and security feasibility of adopting this solution. For example, "If you find a fingerprint in a crime scene in Al-Muthanna province and pick up this latent prints, can the National Card Department in Samawa be able to infer the fingerprint through the system immediately? , Or will the data bank decimal versions be isolated from the main system database? If it is isolated why is this effort now costing?


The conclusion here is that the project has been implemented with a very large and complex performance whose results are due to others when completed. The implementation of the project currently suffers from a weakness in the available resources. Therefore, the efforts to capture the decimal fingerprints (the same principle regarding their capture of the iris) For example, passports, residency, naturalization, and the Independent Electoral Commission. There is no harm in the future in the subsequent stages of development of the system that will be taken to those who request the issuance of a national identity a new issuance or a lost allowance after the feasibility study technically.


This applies to the capture of the iris of the citizens and there is no scientific justification for the draft card to capture them now. The purpose of data collection should be "write ones read (many)". This great effort, when it does not have the scientific justification of the feasibility at the level of security and service will lead to the implementation of the effectiveness of unknown results and unknown completion period may be when possible, it has become the fingerprint of DNA or facial recognition technology less expensive and more reliable.


There must be priorities for the objectives to be achieved and gradual in achieving them, and we certainly not against the process of capturing the tenth edition of the citizens, but after examining the justification of such a project and feasibility and specify the requirements for implementation in detail.

It is not wise and right to increase the types of technology used in the project just to boast about its use, but to determine the purpose and usefulness of the study of its use, and give here another example if we assume that the issuance of a national identity card of a citizen, and then the same citizen request to re-issue a national card instead Lost to sit in the suit of someone else, will the regime object when taking its decimal editions again and give a warning message that these editions do not return to this citizen immediately? Or a realistic example, let's say that there are two brothers, one of whom is in Iraq and the other outside Iraq. The first brother dictated the form for the electronic booking and went to complete the procedures of issuing the card on the specified date, and the card was issued to him after the completion of all the procedures of the issuance. After a period of time, the same person made an electronic booking, but with the information and documents of his twin brother who is outside Iraq and went to complete the procedures on time, carrying his brother's papers. Does the system object when reaching the stage of capturing the finger prints and the iris as originally stored in the database in the name of another person ? If this is not achieved, this is the biggest breach and a gap in the project that allows the transfer of all the fraud and manipulation currently in the Civil Status ID to the national card to be fraud this time sophisticated and electronic. Unless there is a link between the database of decimal editions and the iris (according to the application architecture and the approved platform) with the national card system, where each citizen is checked with the database before issuing the card.


Let us imagine when the decimal-system database grows to include 20 million future registrations, as problems will grow as the size of the database grows. If the administration of the database of the tenth edition in the future will return to the Directorate of Criminal Registration or forensic evidence loaded with fingerprints of those sentenced or wanted to justice, then there will be other problems when linking with the national card verification system before the issue and let you imagine the cases that will emerge as a result.


However, the Iraqi national card contains a smart chip which should have a justification for the feasibility of adding it, but the countries that adopted the decimal or two finger prints were stored in the chip for verification purposes of the holder of identity or passport and not in the background database of the application and this in line with the standards International privacy and data integration and certainly must be available devices and technologies that enable reading the fingerprint or read the smart chip in the card.


AFIS applications have been used for almost 20 years in many countries. We have not found in the research that a country has picked up all 10 finger prints and iris for all its citizens. The operation was limited to law enforcement and criminal investigation applications. Immigration, passports, market holidays.


In the past three years, modern applications of AFIS systems have developed more sophisticated features. For example, these provide information and indicators on the reasons for the presence of fingerprints in the database and can be found on the publications concerning these applications, such as "SIS-II.


We must also refer to the legal aspect of the operations of capturing the tenth editions of citizens and the extent of compatibility with the laws in force and constitutional articles and human rights standards in Iraq. This topic is better than those who deal with the legal specialists, but we would like to refer to the experiences of previous countries in the implementation of projects identification identities of their citizens and this information is available to those who wish to see through the World Wide Web.


For example, in Taiwan ... After a long period of study and research, Taiwan issued a national card in mid-2005 to grant all its citizens aged 14 and above.


It was planned to capture the decimal editions of all those covered by the card, which caused a large wave of objections because of the technical complications and cost necessary to find that the effort does not achieve the goal to resolve criminal cases, as well as objections to privacy and the right to maintain personal data.


The process was opposed by up to 100 organizations with human rights activities. The Taiwan vice-president said at the time that collecting and storing the decimal editions would harm Taiwan's image as a democratic society. Thus, at the end of 2005, Taiwan's judiciary ordered the suspension of the program and froze the process of capturing decimal editions as unconstitutional and costly.

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