e-Resident of Estonia
10:28:00 AM
The most advanced digital society in the world is the former Soviet Republic on the edge of the Baltic Sea. And by handing over $100 and a photograph, allowing my fingerprints to be taken and waiting a few weeks while my credentials were verified, I have been issued with an identity card, a cryptographic key and a PIN code to access its national systems. I am now an official e-resident of the Republic of Estonia, as is the Japanese prime minister, and you will want to be one too. And what's more, by doing so, you'll be part of a system that could not only reinvent public services for the internet age but fundamentally redefine what it means to be a country.
When Estonia gained independence from Russia in 1991, it quickly realized that it needed to find something to set itself apart from its neighbors. Norway had oil, Finland, mobile phones, Sweden, design. But as Taavi Kotka, the Estonian government's chief information officer, asks, what do you think of when you think of places like Lithuania or Slovenia? Nothing, he says, and so to become distinct, Estonia has embarked on massive technological innovation.
But what Estonia has achieved makes the Northern Californians look like laggards: despite only half of the country having a phone line in 1991, by 1997, 97% of Estonian schools were online. In 2000, cabinet meetings went paperless. By 2002, the government had built a free Wi-Fi network that covered most of the populated areas. By 2007, it had introduced e-voting, and by 2012 huge amounts of fiber-optic cabling were being laid, promising ultra-high-speed data connections and 94% of the country's tax returns were being made online, taking users an average of five minutes to fill in the parts that hadn't been automatically completed by the link between the tax office and local banks. Now, every task that can be done with a digital service.
Today, almost all government services are managed online. Citizens, armed with a chip-and-pin identity card, can run their affairs from a laptop or phone, anywhere there is connectivity. And the Estonian government wants to offer you the chance to do the same thing.
Twenty-four years after the end of the Soviet Union, this still feels weird. I feed the Estonian system with enough data to prove that I'm who I say I am; there's allegedly a background check and then a few weeks later I get an email telling me to come to the Estonian Embassy and collect my card. Within is my card, a USB reader, a sealed envelope with my PIN code and an invitation to visit a specific URL.
From summer 2015, you can go to the nearest Estonian embassy and apply for e-residency.
Estonia is working on linking its tax office with its counterparts in other regions of the world. The Estonians want to offer the option for, say, US citizens to run their US companies through the Estonian system, which would in turn, in the background, with no extra work for the user, make sure that the US tax office receives all the money it is legally due. A US-based entrepreneur, they hope, will decide to open her business in Estonia, use an Estonian bank and pay for some Estonian services, even if the company was only going to be trading in the US, because she would find Estonia's national infrastructure far easier to deal with than the US's. In other words, a nation is now competing with its neighbors on the basis of the quality of its user interface. Just as you might switch your bank to one with a better mobile app, the Estonians hope you'll switch your business to a country with an infrastructure that is easier to use.
You want to open a business, say; once you have your card, you can go online from wherever you are on the planet, log on to the government portal with your card and PIN, and use it to form your Estonian company, then register with an Estonian bank and start trading. Because the Estonian tax office is digitally linked to Estonian banks, filing your taxes is radically simple, remember the five-minute average from a few paragraphs back? So too is any bureaucracy involved in keeping the company going. After all, these are Estonian digital services we're talking about: it's across the web, secured with your ID card. To be clear, this doesn't involve actually becoming Estonian, or even physically being in Estonia. Instead, they're hoping to spread the ideas of their powerful Internet-based services and promote their national brand, in order to coax others to use them from afar. Perhaps also to spread the idea to other countries that such a thing is possible. "We don't really like to speak to each other in person, so we went and created Skype and all these things," says Siret Schutting of the government project e-Estonia. "Stuff like this has to be a social right."
In the pine-lined IKEA-esque government showroom of Estonian innovation, there is no one over 30, it feels more like the offices of a volunteer-led arts organization than an international showpiece but foreign delegations visit every week in order to learn from the Estonian experience. Introducing the ID card, Schutting tells those visiting leaders, is a gradual process: "When you introduce an ID card, you get a lot of people asking, 'Why do I need that?' But then you add all of these services, and you can purchase a car from your living room, or vote from your living room or, when it's like minus 40 outside and you have a newborn baby, you probably don't want to go to the family office to name her: you do that online. Very small, pragmatic things."
Today, the fact that every interaction with, and within, the Estonian government happens digitally has had subtle social effects. For example, apart from only carrying two cards (driving licenses, donor cards and the like have been subsumed into identity cards), Estonians have complete control over their personal data. The portal you can access with your identity card gives you a log of everyone who has accessed it. If you see something you do not like, like a doctor other than your own looking at your medical records, for instance, you can click to report it to the data regulator, a civil servant then must justify the intrusion.
The culmination of these systems makes for an awkward conversation with members of certain foreign governments. Strikingly young, dressed like a man who has borrowed a suit before visiting his in-laws for the first time, and sitting behind a chipped table that wouldn't make it into the caretaker's office in a western European capital, one Estonian official, who didn't want to be named, reveals that e-Estonia has a list of foreign delegations they don't bother to have meetings with any more. These countries, he says, are so far behind in their thinking that time spent with them is too dull to bear. They just stare at us, he says.
