The Estonian Zero Bureaucracy Project
A recycled post that is still current
Sep 16, 2021
[This is an older post that strikes me as very apropos to the current problems facing Canada. It addresses the productivity issue that the business community has expressed concern about plus it fits into the new Prime Minister’s pledge to raise the efficiency of the bureaucracy through using new technology. Since I’m going through a sorta crazy time in my life right now (we’re selling our house and plan to buy another in a new city), I thought I’d share a few more of these older posts for the many new subscribers. I’ve edited this one a bit as the original was needlessly long. WDH]
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One of the key problems facing governments is the sheer complexity of modern society. Every time we come up with a new problem, we find that the solutions invariably involve creating a new set of regulations needed to deal with them. And, of course, those new regulations in turn add another layer of complexity---which yet again slows down the speed at which the government deals with issues.
For example, consider how much confusion the current pandemic has created for various companies and government agencies simply because of the need to create special vaccine passports. The federal government needs to show other countries which of our citizens have been vaccinated. In addition, the provinces also need to show businesses like bars and barbershops who has had their jabs and who has not. Wouldn't it be nice if there was some already existing, easy way to do this?
Even before the current pandemic, there has been a proliferation of government and private sector initiatives that allow people to do things on line. Unfortunately, these have all tended to sprout up like weeds without any standardized regulation to protect people's digital identity and privacy. Moreover, they can be really irritating as once you get used to the way one system works, you will invariably find another that doesn't work that way, and it can be profoundly frustrating to figure out the subtle difference that is screwing-up your ability to use it. Each of these programs will also want you to come up with a unique password---that you are then expected to remember along with the scores of other ones you have for other systems. (I know, digital wallets in web browsers exist to store your passwords, but there are a surprising number of systems that will not allow you to use one---I'm looking at you, Federal Government.)
Beyond this immediate example, let me illustrate the point I'm trying to raise with some examples from my mundane private life.
As part of my project of sponsoring my wife to become a permanent resident, I found myself trying to use the federal government's website access portal. I found it to be a complete and utter kludge. To fill out some forms I needed to use Adobe Acrobat---which is proprietary software that has not been adapted to work on Linux. That means I simply could not fill out those forms on line using my home computer.
Moreover, the actual forms on the website are a complex nest that is obviously the result of years of incremental change without any attempt to prune away the dead wood. The result is that if you simply do a Google search for a form, you run the risk of accessing an old version that the government won't accept (this happened to me---and resulted in a big time delay in processing), the wrong one for your particular situation, information that is no longer correct, etc. Even if you get to where you should be, some of the interactive forms will work with a modern browser, but others are only accessible if you use the obsolete Internet Explorer browser instead of the new Microsoft Edge or one of the other popular ones, like Fire Fox (this happened to me too).
Provincially, I've used web-based systems to get my fishing license, my new Health and ID cards, pay my property taxes, and so on. But each of them comes from a different system with their own idiosyncrasies. Moreover, many of them are managed by private, for-profit companies (my wife's driver's license, for example). The thing to remember is that private corporations generally don't have the same sort of privacy controls that governments operate under.
The result of all of this is an expanding number of independent plastic cards jammed into my wallet. Each of them requires a separate set of forms to fill out and which all come with their own idiosyncratic ways in which things can go wrong.
I could go on and on. But my experience has been that if you talk to anyone about how difficult it is to connect with Canadian bureaucracies, you will hear lots and lots of examples that other people have had to deal with. And I'm relatively lucky. I've never had to deal with welfare, a complicated illness, run a small business, had much to do with the legal system, don't have any children, etc. I think that I am on safe ground saying that complex red tape has become an anchor that drags down individual people's productivity, costs a lot of money, dramatically reduces government's ability to tailor policy to people's needs, and, costs the economy significant growth potential every year.
The question is, however, is whether or not this is just an inescapable part of the times we live in or the result of dumb choices made (or, we've been oblivious about) over the past few decades.
Consider the following item:
This is an electronic ID card from the tiny Baltic republic of Estonia. Its government decided decades ago to build it's "brand" around getting rid of as much unnecessary red tape as possible by using modern computer technology. I'm not an expert on this subject in any way, but I think that the average Canadian has no idea what Estonia has done is even possible---let alone that there are already nations in the world who have actually created working demonstration models of how much better things could be.
The first thing to understand is the operating principle of not forcing people to submit a given piece of information more than once. We take it for granted that each and every time we fill out a form we have to input our name, date of birth, where we live, etc. But what if we had a "super Social Insurance Number" that governed absolutely everything in our lives? No separate health card number, driver's license number, fishing license number, property tax roll, student ID number, etc?
