Intellect or Insanity, Jonathan Klinger's Blog

0. Abstract.

[This Wednesday I shall lecture at the LiSS working group conference, here is a draft of my lecture] From 2003, and until today, the Israeli Government has been working diligently in order to legislate the biometric database act and the orders and ordinances according to it. However, This biometric database is not the only biometric database in Israel and is not the only database where government authorities have access to. In my brief lecture, I shall present a different approach, asking whether this database act was actually required and what are the reasons for choosing a legislative act when doing so. When doing so, I’ll have to ask whether the act of legislation was needed because the social contract was broken, or because it was a megalomaniac act made out in will to block any different approach to databases.

1. Database Laws, Privacy.

Let’s first understand how government databases operate. The Israeli Privacy Protection Act does not differentiate public sector databases from private sector ones; moreover, article 23D provides any person the right to know about such database and article 23C provides government bodies the right to request and transfer data from other databases when the action is required by law or by the body’s function. Meaning, if it was it’s desire, the Government could have set up a registered database and operated the biometric database out of such act; but in such case, it couldn’t have mandated the people to provide their biometric information.

So what could it do? It could have amended the Census Act. The Israeli Census Act is the act regulating the management of the Israeli Census (which, as we already know, was leaked to the Internet); article 2 writes down the fields in the database that are required to be listed. In such case, amending and mandating a person’s biometric data under it could have solved the biometric database problem in a 1-line amendment, without requiring massive legislation.

However, The Israeli legislator decided to pass a 30 page long act (PDF), which describes in full the security and use in detail, and allow public debate over it. In order to understand why, let’s understand how other government databases work.

2. Government Databases and legislation.

First let’s see what are the databases which were legislated and which weren’t; Meir Sheetrit, the biometric database’s entrepreneur, said that “Israel has enough [other] biometric databases“. However, if we inspect his claims, we find out a different perspective; the one who says who and when is required to provide his information willfully to the database.

Let’s first inspect what are the databases that were legislated under the Israeli Law: The Israeli Anti-Money Laundering Act, The Israeli Census Act (which actually does not establish a database, but only allows the inquiry of information), The Police DNA Database (The Criminal Procedure Act (Searching in a person’s body and taking of identifying information)), Criminal Records (The Criminal Record Act).

On the other hand, there are quite a lot of databases which contain information which is as personal and as sensitive as the legislated databases, including the migrant workers biometric database, the driver’s license database which includes photographs and according to the Israeli transportation office, does not require legislation in order to retain a database (where the transportation office provides this biometric information at least to the ministry of interior), the unemployed database, which contains fingerprints of unemployed and  the Bus Authority database that contains information regarding passengers and their routes.

3. Why do you legislate databases?

We can see that while some databases were legislated because of their sensitive nature (money laundering, f.e), there is no actual difference between the sensitivity; There is no actual difference between money laundering information or the biometrics of a migrant worker. We can also say that legislation did not come because of the voluntary nature of the database; a person cannot choose to be unemployed or not to travel by car or bus. None of the non-legislated databases are actually voluntary; they just address specific needs and puts the person “agreeing” to provide the information in an inferior place: he is either unemployed, or he wishes to travel to Israeli to work, he may want to drive in Israel or take a bus. These are all daily functions that a person cannot go without.

4. Why Legislation.

Now, let’s go to the theoretical assumption that legislating the biometric database could have been made without any real or substantial legislation; It could have actually just establish a national database by issuing an order of the Passport Act, seeing that most Israelies have a passport, and hold the information in a way that is “required” to issue a passport; he could have went in the same way the Transportation Office went, and required just the issuance of fingerprints. However, the choice to legislate the database was taken. And why?

The reason is the Israeli Privacy Protection Act, but not the article requiring willful consent, nor the article mandating informing the data subject on its rights, but because of article 23C. Let’s inspect the text:

“Notwithstanding article 23b, providing the information is permitted, if not prohibited by any legislation or professional ethics – (1) between public bodies, if one of the following exists (a) providing the information is in the authority or role of the body who provides the data and it is required to exercise a law or a cause by the authority of the data provider or its recipient; (b) providing the database is to a public body who is allowed to demand such information according to law from any other source; (2) from a public body to a government office or another state establishment, or between offices or bodies as such, if the providing of information is required to exercise any legislation or for a purpose in the authority or roles of the data provider or its recipient …”

Well, we do need to read this carefully: There could have been a state-wide database without legislation;  however, in such case the Police could not have been granted access to the information. And why? because neither article 23b(a)(i) nor article 23b(a)(ii) allow it: The first alternative requires specific authorization under law to disclose the information and the second requires that the police would have been authorized to request the information at source. However, the police are not entitled to coerce a person to give them his biometric information, and the ministry of interior [was] not authorized to specifically assist the police.

