There's two things that jump out at me as worth mentioning:<p>1) Estonians can imagine losing a war over their territory. It's happened within recent memory. They have contingency plans. Contrast with the United States, where such a thing is the stuff of fantasy, mostly to do with China's military, and our contingency plans seem to involve cutting our leaders off from the world and waiting it out.<p>2) Americans wouldn't stand for a unified identification system. The moment you propose it, you'd have the Moral Majority breathing down your neck about giving in to the UN and taking a step towards a One World Government. This kind of religiosity permeates our entire civic culture. The very idea of modifying the Constitution horrifies even intelligent commentators, because it was written 200 years ago so it must obviously work well. This is the exact same logic you see from Bible-thumpers.<p>I really appreciate both the notion of the "boring European state" and the "start-up mindset" that Tamkivi brings up, though they're somewhat at odds. A boring government is a good objective; you don't want the government to be interesting: you want it to work. It makes little sense to me to think of growth as an end rather than a means, but I admit I'm not good at economics; I can see its need when you need a buffer zone for experimentation, but I don't see why it's any kind of measure of success.
As an Estonian this makes my heart warm but we (Estonians) have to keep in mind that a lot of what we've accomplished isn't because we're so truly special (although that makes for great marketing) but because our country size and the need (and timing) for a rebuild enabled us to do so.<p>Lets continue to pursue other great things being small and nimble enables.<p>On another note, the national PKI infrastructure truly is great and enables location independence on a new level. One can (and I have) start companies, handle legal issues or anything else which requires either lawful signatures or end to end crypto (PKI between citizens) while abroad.
This sounds awesome, but it also sounds scary. If I understand it well, the government issued the certificates for all its citizens it can both know what everyone does and impersonate them. I wouldn't mind <i>that</i> much if they were mundane operations, but things such as voting is of extreme importance.<p>Oh, and the fact that the id is built in a manner that makes sure the person has to be born in Estonia is kinda odd. No strangers allowed ?<p>Anyway, has anyone details about technical implementation ? That would be terrific if it could be more widespread.
If all this works for Estonian people, congratulations to Estonia for achieving this. As a Greek I suffered bureaucracy and still do. I would like for my country to unite all this data.<p>I have second thoughts about a couple of things though:<p>* The digitally signed mobile SIM-Card: How does this work exactly? Does the mobile company have access to my data?<p>* e-Elections are considerably easy to tamper for one and have well documented problems[1] to which I saw no solution in the article. For example, if there's a tampering accusation, how can we recount the votes or verify that X person voted for Y representative?<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting#Documented_problems" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting#Documented_pr...</a>
More fundamentally, they've completely rethought how to teach maths: <a href="http://www.computerbasedmath.org/computer-based-math-education-estonia.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.computerbasedmath.org/computer-based-math-educati...</a>
Identity management is a very big and very problematic piece of any large government-to-citizens programme; solving this once, up front, is an excellent idea that does not seem to have occurred to many other nations.