The secret to unifying everything into one card is what they call the "X-Road Data Exchange Platform". The idea is that there needs to be a centralized, safe gateway on the bureaucratic Web where someone can use their E-ID to to access a variety of different services. This means that the government can compartmentalize the different types of information each individual has, such as medical history, criminal records, tax payments, educational attainments, property ownership, etc, into secure server farms while at the same time allowing individuals the opportunity to use a single access point to interact with each different system.
This means that a doctor can access a person's health records without being able to look at her criminal history. Similarly, using the same card, the police can look up whether or not there are unpaid traffic tickets on her record without knowing that she may be under treatment for an illness. The secret to the system is the creation of a standardized architecture for both the information collected and the way it gets manipulated by the program.
This system not only applies to core government institutions like taxes, healthcare, or, criminal justice---but also to various private, non-profit, and, public companies such as parking lots, Credit Unions, and, passenger rail services. Any enterprise that deals with the public can join the X-Exchange by agreeing to to adhere to it's rules and regulations. This ensures standardization and allows the central authority to create and enforce rules against things like selling off a customer's data to advertising companies.
Of course, at this point someone will say "Yes, I can see the increase in efficiency. But if we place all the information into the hands of computer geeks and the people who sign their cheques, what's to stop the government (or some hidden cabal) from stealing from the public or persecuting opponents with a click of the keyboard?"
Aside from the obvious rebuttal of "Well, what's there to stop government, private businesses, or, some fraction of them from doing this right now?", I would point towards the Estonian strategy of using a Blockchain system to protect the citizenry.
I'm far from the right person to explain what a Blockchain is, but here's my best attempt. I'd be surprised if I don't get a lot wrong in what follows, but I hope some interested readers will pursue the link to the Wikipedia article I put into this paragraph. Beyond that, I'd suggest that most of us will simply have to accept what the experts tell us about the systems and see it as one more "black box" (like the computer I'm using to write this article) that we just have to trust simply because we lack the ability/time/energy/interest to learn how it works.
Here I go---.
As I understand it, Blockchains use the novel ability of computers and the Web to copy and publish documents, and, check them for their accuracy with almost zero cost. Traditionally, bureaucratic systems---like banks---record data on paper ledgers. Whomever controlled the ledger controlled the data. That person had the ability to alter or destroy the paper ledger, which altered or destroyed the data.
Computers and the Web allow people to create and publish electronic ledgers and send them all over the place. This means that no individual has exclusive control over the ledger anymore. Everyone who wants can get a copy of the ledger sent to her machine any time she wants. All the copies have a date-stamp on them, which gives a "snapshot" of what the ledger said at any particular date and time. This means that even if the central accountant tried to change the ledger to say erase a payment into my account, everyone on the Blockchain would still have old, dated copies of the ledger that would say that I had a certain amount of money in my account which wasn't listed in the latest version.
Moreover, a program in their computer would do a checksum test to see if any changes or errors had crept into the old parts of the ledgers in the Blockchain. (I do this whenever I download a new operating system for a computer—so I know it’s no big deal.) If an error was found, the idea is that the community of computer types who have made it their business to know about all these things would then look into what's going on, and if they found any hanky-panky they'd raise an unholy ruckus. (As they routinely do about any number of things---ever heard of Anonymous?)
"But wait a minute!!!!" I can hear people saying, "I don't want a bunch of hacker types having access to all my information!!!" In response, I'd like readers consider a key few issues.
First of all, the privacy horse left the barn a long, long time ago. Every time you use a credit or debit card, answer a "fun survey" or fill out a petition on social media, buy something on line, click on an advertisement, watch something on You Tube or Netflix, use your cell phone, etc, a machine is gathering intelligence on you. Most of that info doesn't go to the government, but rather big business. The only difference is that democratic governments have a set of regulations to protect your privacy, and most businesses don't. Moreover, if a rogue arm of the government wants to jerk you around, they can either buy the info from a willing business or have it sent to them by a intelligence agency in a willing foreign country. (Ever heard of the "Five Eyes"?)
The second issue to consider is “what role does privacy actually play in our society?” If someone wants to know how much money and real estate I have, it's pretty much a matter of public record. That's because I'm a small fish. But if I was a super wealthy or powerful person—well that's a different story. I could (and probably would) hide my wealth through things like numbered companies and offshore bank accounts.