Therefore, unlike other databases, the mobility of the information and the detachment between the cause of why it was collected and its use brought the actual need for legislation.

5. Ruling out other factors.

Now, we can inquire about the question of whether this was actually the reason; whether there was a secret hand that required it. The only reason to explain why a 30-page long bill was passed was explained when alternatives were presented to the government. The rejection of the Adi Shamir proposal, for a non-identifiable database, and the choice to store both a person’s facial photo and fingerprint (where such information is not required to maintain a clean database, see Yoram Oren’s statement “if the purpose is to reduce a list, then yes“). Meaning, the legislator was presented with at least two alternatives that allow a secure database that does not allow double-inclusion and does not retain so much sensitive data, but rejected it.

Such rejection may be discussed later in courts when inquiring about the constitutionality of the act, but that’ out of the point. The choice of both legislating and deciding on this architecture was made solely in order to allow surveillance.

6. Summary and Conclusions.

We know that the legislator had other options to legislate a database (or not to legislate it); and that it could have allowed it to be used quicker, without any pilot and even with the coercion against the persons, but in such case, the police and other security authorities could not have obtained access to the database. Therefore, the sole purpose of addressing legislation is in order to allow such access, and unless we can rule this out, this is the true purpose of the database.

In about two weeks time, I’ll attend the Wikimania2011 Conference and discuss Cultural Fair Use, Political Narrative and Copyright; while this might sound as one big mashup, because there is no apparent connection between copyright and political narrative. The story of fair use, however, points us to why copyright, more than any other thing, has to do with Politics. The text of this lecture is somewhat derived from my research with Dr. Nimrod Kozlovski for Consumers International about Fair Use in Israel.

But first, a short story. One of my favorite TV shows is South Park. I’ve been watching them from 1997, and have been a fan of the authors and their opinions; when Trey Parker and Matt Stone described their approach towards copyright in their interview for Reason Magazine back in 2006 i was quite happy to find out their approach for copyright was that of a true artist, a wish to reach a wider audience. In a same manner, back in 2008 when they launched South Park Studios, a website to allow watching all their episodes through video streaming as well as remixing and sharing their content, I understood how much they were artists and how they were not just in it for the money.

In 2008, South Park paid tribute to the internet nation with an episode criticizing the Writer’s Guild of America’s Strike while paying tribute to some of the latest internet meme sensations such as the sneezing panda and the Star Wars Kid. One of the subjects of criticism was Samwell, whose video “What What (in the butt)” depicted an African American male pondering whether the viewers of the video wish to “do it in the butt” with him. The video was displayed in the popular YouTube site free of charge and received millions of views.

In the “Canada on Strike” episode, the four prepubescent characters in South Park wish to earn a quick buch from the internet and decide to film a viral video. The position Butters, one of the characters, in the same way as Samwell is in the video and make the unconceivable, take the already grotesque video and make it even more grotesque. This is basically why I love South Park so much: the interaction between extreme free speech and the ability to mock the already mocked to a grain gives them the ability to go on for so many shows. This is the video that Butters produced:

Samwell decided that South Park’s use of his “Work” constituted as copyright infringement and decided to sue Viacom for copyright infringement. Viacom decided to be the better person and instead of settling the case out of court (which would help it, as a copyright owner to fight others who make similar uses of its content) decided to try and use the affirmative Fair Use defense. This week, a Wisconsin federal judge dismissed the case, arguing that South Park’s use of the work was fair (read the full opinion of 10-CV-1013 Brownmark Films LLC, v. Comedy Partners). The court weighed in favor of what I try to call “Cultural Fair Use” which became somewhat popular recently, but is not actually in the general Fair Use exemptions.

