| By the end of the month the Japanese will be numbered Yesterday, a nationwide electronic system went into operation in Japan, which will store information about all 127 million residents of the Land of the Rising Sun. The Juki Net network will connect together local computer networks of municipalities and turn them into a huge database in which the name, address, date of birth and gender of every Japanese person will be entered. To facilitate registration, by the end of August, all residents of the country will be assigned 11-digit identification numbers.
Official Tokyo believes that citizens should rejoice at the innovation, which will save them from many tedious bureaucratic procedures that require personal appeal to the authorities at their place of residence and the collection of an incredible number of papers. According to Asahi Shimbun, Juki Net will be only 40% occupied in the coming year. Starting next August, the system will be fully operational, after which it will be easier for numbered Japanese to notify the authorities of a change of residence, and they will also be able to use social security services outside their municipality. The capabilities of the system are truly enormous: correction of passport data, payment of pensions, unemployment benefits, insurance payments, issuance of construction permits.
Citizens' opinions about the new product differed. There were fears among people that the new system would become a convenient tool for the government to control their private lives and, as a result, limit their freedoms. Local intellectuals and human rights activists, at times and inappropriately, recall Imperial Japan during the Second World War and the German Third Reich, warning that an undemocratic government could use the Juki Net for total surveillance. The authorities' refusal to name the exact location of the system's central computer was perceived by dissatisfied people as an additional bad sign. More pragmatic people are worried about unscrupulous officials and computer hackers - they will be able to collect comprehensive dossiers on individuals, tracking information by identification number.
Last week, desperate opponents of the program sent Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi three dozen pistol casings and a letter of protest. A similar package was sent to the Ministry of Public Administration, which is responsible for operating the computer system. Yesterday, outside the ministry building, there was a demonstration by opponents of the “digitization” of citizens, who tried to convince officials and passers-by of the “inhumanity” of the government’s actions. The initiative group went to court and filed a petition with the authorities demanding to stop the program.
Tokyo is assuring people that their personal data will be protected from prying eyes - for disclosing information from Juki Net, you can get up to two years in prison and a fine of up to a million yen ($8.3 thousand). However, an ugly story appeared in the newspapers about the experience of creating a local information network in the mid-80s, which accumulated detailed data on 300 thousand residents of the Yokkaichi municipality. Official network users did not leave it, leaving the workplace during the day and leaving the computer unattended. Moreover, they did not even hide the fact that they used the network to satisfy personal curiosity. Anonymous eyewitnesses recall that during the lunch break, people sitting at their computers made exclamations like: “Oh, she’s not married!” or “Gee, he’s disabled!” Reputable lawyer Hideki Sugiura believes that formal strictness will not help the matter: “This story has shown that government officials are completely insensitive to the privacy of information. Its protection in the nationwide registration network will depend on the ethical qualities of the officials, and I think this is a risky business.”
One can understand why the authorities of five municipalities refused to connect to the Juki Net network at all. Among the “dissidents” were the Tokyo municipalities of Kokubunji (110 thousand people) and Suginami-ku (510 thousand people), and the city of Yamatsuri located in Fukushima Prefecture (7.3 thousand people). They said they would not participate in the nationwide network for fear of insufficient protection of information about their residents. Mayor Kokubunji held a demonstration ceremony to unplug Juki Net during a press conference yesterday morning. A less decisive mayor of the northern Japanese city of Yamagata showed his protest by delaying the network connection for one hour. Authorities in Yokohama, the country's second largest city, said participation in the program would be entirely voluntary for its residents. This means that approximately 4 million Japanese may remain outside the scope of “big brother”.
Opponents of the “digitization” of citizens do not believe in the ethical impeccability of officials Alexander LOMANOV |
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