wibbi we understood privacy can reinforce security

William Heath has been asking Stefan Brands about egovernment.

"What does Stefan Brands have to say about Transformational Government? The same as what he has said for years: government needs multi-party security that preserves privacy. And it can be done.

I should point out that we have cast his pearls of wisdom in front of the UK Government several times before. And that it's not his problem if we screw things up in the UK - after all, he's a Dutchman living in Canada. But if we had to name three people whose views should be heard if we are to create in the UK the foundation of trust we need in e-government, he's one.

Stefan did set out his position pretty clearly here on Ideal Government in October 2004 and not much has changed. And he points me to a good and concise exposition of his thoughts called On E-Government Authentication and Privacy which appeared on the Anonymity Blog, in Nov last year. "

It is becoming critical for policymakers to understand that privacy and security are not opposing and mutually exclusive forces. As Brand says:

"Governments around the world are working to implement digital identity and access management infrastructures for access to government services by citizens and businesses. E-government has the potential of bringing major cost, convenience, and security benefits to citizens, businesses, and government alike. There are major architecture challenges, however, which cannot be solved by simply adopting modern enterprise architectures for identity management. Namely, these architectures involve a central server that houses the capability to electronically trace, profile, impersonate, and falsely deny access to any user. In the context of an e-government infrastructure, the privacy and security implications for citizens of such a panoptical identity architecture would be unprecedented...

On the legal side, the compatibility of modern enterprise identity architectures with data protection legislation and program statutes is highly questionable. Also, the adoption of enterprise identity architectures in the context of e-government would directly interfere with Article 8 rights under the European Convention on Human Rights. Specifically, any interference with privacy rights under Article 8 must do so to the minimum degree necessary. Enterprise identity architectures violate this requirement: far less intrusive means exist for achieving the objectives of e-government.

Specifically, over the course of the past two decades, the cryptographic research community has developed an array of privacy-preserving technologies that can be used as building blocks for e-government in a manner that simultaneously meets the security needs of government and the legitimate privacy and security needs of individuals and service providers. Relevant privacy-preserving technologies include digital credentials, secret sharing, private information retrieval, and privacy-preserving data mining.

By properly using privacy-preserving technologies, individuals can be represented in their interactions with service providers by local electronic identifiers. Service providers can electronically link their legacy account data on individuals to these local electronic identifiers, which by themselves are untraceable and unlinkable. As a result, any pre-existing segmentation of activity domains is fully preserved. At the same time, verifier-trusted authorities can securely embed into all of an individual’s local identifiers a unique “master identifier” (such as a random number). These embedded identifiers remain unconditionally hidden when individuals identify themselves on the basis of their local electronic identifiers, but their hidden presence can be leveraged by service providers for all kinds of security and data sharing purposes without introducing privacy problems. The privacy guarantees do not require users to rely on third parties - the power to link and trace the activities of a user across his or her activity domains resides solely in the hands of that user.

In the context of e-government, security and privacy are not opposites but mutually reinforcing, assuming proper privacy-preserving technologies are deployed. In order to move forward with e-government, it is important for government to adopt technological alternatives that hold the promise of multi-party security while preserving privacy."