The fact is that a great deal of our current fixation on privacy protects the rich and powerful from being accountable to the public good far more than it protects the vast majority of individuals from the power of the state or giant corporations. This means that the more gyrations our society goes through to preserve theoretical privacy for everyone, the more it protects the wealthy and powerful from being accountable for their actions. Do you really want to place a higher value on HYPOTHETICALLY (but not really) keeping your personal "secrets" from others than on forcing large corporations and wealthy individuals to be more transparent?
The last question I suspect people will ask is "What if there's a computer melt-down and we lose all this information stored on computers?"
Estonia has gotten around this issue by creating a "digital embassy". This is a server farm in a secret location in another country (Luxembourg) that has the same sort of protections as a traditional embassy (ie: it's considered part of another nation and no one from the host country can get into it without permission). Huge amounts of the Estonian digital bureaucracy saves it's data there so they could quickly reboot their government if the existing structure was destroyed during a disaster. Beyond this, there’s that whole blockchain thing too—there will always be copies of it somewhere simply because they are so easy to create and store.
This isn't a hypothetical concern. Estonia happens to be on the front lines of the current cold war between NATO and Russia. It suffered a massive cyber attack in 2007 and could actually end up in a shooting war because Russia tends to see it as being traditionally part of its territory. Putin would probably dearly love to see it annexed or at least reduced to puppet status.
As other nations adopt the Estonian bureaucratic model, they are similarly creating digital embassies to protect their data. No doubt Estonia has other, secret backups that add another layer of redundancy to their government records.
I could probably write a lot more on this subject, but the point of this article isn't to be exhaustive but rather to expose readers to something they probably haven't heard about. I'll finish off by offering one bigger, "meta issue".
Our society is going through a lot of turmoil because it is facing a lot of stresses that will require significant changes in the ways people live their lives.
Moving towards a zero-carbon economy is going to totally upturn how people live their lives.
Marginalized groups---non-whites, women, gays, etc---are no longer willing to sit on the sidelines while rich, old, white men call the shots.
Our housing system has totally failed to produce affordable housing for most people.
Modern technology is increasingly incomprehensible to a slice of the population.
Society is splitting into an upper class that is sucking up more and more of the collective wealth while everyone else is finding their income degrading as dependable, full-time jobs are replaced by the "gig economy".
The COVID plague has stressed-out the small businesses and service sector jobs that the precariat depend on to survive. At the same time, it has forced a lot of people who are extremely suspicious of any technology they don't understand to simply take things like vaccines and mask mandates on "trust".
I suspect that my vision of what's going on is extremely rare. In a lot of ways I should be someone who is upset about new technology. I grew up in a very old-fashioned community on a family farm. We grew almost all of our own food. When I was out ploughing field with a tractor, my neighbours (old order Amish) would sometimes be doing the same thing with heavy horses. I still preserve some of my own food and have been told that I sometimes dress like someone from the 19th century.
I also had a blue collar, unionized job for most of my life. I recently retired but my employer didn't fill my job with a permanent replacement, but instead made the job part-time, casual, and, dramatically cut the pay and benefits. I own my own home, but am concerned about whether I will be able to buy a comparable replacement without having to leave Guelph if I have to sell it.
At the same time, however, I am very well educated. I have tried to keep up on various issues. I can and do things like change the operating system on my computer. I recently purchased a bleeding-edge "open source" cell phone and have taught myself how to change the operating system on it too. I am not afraid of technology and try to learn as much as I can about it.
But I understand that the vast majority of people in my age bracket and with similar backgrounds aren't like me. They are afraid of the new world ahead of us. All this new stuff makes them feel powerless and disenfranchised. They want the world to stop changing.
The problem is that it can't. There are more and more people in Canada every year. They have to have some place to live. The climate is changing and we have to stop using fossil fuels. More and more people who are "different" are gaining influence in society, and they are not going to go back into the closet, kitchen, ghetto, reserve, or wherever society used to hide them away. Rich people will continue to get richer unless society starts to redistribute wealth in some significant way. And COVID-19 is here to stay whether we trust big pharma or not.
All I can personally do is try to expose people to new ways of looking at the world and plead with them to make the effort to try to learn a little more about it. And once you do that, I would suggest that you try to force yourself to push the boundaries of your "comfort zone" to expand them a bit wider. Our lives are going to continue to change as the years go by. If people continue to fight tooth and nail against it, we are going to make more bad choices and end up with a worse future than need be. If, instead, we make the effort to educate ourselves we might be able to get to a better place. I think that Estonia may very well have found a significant solution to one of the problems we currently face. I think it's time we took a good look at their example to see what we can learn.