For all you non-lawyers, fair use is a defense (codified in 17 USC 107 for those who use copyrighted works for causes such as “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research”. However, South Park’s use, in spite of the wish to be considered criticism, is not really criticism, but mockery or homage. South Park used Samwell’s work in order to criticize the viral videos altogether, not the work itself. In a similar case, where a famous Israeli Comic Book (or should I actually say “Graphic Novel”) cartoonist depicted Donald Duck in order to mock the Isreali Society, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that his use was not fair as the criticism was not on the work itself (RCA 2687/92 Geva v. Disney). Only recently, the lower courts acknowledged that other, cultural aspects of fair use in order to stretch society’s public domain and ability add some works of authorship to the public domain without the formal requirements of copyright terms, solely because such works have become works of the public due to popularity and demand.

The recent cultural fair use is based on folklore more than anything else. The basic elements are that once a work has exhausted its commercial value and became a part of popular culture, it may allow others to create additional social value by reusing the work. Such uses may be mashups, remixes or other uses which are not highly criticizing or transformative, but are without any impact on the actual market value.

[Here comes that part where if you read this prior to hearing my lecture you thanked me, because the crowd will be rickrolled]

A good example is Rickrolling, the phenomenon of baiting someone into clicking a link on the internet which leads to Rick Astley‘s “Never Gonna Give You Up” video, which is not as grotesque as Samwell’s “What What”, but is no less funny. People have used this song and attempted to add it into popular culture and other works as an homage to the internet nation; either by playing it instead of the end credits to Bill O’Rielly‘s show, paying tribute in an episode of the popular TV show Family Guy, using Barack Obama as the singer by mashing up his speeches or even a Stephen Hawking tribute to the song.

But putting Rick Astley‘s career aside, let’s discuss Government Works for a bit. The US, as well as other states, has a “Government Works” clause that determines that any work of authorship made by the state itself is not subject to copyright. Unlike the US, Israel does not have such clause. Therefore, a material part of Israel’s history is subject to copyright; meaning that the national photo archives and other government works such as reports of the Central Bureau of Statistics are subject to copyright. In such case, when Israeli nationals (and other nationals, actually) wish to use government works, they must either license them or find other sources.

This creates a burden, first of all because the Israeli government does not benefit from selling licenses. It is not one of its positions as a government nor is it a material source of profit. The government has set up its Press Office to allow dissemination of information freely from the government outwards and copyright restrictions seems to contradict Israel’s wish to disseminate its message.

During the 2010 term, Parliament Member Meir Sheetrit submitted a bill introduced by Wikipedia Israel, proposing that non-commercial use of government pictures shall be free of charge, as long as the use is with credit, and does not manipulate or alter the photos in any way. In an interview, Sheetrit stated that one of the reasons for the governmental opposition to the bill was the fear from use of the photos by organisations
which are hostile to Israel or wish to promote the opposing narrative.

The bill was prepared following a study by Creative Commons Israel and Wikimedia, which dealt with Crown Copyrights. The understanding and discussions were whether to apply fair use principles to these uses or to exempt them individually. The tension between personal uses and political uses was balanced by the Israeli ministry of justice, which drafted the bill for MK Sheetrit, and exempted non-commercial use only.

Interestingly enough, the definition of what is commercial and what is not has yet to be discussed. It is interesting to note that both the language of the bill and the language opposing the bill use copyright as censorship or impediments on free speech. The rationale behind the bill, at least as stated by MK Sheetrit, was to allow the dissemination of Israeli Hasbara (propaganda) and use of the Israeli imagery for free by bloggers, Wikipedia and other organisations who wish to use them in order to enrich their works. However, at least as stated by MK Sheetrit, the governmental opposition was based on the fear of use by hostile organisations. Both parties held an opinion that government works are a part of the discourse and that copyright may be used to prohibit others’ speech or to allow them to undertake one’s narrative. These rationales underplay the economical aspects of copyright, and deal with fair use in a different manner, which is the ability to silence political speech.

If, indeed, the only rationale for copyright in Israeli government works is political: to maintain the political narrative, then one material aspect, which is the commercial value of the work, has to be let aside when discussing government works. Let’s, for this cause, inspect the incentives behind copyright and see whether they apply for government works (based on the incentives described by Julie E, Cohen in Copyright as Property in the Post-Industrial Economy: A Research Agenda); the purpose of Copyright was to encourage new and original authorship, however, in Government Works, there is little originality, most Government Works are either documentary (formal photographs or official journals) or are the result of a research; and even if commercial uses were made using these works, then the Government shall continue to create.

