1.9 Billion Digits: Brazil's Bid For Biometric Voting 140
MatthewVD writes "Brazil is on a massive fingerprinting spree, with the goal of collecting biometric information from each of its 190 million citizens and identifying all voters by their biological signatures by 2018. The country already has a fully electronic voting system and now officials are trying to end fraud, which was rampant after the military dictatorship ended. Dissenters complain that recounts could be impossible and this opens the door for new kinds of fraud. Imagine this happening in the U.S."
Re:When the people fear their government (Score:5, Interesting)
A wise man once said: "When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty."
The point of that saying is that governments should be easily overthrown (which is actually the entire point of having elected officials. When they start pulling crap like asking citizens to be fingerprinted, you overthrow the government by electing a brand new one. The newly elected officials would then fear introducing similar legislation and then no longer being re-elected. In practice, the people are far too apathetic for the system to work that well, but as Churchill put it, "Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.")
Btw, I, as a brazilian, must say that the quote "Imagine this happening in the US" was VERY offensive to me.
As a fellow Brazilian, I can tell you that Brazilians have an unfortunate tendency to be very easily offended for no reason at all. In fact, the fact that I pointed this out probably offended you.
I grew up here in the US, South Carolina to be exact, and all the statement is accurate. You're just missing some cultural background on the American thought process. People here are, in general, very anti-government. All that was meant is that If the federal government suggested fingerprinting everyone here, there would be a huge backlash. In fact, not too long ago there was a federal law passed (the REAL ID Act [wikipedia.org] that would require state identification cards and driver's licenses to pass certain requirements to function as a federal ID card (we don't have a carteira de identidade as in Brazil, there is no federal ID card). The backlash was such that 25 states have passed some type of legislation vowing to not participate in the program. And they don't even require fingerprints, just full name, signature, date of birth, gender, a unique identification number (which was the cause for most of the backlash), address, and a photograph.
There's a lot of things I don't agree with in American culture (like the general lack of interest and trust in science), but I do wish Brazilians would adopt some of the very, very healthy distrust of government.
Oh, and english is not my native language, but come on, the topic is just wrong: "1.9 billion digits" does not make sense.
It's digits as in "digitais". The population of Brazil is approximately190 million, assuming everyone has 10 fingers (or digits), you arrive at that number.
As a Brazilian, I'll give you the context (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Here in Brazil, mostly everyone trusts the e-voting systems.
It's much much better than the paper ballots which used to end up in rampant fraud in smaller cities, since corruption is widespread. With the e-voting system, the only possible fraud is if the federal government wants to rig the elections (and does a *very* good job at it) neither the government or the opposing parties consider this an issue so, unless they're all colluding with each other (which would make the elections pointless anyway), I think it's reasonably safe. I actually worked for a year and a half in the IT dept. of the Elections Branch in my state and, with that knowledge, I trust the e-voting system.
2) No one here really cares about providing personal data to third-parties. It's common to have to provide your RG (ID card number) and CPF number (something similar to SSN) at a store, when you're making a regular purchase such as shoes or a t-shirt. When designing any sort of IT system to store clients, etc, the CPF number is usually the natural primary key.
Most people here think it's reasonable to collect fingerprints and no one cares when, for instance, the US consulate collects our fingerprints when we're getting our US Visa. Almost all our government documents (we have several: ID Card, CPF, "Voter's Card", Driver's License, Passport) have tons of personal data and fingerprints. This is a non-issue here.
3) People here care about privacy only inside their homes. For instance, everyone (including me) thinks it's a good idea to install more CCTV cameras in some areas to stop crime. In some places, crime is a much more pressing issue than expectation of privacy in a public place. "Big Brother" reality shows are the top 1 programs on public TV, so I would say the next generation might even not care about privacy in their own homes.
The rest of the world is very different from the US - just keep this in mind.