House of cards

Yuri Luzhkov continues to dream of an electronic passport for a Muscovite

The capital's authorities are not giving up hope of coming up with an electronic passport for a Moscow citizen. At yesterday's meeting of the city government, where the program for the further development of the so-called Muscovite social card was discussed, Mayor Yuri Luzhkov called on his subordinates to turn it into a full-fledged document containing a lot of information about the person. “A Muscovite’s social card should become an identity document,” said the mayor. Officials were ready to make this mayor’s dream come true for 12 billion budget rubles, but, fortunately, they could not prove that they would create a truly universal means of payment and identification.

In principle, as admitted by the acting Head of the Department of Economic Policy and City Development Marin Ogloblina, the city authorities had similar plans from the very beginning of the project. Let us recall that the card system for providing benefits was introduced in 2002 and has already covered about 4 million citizens registered with social security authorities, the Pension Fund, as well as students, schoolchildren, families receiving housing subsidies, and women who are entitled to maternity benefits. Some of the project's achievements are indisputable - in particular, the abolition of manual control in the metro and ground transport in 2005 allowed urban transport enterprises to receive additional income in the amount of more than 2 billion rubles. Muscovites, unlike the budget, hardly received any significant financial benefits, although social card discounts are provided in more than 1.5 thousand stores, pharmacies and consumer services enterprises. Now Ms. Ogloblina believes that the time has come to significantly expand the functions of “plastic”. In particular, the program she proposed assumes that a Muscovite’s social card will become an alternative to the compulsory health insurance policy and will contain so-called vital information (blood type, hereditary and chronic diseases, etc.), and will also be distributed not only among beneficiaries.

However, acting The head of the city's informatization department, Alexei Mikhailov, immediately admitted that the card's capabilities are limited by some objective reasons - and that is why it is still not used, for example, when taking into account targeted housing subsidies and the provision of medical services. According to him, on the one hand, federal legislation on the monetization of benefits does not allow this, and on the other hand, interdepartmental databases are not ready for joint work. In his opinion, Ms. Ogloblina’s new project does not take into account technical subtleties.

The head of the Federal Information Technology Agency, Vladimir Matyukhin, who was present at the meeting, even called the social card systems being created today in more than 20 regions of the country “information separatism.” “Everyone is different,” he complained. As for the Moscow card, according to Mr. Matyukhin, it is simply technically not ready to expand its functions. The head of the agency drew the attention of city officials to the fact that the card lacks “intelligence” - it does not have the memory and security systems that are required for a full-fledged identity card in an electronic plastic version.

The only person who timidly tried to support the project was the head of the capital’s metro, Dmitry Gaev, whose company is so far the main “beneficiary” of the use of the social card. He recalled that at one time, when developing this card, the authorities were guided primarily by the principles of cheapness, and there were simply no state requirements for the technical characteristics of such certificates. According to Mr. Gaev, even today, for simple operations, the available memory is sufficient, not protected by a complex cryptographic key. It is enough if the databases are protected, and the card becomes only a key to the necessary information about a person, the head of the metro believes.

But these arguments seem to have seemed unconvincing even to Yuri Luzhkov. The mayor, who believes that a Muscovite’s social card should eventually replace citizens’ passports and driver’s licenses, and also contain a lot of medical information, believes that the electronic card of the 2002 model has exhausted itself. The mayor sent the social card development program for revision, demanding attention to improvements in its technical component.

Yulia KHOMCHENKO