Therefore, the incentives for Government Works do not exist in copyright. Now, what’s left is the apparatus of control, and this is actually what’s important in copyright nowadays, more than the economical incentives in Copyright, it seems that Governments, like artists, wish to keep the control of what others shall do with their works, therefore applying their political narrative through copyright.

Israel’s offer for a “Israel Friendly License” shows that we do have a problem: Israel wishes to enforce its political narrative through copyright, by granting a license to use its works solely for those who adhere to its standards. Because the Government does not work for-profit, we can learn, more than from any commercial entity, that fair use is required for criticism, because it is made exactly where people do not want others to use their intellectual property.

Last Thursday marked the final approval of the biometric database regulations and the biometric database order in Israel; the regulations and order were approved by a special panel participated solely by Meir Sheetrit and Abraham Michaeli, where Sheetrit was the initial entrepreneur of the Biometric Database in his position as minister of interior. This marks the end of a two year process that began two years ago when The Knesset approved the biometric bill. The discussions prior to the approval were on who shall be granted access to the citizen’s biometric database (but not to whether it’s really needed). According to the biometric law, any citizen or resident that shall join the database shall have to provide the ministry of interior his fingerprints and a photograph of his face which will be stored in a central database which may be accessible to the ministry of interior, the police and other security services.

Following the public protest, made mostly in the internet, it was decided that the database shall commence with a pilot program which shall be no longer than four years. during this term, which shall commence this November, the necessity   of the database shall be examined (however, recent statements show that the pilot is not actually a pilot). The only way you can help during this pilot is to refuse to provide the government with your fingerprint.

On the actual question why is the biometric database dangerous to you and your country there are numerous answers which were already raised by experts and discussed over and over again. Briefly, the stated purpose of the database is to prevent forgery of identity cards (and identities). However, it order to prevent identity theft and ID forgery there is no actual need for a biometric database and several other methods already exist, including electronic identification cards. However, as we learned from a recently leaked document, the only reason that a biometric database is required was to pass information to the police about the citizens of Israel. We learned so when the police rejected a safer mean of storing biometric information detailed by Prof. Adi Shamir (the S in RSA), claiming that it cannot utilize the database if made in the Shamir method. And yes, the same police that uses extreme violence on protesters from right and left, against Arabas and against social activists.

Another reason to object to biometric identification and the biometric database is that once your biometrics is your unique identifier, then anyone with access to this information could possibly steal your identity. And of course I need not remind you that you leave your fingerprints on any cup of coffee you drink, right?

So, once we passed the “why we detest a biometric database in two paragraphs or less” the question that comes to mind is how you, as citizens, could protest against it. First, you have to understand that the state is going to try as hard as it can to persuade you to provide it with your fingerprints; the bureaucrats and clerks in the ministry of interior are obliged, by the national order, to offer you to join the pilot. Yes, in the same way that your grocery store clerk is obliged to offer you to join their value club, so does the clerk in the ministry of interior have to offer you to join the experiment.

However, one of the criteria set in the pilot is how many people did not join the database out of the entire population; these people have to be you. Beginning November first it is your civil duty to go to the ministry of interior’s offices and have new, non-biometric, cards, so that your refusal to enter the pilot will be counted and in two years time, when the pilot shall be examined, the parliament shall find out that no one wants it.

If you will not do so, then you will find yourselves in two years with a biometric database, that like any other database held in Israel, makes us forfeit our privacy.

[Originally published in 972Mag]

[Partially based on my Hebrew Post]. The assasination of Mahmood Al-Mabhouh is still a mystery, though many links point to the Israeli Mossad as responsible, and security cameras show a general operation, some might understand that biometrics played an important part in the game, as both The Biometric Architect, Meir Sheetrit stated that the biometric database would have prevented the identity theft and we, as opposers, stated that the biometric database allows the Mossad and other security agencies unlimited access to personal information.

However, we could be certain, without a shadow of a doubt, that no matter who is right, some problems arise from the definition of the access to Israel’s biometric database.

It doesn’t matter if MI6 was tipped by the Mossad about the assasination or not; as under the new Biometric Database Act passed in Israel, the Mossad and Shin-Bet would have unlimited access to the biometric database. In such case, and as the biometric data encrypted in passports is only Facial, they could attempt to find persons with double citizenship, let’s say, both Israeli and Irish, and use their original documents, making forgery of Biometric passports irrelevant.

