The Belgian e-ID

A while ago I finally got my very own and totally personal e-ID card from our beloved government .

For those of you not familiar with Begium, all citizens here have an identity card which contains a number of personal information items (name, address, unique identification number – yes, they have us all neatly numbered over here – date of birth, gender, etc). We’ve had this for a long time, and it used to be a rather straightforward laminated cardboard card (well, actually a bit more sophisticated than that of course, with the necessary security features etc) which contained all information in plain human-readable form. Nice and simple because you always knew what was on it and everybody you showed it to could easily read the information.

A few years ago however (I believe it was 2005), our beloved and ever so progressive government decided that this was not enough, that such a straightforward ID card was just too old-fashioned and so totally not up to speed with the current state of technology, that the situation was simply intolerable. Something had to be done. The decision was made that those ugly dinosaurs should be exterminated and replaced as soon as possible by flashy techie electronic ID cards (you know, the type of card of which you already carry a few dozen around, used by banks, security systems, libraries, shops, and what have you).

The idea was that this decision would put Belgium firmly on the map of technological advancement, because we would be the first (yes, 1st) country to implement such a nifty system. Bill Gates even came to Belgium in person to congratulate our government for being so visionary, and promised he would have MSN adapted to work with the e-ID (which is probably what reeled in the government ). That was back in 2005. Since then we haven’t seen Bill again, MSN does not know about the e-ID (surprised, anyone?), but we are all getting one anyway. So just the other day I was invited to collect my brand new electronic ID card from the municipal service of the town I have recently moved to. Great, finally, couldn’t wait. Except for…

Well, except for a few not so great features of being on the forefront of technological innovation.

One of the advantages of an e-ID is of course that the information stored on it is dynamic. So when you move to another adress, you don’t need a new ID card, the data can just be updated to reflect your change of address. For example, today I went into the bank, inserted my e-ID into a card reader, and my address data in the bank’s systems were automatically updated and verified. Very nice. But, being dynamic also means that the information is no longer available in human-readable form on the outside of the card. So you can only check someone’s address if you have the necessary equipment to read the electronic data. And since Belgium is the first to implement the e-ID, this necessarily means that no other country in the world has the means for reading the data. So much for the advantage.

So when I want to, let’s say, check in to a hotel in a foreign country (our neighbor Holland will do for example), I give them my ID card, and… well, basically they don’t know what to do with it. Although they have my name and picture (luckily those are still visible on the outside), they have no means of getting at or checking my address – which they need for their administration of course. So, ouch, the nifty e-ID does have a practical downside. But, nothing to fear however, our beloved and ever so cunning government has come up with a solution to this problem. Since being the first implies that the rest will follow sooner or later, they came up with a “temporary” solution: when we collect our e-ID cards, we also get a (don’t laugh) “proof of address” document, an A4-sized letter stating our address, with the necessary stamps and signatures to make it official. So now we have an ID card half the size of what it used to be (very handy), but we do get to carry around an A4 sized letter with it… duh. Of course, this is “only a temporary measure”, to be used only so long as the other countries haven’t ‘progressed’ to the e-ID yet. So I guess at some time in the future, when the rest of the world has finally also discovered the wonders of the e-ID, we can rip the A4 dragon to pieces. Yeah right, as if that is going to happen any time soon .

Another nasty side-effect of wanting to be “the first” is that it implies you are not waiting for the rest. Our beloved but ever so reckless government was so eager to be at the pinnacle of technological evolution, they did not stop to think about “the others”. And for a country the size of Belgium, those “others” can be rather important. After all, Belgium is only a tiny country (with fewer inhabitants than New York), so it does not have much political weight outside of the larger group of the European Union. And of course, the e-ID is a good concept, with a lot of potential, so the European Union was bound to embrace it in the end. And in the meantime they have done so. Only, they were smart enough to think about doing it as a group, so they debated about it and came up with a standard for the European e-ID, to make sure its implementation would be identical across all member states. And guess what? The standard they came up with is not what has already been implemented in Belgium. So although we were the first (“yeah!”) we are now stuck with a solution that does not fit in with the rest of Europe (“bummer!”). And so maybe in the near future we might have to carry around another A4 sized letter, properly signed and stamped, stating that although this person’s e-ID is unreadable in the rest of Europe, it is actually a real and official e-ID, and the holder should therefore please not be arrested for forgery .

Finally, and this is not attibutable to our beloved but slightly short-sighted government, there also seem to be some quirks in the implementation of the Belgian e-ID card. I work in the IT sector, and that gives me the privilege of hearing some of the more juicy behind-the-scenes details of the digital side of life. And apparently, whoever implemented the e-ID card system ended up storing the information on it in free text format, including the date of birth information. A date in a plain text format, with no restrictions on input – you don’t have to be a geek to understand that that is not a wise decision. Apparently the input format is left to the person who enters the data, and apparently there are many different people entering the data, because the field contains many different formats (I heard this from someone who works on building software to operate on the e-ID information, so I don’t know first-hand how accurate the info is or how bad the situation is). Anyway, in computers dates are normally numbers of some sort, while only what is shown to users is human readable (you see “January 1, 2008” but this is converted to a number behind the scenes, which can then easily also be shown in other formats like “2008-01-01”, “01/01/08” and so on). This makes the data consistent, as there is only one way it is stored, over which the user has no control. Consistency also makes it easy to process the information automatically – which is the primary reason for storing it digitally in the first place – since the program that reads the info has a single and fixed algorhythm to interpret it – it does not have to guess at what the users were thinking when they entered the data. So storing a date as plain text makes it practically unusable for automatic processing. Plain text is a big IT no-no, only to be used for data that cannot be controlled content-wise (like a “remark” field or something). Whoever came up with the idea of storing the date of birth as plain text should be fired – this person should not be working in IT.

So although we have a beloved government, it wouldn’t have been a bad idea for them to stop and think before acting. That might really have put Belgium on the technological map, and made sure the Belgian e-ID would elicit more than just a chuckle when it is mentioned to the rest of the world.

G

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Tags: belgium, e-id, electronic id card, europe

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