Meanwhile, parliament is designed to be paperless: laws are even signed into effect with a digital signature on the president's tablet. And every draft law is available to the public to read online, at every stage of the legislative process; a complete breakdown of the substance and authorship of every change offers significant transparency over lobbying and potential corruption.
Although it's never been proved, it has always been assumed in Estonia that the attack came from the Russian Federation -- if not directly, then certainly with its support. The Russians, indeed, are commonly held by the Estonian-speaking majority to be up to no good. For most of the last 800 years, Estonians have been part of someone else's empire, and it's an ingrained belief that they're destined to become so again at some point: many are, post-Ukraine, deeply nervous of Vladimir Putin. Many people in Tallinn say the same thing: we're next.
Starting on April 27, 2009, Estonian web servers found themselves under constant attack for three weeks. Huge amounts of traffic, generated by virus-infected machines around the globe, overwhelmed the country's systems. More than 120 of these distributed denials of service attacks brought down sites across the country, including those belonging to the president, government ministries, newspapers, banks, and local businesses. Although the systems behind the websites weren't damaged per say, they were unreachable for that time. It was a truly modern show of force, now considered one of the first major examples of a cyberattack on a nation.
They're planning for it and the main question is what will happen after an attack. The last time an annexed Estonia won independence, after years of rule from Moscow, the government was able to restore much of the country's land to a semblance of pre-Soviet ownership by consulting church records and other written documentation. Today, though, that documentation is entirely digital -- and that makes all the difference. "The point is that it's not only the data you need to backup," says Kotka, the Estonian tech entrepreneur turned government CIO. "If you look at what happens in Ukraine, for example, it's not a war, it's a hybrid war. So if you want to affect Estonia somehow, virally, make our ID card not work. Then we're in trouble. Banking: 40 per cent of people using e-banking are using their ID card for e-banking. Take those services down, and they can't access their money and they have to go physically to the bank... and since the banks have optimized according to the need, with 99% of banking transactions happening electronically, they've closed their offices. So in a hybrid war case, we need to backup services as well as data... so if the little green men" he means the Russians, "decide to have their holiday here rather than in the Ukraine, just to be sure that the ID card works, we'll move it to the UK."
Or, indeed, any of his six planned "data embassies" around the world. At times of national emergency, the plan is to be able to hit a switch and move the execution of the code that runs the systems behind the Estonian state to another server farm, one outside Estonia. An attack, even an invasion, can't shut down the local government because it doesn't need to be local to still be a government. And even if the links are severed, eventually independence would be re-won and the state can be restored from a backup. This can be applied not just to digital data and services; because everything from the Estonian parliament to its civil courts is paperless, they can be run from anywhere. In the old days, a government in exile would quickly lose legitimacy. Sheltering in another country, it would lack the infrastructure to do its work. But today an Estonian government in exile could just carry on. Fittingly, for a country that founded Skype, the judiciary could fly to the Caribbean, and it would mean nothing more than a series of particularly relaxed case hearings. They could be there today if they wanted. It helps to clarify the differences between a nation, a state, and a geographical country. These things are already a bit fuzzy, but in general, a nation is a group of people within an area who perceive themselves as being the same type of person; a country is that geographical area itself, and a state is the set of political organizations that those people agree to adhere to. By disconnecting the silicon-based functions of the state from the actual soil-based country, Estonians are protecting their nation from fates that might befall their country.
This is all software, and software can be easily, and perfectly, copied. So if the Estonians are successful in their efforts and they can build a digital state infrastructure that can be hosted anywhere, then there's nothing to say they can't release the code and let another nation upload a new flag gif, change some of the names in the config file and boot themselves up their own version. It doesn't have to be an officially recognized state, either: fully realized, this brings down the barrier to entry to effective statehood for the more agile, more entrepreneurial separatist movements, budding caliphates or secessionist offshoots.
Gathering people of specific identities together is what the internet does. We're forever building nations online. There's American TV, a communal experience, but there's no American internet: we build our own experiences individually, through the people we hang out with online, regardless of geography. It's not the proximity of distance but the proximity of ideas that matters. Or perhaps proximity of time zone, as Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe had it: shift workers allied to the people whose waking hours shared the same offset from GMT, no matter if that matched a London sunset to a Los Angeles sunrise. If we choose our communities by interest or culture things we can choose rather than by closeness, which is thrust upon us by birth, why not start choosing the state-level infrastructure we actually interact with on the basis of how well it works?
In 1996, one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, John Perry Barlow, wrote an "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace". A seminal text for its time, it says: "Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is the world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live." When that declaration was made, it seemed outlandish because independence only went to actual nations which had all of the tools of a state. You had to have a parliament building before you could have a parliament. A state needed the stuff to be of substance.
According to the International Telecommunications Union, by 2020 80 % of the world's population will own a smartphone. Perhaps, soon after, where they choose to live and work and place their businesses will depend as much on the fertility of their country's digital infrastructure as its land. "Welcome to e-Estonia," says its website, "and enjoy a hassle-free life!"
Since April 1, you can apply via an Estonian embassy. Take your passport or photo ID. You'll have your photo and fingerprints taken, fill in a form, then hand over $100 in cash. Then comes the background check, when your documents are sent to Estonia. You may be asked why you want e-residency and whether you have any previous links with the country. After about four weeks or so, you'll receive an email to let you know whether your application was successful. If it's a yes, you can go and pick up your identity card from the embassy.
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