The current law allows them Access, without explaining what is access. During the discussions over the biometric bill in parliament, I tried to ask the Secret Service’s representatives what does this access mean; this is how the conversation was listed in the 20.07.2009 official protocol:

Chair Meir Sheetrit: Ok, the sunlight does not apply for secret things.
Jonathan Klinger: what is ‘pass information from the database’? it could be from the entire database
(…)
Parliament Member Eitan Cabel: Mr. Geva is still in the midst of his matters, afterwards we shall relate to it, as my mind is not at ease.
Danny Geva: This clause was phrased after all the other possibilities were examined and in order to allow us to tolerate our needs. What I want to say is that what we create here, with the issuing of the new biometric cards and the database is something new that did not exist before. This new situation has to allow us to continue to act in order to fulfil our role and destination.
Nira Lamay: When they say ‘allow them access to the database’, they mean that they could just enter to the actual place… will they have permissions in the database? when they say ‘allow them acces’, it is not just to convey them -
Chair Meir Sheetrit: Not through communication.
Nira Lamay: So what is ‘allow them access”?
Nissim Alyasaf: They could come to the database and obtain information.
(…)
Nissim Alyasaf: The database will not have communication.
Chair Meir Sheetrit: So why won’t you change the word ‘Access’?
Nira Lamay: So what is access?
Danny Geva: it doesn’t matter what access is, the word access has to stay because we inspected all other possibilities -
Chair Meir Sheetrit: do explain.
Danny Geva: Sir, there are things I cannot explain.

Now, you may understand that no matter what, Sheetrit’s statement that “Effective use of biometric data could have prevented the apparent theft of Anglo-Israelis’ identities” is incorrect; had the Mossad wished to do so, it could have just as easily found the people it needed in the database and use the government’s own facilities to issue original biometric passports.

The other point of failure is the ease of stealing Israel’s biometric database; as I explained briefly in a Round-Table held at the Israeli Democracy Institute, more than 30,000 People would have access to the biometric database. This number constitutes around 0.5% of the Israeli population. No secret is secure enough when so many people have access to it.

We are turning more and more into a surveillance society, this has to be stopped before we lose ourselves.

The Government’s wish to issue self-signed electronic signatures on the newly inaugurated biometric cards is more of a monetary mishap than a privacy Issue. However, some critics may say that this is more than a failure, it’s a way of doing business.

In 2001, Israel legislated an Electronic Signature Act, which allowed authorised bodies to issue digital signatures to encrypt and digitally sign documents, in order to replace their physical presence [further reading at the Israel Justice Department website]. To sum up: when acquiring a digital signature, a certificate authority issues a signature, and then validates your identity and warrants that you are who you say you are.

However, due mostly to overburden created by the state, Israel holds only one certificate authority, ComSign. The problem? ComSign is (a) a private company and (b) charges 300 ILS (~75 US$) per signature. The lack of competition caused the government to try a new approach: as every biometric ID has to be digitally signed, the government wishes to be both the certificate authority and the entity which relies on the validty. There are two main advantages for this scheme: first, the costs of issuing electronic ID cards reduce, as there is only need to pay the issuer of the plastic card; Second, the government is certain that the certificate authority will never go out of business.

However, there is one major flaw: when the government issues a person’s private key, it can never (and i mean never) hold a copy of that private key. Exposing this key to any person which may be able to access it is a major flaw that could assist identity theft and other causes. Here comes the need for a certificate authority’s liability. When inflicting liability on a CA, it may exercise best care and warrant that no information may be misused. Moreover, it, by itself, lacks the interest of infringing its users’ privacy. Therefore, opening the market to competition and allowing more private CAs is the solution, not allowing the government to have more force.

However, a minor tongue-slip by Adi Sagi, from the military’s CA, during last week’s discussion, may show that something is not all-that-ok wiith a self-issuing certificate authority; Sagi stated that the certificate exists “not only on service cards, but also for Keva [additional service, after the mandatory - jk], soldier service cards, smart ID cards for the military’s needs. I want to raise two other points: the first is the trust in the soldiers or loss of cards. Once a soldier loses a smart card or a card is stolen, he has to notify the police and the ministry of interior that the card was stolen. Then you need to operate systems where the certificate is not valid anymore and a new certificate needs to be issued. I don’t know, and i guess that Boaz [Dolev, the head of the computing unit in the government - jk] doesn’t know, any authority that if a certificate is stolen may…” here Sagi was interrupted, stating that he exceeded his authority.

