Access

Sometime in the near future, the traditional paper-based passport will be gone. In its place will be laser cards, in the same proportions as credit cards.

At the immigration gates of airports all over the world, all arriving passengers have to do is to slide their cards at the tills and pass through the bars, much like we do when we use the trains. The laser cards will contain their visa and biometric information that will be rapidly processed by high-speed computers. Entry and exit data can be rapidly accessed by the jurisdictions visited by travelers.

When the shift to laser card passports happen, only a handful of really backward, short-sighted countries — such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and the Philippines — will lag behind. For their nationals, airports all over the world will have to provide for traditional immigration booths where their passports will be inspected manually and stamped in the manner of the previous century.

The poor nationals of these backward countries will have to endure long queues, suffer the indignity of long interrogation by irritable immigrations officers and possibly pulled aside to anterooms to be bodily searched. They will be second-class travelers whose documentation is considered unreliable and whose purpose for travel is easily suspect.

In order to shift to laser card-based travel documents, we need to build a national database of all our citizens, including biometric information. That database will probably take a decade to do. We have not started.

The national identification system is precisely that database. One by-product is an identification card issued every citizen containing whatever information beyond the biometrics we might want to include.

A laser card can contain vast amounts of information. We could, for instance, input medical information that might be useful in emergencies. For the same purpose, the indestructible card may also include contact information for next-of-kin, again very useful in emergencies. It might also include information on health plans the bearer might have so that hospitals around the world may contact them in urgent situations.

We can debate whatever information the laser card might contain. There are those wary of this technology and raise often false issues of privacy to oppose this undertaking. What is indispensable is the construction of a citizen database, which will have many uses given the trajectory of modern communications technology.

I cannot believe it has now been 20 years since we first introduced the idea of building a citizen database. In two decades, nothing has been done to move forward on this. We could be the last country on earth to finally build an information superstructure for its citizens.

The idea for a national database was first discussed in the early years of the Ramos administration. At that time, it was described as a “national ID system,”which aroused all sorts of small-minded suspicions. The political Left, permanently stuck in the mindset of another century, protested this as an invasion of privacy. Eventually the High Court, not the most technologically versatile institution in the country, blocked the proposal.

I recall proposing to the officials of the Ramos administration that the project be called an “access card” rather than a “national ID system.” This is because the most frequent day-to-day utility of this database is to enable citizens to access public services. I imagined at that time that government can set up information kiosks where citizens, using their access cards, can look into their pension plans, their benefits from the insurance systems and other publicly available information.

Now that idea looks quaint. Citizens can access their government today using their smart phones. No kiosks, vulnerable to vandalism, are necessary.

I consulted for the honorable Bernardo Pardo when he was Comelec chairman in the mid-nineties and recall submitting a thought-piece proposing a cheaper system for automating our polls. Voters can cast their votes for candidates in their localities from anywhere in the country using ATM machines. If people can take cash from these machines anywhere it is convenient for them, they can also safely vote through that system. The Comelec simply rides on an existing communications infrastructure.

The key to that, however, is an incorruptible national ID system. Even at that time, this was a political rather than technical problem. Our politics being so retarded, the idea did not prosper.

With a reliable national ID, senior citizens will not have to produce their special cards. Members of the GSIS and the SSS do not have to carry separate cards. Ordinary citizens will not have to walk around with a pile of separate identification card on their person.

When the Supreme Court blocked the national ID system, government’s only recourse was to institute a unified multi-purpose ID system involving public sector personnel, the social security systems and the Comelec.  The voter’s ID card for some reason was not rolled into this system, causing the turbulent registration process for barangay elections we saw last week.

I cannot see why a modern nation-state cannot identify its own citizens. That is indispensable for state-of-the-art governance.

It appears this administration is not too keen on reviving the idea for building a national database for its citizens. It is not too keen on anything that requires work. It is not too keen on anything whose benefits will be reaped beyond the current presidential term.

What a waste of time and opportunity. The present conditional cash transfer program could be a platform for introducing an identification system that will be a building block towards a national database.

In the meantime, the information technology environment changes every day, at a searing pace. Governance is being left far behind.