Tech savy government of the future

Here is what a tech savvy government in the future could look like:

" Estonia is a tiny country in northeastern Europe, just next to Finland. It has the territory of the Netherlands, but 13 times less people—its 1.3 million inhabitants is comparable to Hawaii’s population.  What makes this tiny country interesting in terms of governance is not just that the people can elect their parliament online or get tax overpayments back within two days of filing their returns. It is also that this level of service for citizens is not the result of the government building a few websites. Instead, Estonians started by redesigning their entire information infrastructure from the ground up with openness, privacy, security, and ‘future-proofing’ in mind.

The first building block of e-government was telling citizens apart. Estonia uses a simple, unique ID methodology across all systems, from paper passports to bank records to government offices and hospitals. For these identified citizens to transact with each other, Estonia passed the Digital Signatures Act in 2000. and a national Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which binds citizen identities to their cryptographic keys, and now doesn’t care if any Tiit and Toivo (to use common Estonian names) sign a contract in electronic form with certificates or plain ink on paper. A signature is a signature in the eyes of the law.

Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip signed an e-services agreement. As a quirky side effect, this foundational law also forced all decentralized government systems to become digital “by market demand.” No part of the Estonian government can now turn down a citizen’s digitally signed document and demand a paper copy instead.

Also to prevent this system from becoming obsolete in the future, the law did not lock in the technical nuances of digital signatures. Initially, Estonia put a microchip in the traditional ID cards issued to every citizen for identification and domestic travel inside the European Union. The chip carried two certificates: one for legal signatures and the other for authentication when using a website or service that recognizes the government's identification system (online banking, for example). Every person over 15 was required to have an ID card, and there are now over 1.2 million active cards. That’s close to 100-percent penetration of the population.

But now Estonians can get a Mobile ID-enabled SIM card from their telecommunications operator. Without installing any additional hardware or software, they can access secure systems and affix their signatures by simply typing PIN codes on their mobile phone.

Besides the now-daily usage of this technology for commercial contracts and bank transactions, the most high-profile use case has been elections. Since becoming the first country in the world to allow online voting nationwide in 2005, Estonia has used the system for both parliamentary and European Parliament elections. During parliamentary elections in 2011, online voting accounted for 24 percent of all votes. (Citizens voted from 105 countries in total).

To accelerate innovation, the state tendered building and securing the digital signature-certificate systems to private parties, namely a consortium led by local banks and telecoms. And that's not where the public-private partnerships end: Public and private players can access the same data-exchange system (dubbed X-Road), enabling truly integrated e-services.

When employers report employment taxes every month, their data entries are linked to people’s tax records . Charitable donations reported by non-profits are recorded as deductions for the giver in the same fashion. Tax deductions on mortgages are registered from data interchange with commercial banks. And so forth. Not only is the income-tax rate in the country a flat 21 percent, but Estonians get tax overpayments put back on their bank accounts (digitally transferred, of course) within two days of submitting their forms.

This liquid movement of data between systems relies on a fundamental principle to protect people’s privacy: Without question, it is always the citizen who owns his or her data and retains the right to control access to that data.  But there is also a flip-side to the fully digitized nature of the Republic of Estonia: having the bureaucratic machine of a country humming in the cloud increases the economic cost of a potential physical assault on the state. Rather than ceasing to operating in the event of an invasion, the government could boot up a backup replica of the digital state and host it in some other friendly European territory. Government officials would be quickly re-elected, important decisions made, documents issued, business and property records maintained, births and deaths registered, and even taxes filed by those citizens who still had access to the Internet.

While the Estonian story is certainly special: the country achieved re-independence after 50 unfortunate years of Soviet occupation in 1991, having missed much of the technological progress made by the Western world in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. -'80s, including checkbooks and mainframe computers. Nevertheless, the country jumped right on the mid-’90s bandwagon of TCP/IP-enabled web apps. During this social reset, Estonians also decided to throw their former communist leaders overboard and elect new leadership, often ministers in their late-20s capable of disruptive thinking.

And this is what United States, along with many other countries struggling to get the Internet, could learn from Estonia: the mindset. The willingness to get the key infrastructure right and continuously re-invent it. Before you build a health-insurance site, you need to look at what key components must exist for such a service to function optimally: signatures, transactions, legal frameworks, and the like."

Here is a path forward for India which now has an ID card ( Aadhar), reasonable internet penetration ( 137 million users), 980 million cell phones, 100,000 ATMS in many Banks with computerized records and transactions. What is needs now is an completee information infrastructure that ties all these together.