But it seems that the architecture of privacy here was not in the main interest of the government. Issuing seven milion ID cards and paying a private entity 300 ILS per card may cost the government more than it is willing to pay for the biometric experiment. Therefore, the government decided, for monetary reasons to risk the citizens’ privacy, and be its own certificate authority.

When explaining it to the committee, i said that “I am afraid from my government. I am afraid from the government in a place where a corrupt social security employee was bribed to pass private information; I am afraind from a government that cannot investigate the leak of its own census; I am afraid from the government and I am entitled to do so, and it is still the government’s duty to protect me. But this is not the discussion. The question is a certificate authority could be the entity that verifies the identity and still hold my cryptographic keys“.

Something has to be done here, before it gets too late.

The research we conducted with Ynet News in regards to p2p throttling and DPI in Israel, which was (even after reading the criticism) most likely the most comprehensive in Israel, even though it needed more research. One of the results was a Parliamentary hearing by Meir Sheetrit, the chair of the Science & Technology Committee. The real question is what to do with it.

Daniel, one of the commentators in the Hebrew blog, claimed that a class action lawsuit could not be substantiated on contractual grounds. I disagree, but in spite of many calls and mails I received to launch a class-action, I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do. A class action may be filed according to the consumer protection act or based on other obligation. Allegedly, the ISPs obligation to net neutrality in their license (and see clause 5.4.1 to the general ISP license) and their obligations according to clause 29 to the Telecommunication Act are sufficient cause. The problem? The Class Action Act requires monetary damages, and there is more than one problem to prove it.

And what are things all about? If the cause of class action lawsuits is not to enrich the attorneys and plaintiff but to bring restitutional justice, then it will not be made; in the best case, a settlement would be made where the attorneys will receive 500K ILS and the plaintiff 1M ILS, where all the related clients will receive 10% bandwidth upgrades for a few months. Apart from that, even if different damages were made to different potential plaintiffs, there’s still place for class action lawsuits (OCR 31032/06 Shalom & Malka Fabrics v. Tel-Aviv). But what was the damage?

Many comments were written in wrath and required justice and a lawsuit. The problem, none of the commentators had any monetary damage. Is blocking a p2p download cause-worthy? Could those people come to the court in clean hands and explain to the judge what are the files they downloaded? Most likely, some lawyers’ will to be first just went up to their heads.

Of course, one should understand the difference between illegal file sharing and other interference that may occur in prioritizing VOIP traffic or blocking other services.

The people with the most to gain from this research, most likely, may be the Copyright Organizations. If we recap the discussions on the Electronic Commerce Bill around a year and a half ago, where the idea was that An ISP shall not be liable to acts committed by its users if it wasn’t aware of the activity and was not supposed to be aware, we understand the problem (See also Dubitsky v. Shabiro and MGM v. Grokster). Actually, ALIS, the Israeli equivalent of the MPAA could request the ISPs for damages, as they interfered with traffic and blocked. De-facto, this claim would not be far from the required legal conclusion: if the ISPs did not interfere with traffic, they were better of in regards to liability.

Therefore, if someone should sue the ISPs to bring restitutional justice, it should be the Copyright Holders. If they were actually harmed by file sharing (and I doubt they were), let them sue the ISPs and make them pay, understand and acknowledge that by blocking they inflicted liability on themselves. That way, and only that way, they’ll learn.

[Posted in Hebrew]

0.
We lost the skyline. The parliament approved yesterday Meir Sheetrit‘s proposal to establish a biometric database. After a few months of delay, including endless discussions in parliament trying to persuade Sheetrit not to go with the database, we lost. It didn’t matter that we brought Two Nobel Prize Laureates and many other professors to explain the dangers, Sheetrit just explained that they don’t know a thing and that they do not represent the best minds in the field. It doesn’t matter that the Israeli census leaked or that the company who is meant to issue the biometric ID cards is the one who was in charge of the census: the Parliament Members just don’t get it.

CC-BY-SA Tomer Lichtash

1.
A biometric database is not something to be taken lightly. While Sheetrit claims that other states have a biometric database, we know he lied. A research by Karine Barzilai-Nahon showed that a biometric database is something unprecedented in the entire world, at least if we think about biometric databases that are used with census data. Even that controversial Dutch database is not as extensive as the Israeli one. The UK ID initiative was not as comprehensive as ours, and yet was not as popular. When we try to understand where we went wrong, I think that it was the international aspect.

