Posted on 08/12/2002 7:01:29 PM PDT by lds23
A new national database has sparked a rare outbreak of civil disobedience
IN THE late 1970s, nervous residents of Suginami-ku, one of Tokyo's western wards, were battling the municipality's plans to load their personal records into electronic databases, fearing the move would make it easier for the government to invade their privacy. To bypass the protests, local officials simply had the menacing new computers smuggled into the ward's offices—at 3am. A quarter-century later, Suginami-ku's residents are at it again, fighting fiercely to protect their privacy. This time, however, the local government is eagerly taking the residents' side. And to the embarrassment of Japan's national officials, the municipality is keen to wage this campaign in broad daylight.
This week, in an unusual act of defiance, at least by Japanese standards, Suginami-ku and five other municipalities refused to carry out a central-government directive to tie their records into a new national network, which went live on August 5th. The network, known in Japan as Juki Net, will assign each citizen an 11-digit identification number, and then link that electronic marker to the person's name, sex, address and date of birth. The system will then allow any ministry, agency or municipality to tap into such data on any Japanese citizen.
With local government divided among more than 3,300 cities, towns and villages, a half-dozen holdouts might seem easy to dismiss. But given the influence Japan's central government has usually wielded, their dissent has registered loudly. Within a week of announcing on August 1st that it would boycott the new system, Suginami-ku had received over 40 requests from non-residents to establish an address in the ward, as a way to give Juki Net the slip. In a recent poll by the Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan's biggest dailies, 86% said that they expected some personal information to leak from the new computer network, while 76% believe that the project should be postponed. Detractors are especially incensed that the government has pressed ahead without having first passed a privacy bill in the last session of parliament, which they viewed, with some justification, as a prerequisite for the system's being allowed to go online.
The central government, however, claims that the new registry will promote more efficient electronic government (which only 37% of those polled believe), and will contain only limited, reasonably harmless, information on citizens. Its core argument is that existing laws and procedures already provide perfectly adequate protection and render the national-identity numbers innocuous.
Although a clause in the 1999 law that set Juki Net up called on the government to submit a broad privacy bill before it could become active, officials point out that the same law placed restrictions on the system it created: the data cannot be shared with (non-governmental) third parties or used for purposes that are not already specified. They also say that since Junichiro Koizumi's government did table a broader privacy bill (which failed to win approval) in the most recent parliament, the original agreement has been honoured. Finally, apart from these legal restrictions, officials at the home-affairs ministry, which oversees Juki Net, place great stock in their procedures for catching abuses.
Wary Japanese citizens find it hard to choose which of these arguments to rubbish first. Just this week, as Juki Net went live, the headlines furnished two examples of how unprotected information can be. Fujitsu, a big electronics firm, announced that blackmailers had got hold of intelligence on a network it designed for the self-defence forces. Then prosecutors building a case against Muneo Suzuki, a scandal-bitten lawmaker, revealed that they had accidentally faxed their secret files to a real-estate company. Meanwhile, the home affairs ministry, the would-be guardian of Juki Net's integrity, revealed only last month that a separate data-sharing network it oversees for local governments was easily vulnerable to hackers. Topping it off, within just two days of Juki Net's launch, personal data on roughly 2,500 people had already been mailed to strangers.
Even if the new database could be reasonably secured against outsiders, many Japanese are hardly willing to entrust the system to the insiders who will be allowed to use it every day. In May of this year, the defence agencies got caught creating a database on citizens who had requested materials under last year's Freedom of Information law, including information on their political views. After one official tried to delete the evidence, and ruling-party lawmakers attempted to suppress a 40-page report, those responsible were slapped on the wrist by their ministry for turning a measure aimed at promoting open government into a tool for covert surveillance. Their pay was docked.
With such a track record, Juki Net's opponents wonder, what is to prevent the government itself, or single-minded bureaucrats within it, from later using the national-identity numbers to compile alternate databases, with information on citizens' health records, pension benefits, or religious and political affiliations? And if anyone does try it, how often will they be caught? Or punished? Among the safeguards it now places on local records, Suginami-ku's government deliberately tries to prevent such abuses by keeping its databases fragmented, giving each of its half-million residents a different identification number for different purposes, from health, to tax, to residency files. But that is not efficient. Why, the central government wonders, won't the ward's jittery residents hurry up and trust the central bureaucracy again? After all, it has already told them who knows best.
After the power is in place, all the paper words put there as "assurances" will be whooshed aside.
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