2.
We blogged in Hebrew, twitted in Hebrew, interviewed in Hebrew and lobbied in Hebrew. The holy language was not as holy when it involved legislation. We can try the International human rights courts, we can try to petition to Israel’s supreme court, but nothing is as fine as international pressure. It didn’t even hit the international press, only our local Jewish Ghetto.

3.
Now we have two years of an experiment. Let’s see how it goes.

0.
Sometimes, when discussing the US-Israeli relations, we need to see the broader picture. Things like the Palestinian conflict are just a minor issue in relation to the economy. As most of the English Readers of this blog [this was originally posted in Hebrew, sorry for Hebrew links, but use Google Translate] may not know. Israel had a major crisis around 1985, banks collapsed and were bought by the government. Then, in order to save the economy, our late minister of treasury, Yitzhak Modaey, along with the former prime minister, Shimon Peres, had an initiative. Their plan was to save the economy by a what the former Attorney General (and supreme court justice) Yitzhak Zamir called a historic mistake. Our Omnibus Statute was meant to save the economy by amending a few statutes and giving the government a way to deal with the crisis. The statute was a mean to implement emergency policies in order to save the economy. Along the years, though, the government used the omnibus law, which passed from year to year, as a mean to implement reforms and force economic policies without a real debate about them.

1.
When time came, a petition against the law was submitted to the supreme court as the “Quantity became Quality” (playing on justice Aharon Barak‘s words in HCJ 3267/97 Rubinstein v. The Poultry Farmers Union). The Poultry Farmers petitioned to the supreme court, stating, amongst other things, that there was no real discussion and debate about the Omnibus Statute that year, and while justice Dorit Beinish refrained from striking the statute, she warned the parliament before the quantity becomes quality:

Indeed, this is a legislation process that makes a sufficient and deep discussion hard, and which tempers the decisionmakers in parliament and government ability to gather an established opinion. Let us remind that one of the purposes in the Parliament’s regulation about legislation processes is to allow the parliament members to gather their opinion about every legislation that stands against them (…) and it’s hard to see how the legislation process in the Omnibus Statute allows that purpose” (HCJ 4899/03 Poultry Farmers Union v. The Israeli Government)

2.
Twenty-three years later, and our big Uncle Sam has the same issues. Because of historic mistakes that were caused by a capitalist policy to encourage consuming, Mortgage Banks collapsed since they incenticised high risk loans, as a chain reaction, the US stock indices fell and billions of theoretical dollars were lost. Not too much later, the US Government decided to nationalise several banks and an FBI inquiry regarding AIG’s conduct began.

3.
Right, Israel’s bank crisis of 1985 began because banks loaned people money in order to purchase the ever rising bank shares, which drove the bank shares even higher, until one day people understood that it was worth nothing. Billions of theoretical Shekels were lost. But the same mistake was made in t he US in the mortgage market. Allowing bubbled loans and leverage of real-estate was what made the real estate market bloom, till it exploded.

4.
Well, like in Israel, fast legislation processes were needed. However, the Congress first rejected the Wall-Street Bailout, which caused a major decline in stock indices. Therefore, gently, the government formalised a more serious plan that imploded from the original three pages to one hundred and ten, and then to four hundred and fifty one. 451 pages of tax reforms that most likely will never be read and will cause tax exemption for wooden arrows for children.

5.
And if we’re still with the great Uncle Sam, I am quite troubled by the great endeavours burned in order to assist the Israeli government implement Biometric Identification. This time, our minister of internal affairs Meir Sheetrit, claims that Israeli citizens will not be required a US visa if the biometric database will be approved. The subtext, of course is “if the biometric database will be approved and conveyed to the US authorities”, since without that, the US government has no mean to confirm their identity. What Sheetrit forgot to tell us, being a minister with formal micro-biology education (which the government thought was relevant when they approved his offer for biometric IDs), is that Biometric Passports are easy to fake or copying in a manner that allows Identity theft.

7.
But Sheetrit won’t be blurred by the facts when he will be speaking in front of the Knesset about the biometric identity statute. He’ll explain to the parliament members that the government already signed an agreement with HP to issue the IDs and that the US insists that we have such a database. Our Knesset Members, being so reasonable and have to consider every proposal, will do the right thing and vote seriously, of course. And that’s only if the Omnibus statute won’t be the statute that approves the Biometric Database.