2014 A Day At The Hong Kong Ministry of Truth

The year was 2014, well, that was the official year that was announced every morning on RTHK, As I listened this morning, like every morning to the sanitized news, I heard a surprising announcement. 'This is Eason Chan, If you where born between 1967 and 1969 , you must replace your smart ID card, with a new Smarter ID card', while this was not strange normally, This replacement exercise had been going on for what seemed like forever. This was my range, again, and it was the sixth card I'd been told to replace it.

I got dressed and ready for work. A typical Hong Konger, overdressed for a mundane routine of writing responses to citizens letters, in the Ministry of Truth. This month though , had been interesting, I had temporarily been moved into the Smart ID card response team. Apparently the number of letters complaining about the Card had been on the rise, And my skills for writing letters that sound a bit like we where listening to people, and the same time ignoring them helped to make the current Leadership feel less threatened. It was a shame though, I knew that I'd have to go back to more mundane duties soon, as they didn't like anyone to keep that job for too long, a number of previous incumbents who had stayed for too long, had disappeared.

I left the flat and headed for the MTR, as I entered, I noticed the long lines of people waiting to press their thumbs onto the entry platform. Always a bit strange, The MTR had decided to start using a card similar to the governments Smart ID card, a while back. Having believed the government line about what a great success it was. While I queued up, to press my thumb, I noticed the person at the front of the line next to me, getting very agitated that he could not go through. When the attendant came, he looked at the mans MTR Smart ID card, looked at his face. And with a firm voice, said 'can you please look after your card better'. And pressed his thumb against the machine.

Much to the amusement of bystanders, nothing happened. The attendant quietly murmured under his breath, 'stupid machine', and bend down further, pulling the cover from the machine, pushed the manual override, and let the commuter through.

As I got on the train, I passed a man installing the latest in cool technology, a retinal scanner, a lot of the shops had been installing them already. When you where paying for clothes, food or at Sogo, you would catch a blue light scanning your eye. While I normally tried to look away, It had caught me a few times by surprise.

The journey was uneventful, but when I got off, I got stunned by that familiar blue light of the scanner, it instantly fired up a video wall on the right of the corridor, blasting adverts about makeup and weight loss. For a reasonably fit 45 year old male, I always thought it a bit odd that whenever those things caught me, I ended up with adverts like that. Perhaps it was just because I had to do my wifes shopping last week when she was sick.

I walked up to the new Tamar Government Offices, a rather bland building that was envisioned about 10 years ago. It was a couple of blocks away from what was left of our harbor, more like a canal. The place was beginning to look more like Amsterdam, but at least it was only ten minutes walk to tsui tsai tui, across a few small pedestrian bridges.

Inside the lobby of the building was the three main directives, that must be remembered when dealing with the public.

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

After working my way through the labyrinth of passages to my cubicle, I settled down. Luckily most of these government jobs where pretty easy, nothing really started until after ten, If you where lucky you would get a meeting, where we mostly just discussed the best way to deal with awkward questions. But today I had a stack of papers on my desk.

I looked at the first one. It was titled 'Regarding Replacement of Smart ID's', a three page essay, by the looks of it, detailing a number of concerns about the Smart ID cards. Underneath it was another one, very similar, but with a different name and address. Obviously a standard letter, but today's pile was a bit bigger than usual, probably due to the fact that the age range that was affected this month, had changed.

I'd been answering this type of letter a lot, It was pretty easy after a while, I didn't really have to think to much, just use the standard 'lines', or maybe lies, covered most of them. Last month I'd been responding to ID card letters for about half the month, the rest was dealing with missing persons. The missing persons where more interesting, as they where not standard letters, normally individuals who had gone across one of the borders, and on their return, they tried to go through the barriers, pressing their thumbs to the machine, and it indicated that they where not the correct person. From what I heard, this happened about a thousand times a day, unfortunately quite often, a rather over efficient immigration official, rather than examining their photograph, would presume that the technology was perfect, as advertised, and just send them back across the border.

The lucky ones, where able to find a way to contact friends, the less lucky where arrested the other side of the border, and usually shipped off to the local prison. This is where it got messy. My job, rather than trying to chase up all these missing people, was to write an assuring letter, letting the relative know we where doing our absolute best, and how incredibly reliable our border controls where, In fact we where not aware of any illegal immigrants crossing our borders. It did however make me laugh, knowing so many where arrested in Mongkok each week.

It wasn't until lunchtime that I got finished with the Missing person letters, After a long lunch, common when working for the civil service these days, I finally got onto my main chore, responding to the Smart ID complaint letters. The current batch looked like it had been updated, the basic letter was freely available for download obviously. So It was time to improve some of the general responses. I sat down to go through them.

They always started with the first Issue, Privacy and Data Collection, pointing out the various issues with how collecting data and cross referencing on a ID card number was so dangerous. How Banks had avoided it, due to the fact that information could so easily be abused when it was so interconnected. Our standard response to this was to avoid the issue 'Data collected by government departments are held individually in their own databases', this nicely avoided the question, or any of the issues, and sounded condescending and official, Ignoring the fact that we routinely requested information inter-department based on the ID card number, and I could find out everything from medical records, voting pattern, last time they left hong kong, to address and amount of tax paid with a few quick phone calls.

The Next Paragraph talked about the need for the cards in the first place, I knew the response to this 'illegal immigration remains a threat to our immigration control and there is a need to enhance our identity cards to prevent forgeries. With the use of biometrics (turning the thumb print images into templates), forged or unlawfully altered identity cards can be detected more easily'. Of course this was rubbish, the absolute trust we had in our cards, had lead to the stack of Missing persons, and a huge increase of illegal immigrants specifically thanks to the cards. We had known from the beginning about the complete lack of reliability of biometrics, it was all over the net, but luckily nobody was that interested at the time, and we squeezed it through, without much fuss or examination. Not to mention we had rigged the elections at that time anyway.

Requiring everyone to replace their cards was one of those annoying things that lead to most of the letters, most people ignore all their rights being taken away from them, until they realized that it affects them. When we first introduced the cards, It had cost an absolute fortune, but we soon started getting some money back when we introduced the first fines. In fact the fines where about the only financial justification for the project, we could have just waited until people naturally replaced their cards, over time, but now the security kept being broken, and we where so heavily dependent on them, we where in a catch 22 situation, no-one would admit that they had made a huge disastrous mistake. But what did I care, all I had to do was get back to the standard response. 'Since the introduction of paper based identity cards in 1987, it's supporting computer system and card security technology has become outdated', Yeap, I really enjoyed that one, we sat here with two huge piles of paper letters, and said that paper was obsolete. The letter had pointed out that 'a colour photograph would have sufficed for any confirmation that the individual was allowed to stay here'. I just ignored that.

Cost was always a problem, we had been cutting back slowly on our health and education budget, but the latest Smart ID cards where a shining example of how we buy the latest technology, even if it had never been proved to work. 'We accept that, like any other infrastructural investment, substantial expenditure has to be incurred in implementing the Smart identity card project'. I went on to mention the great benefits of faster clearance at our borders, for the cards that worked most of the time. And left out the fact that only 2% of our population regularly travels across the border, so they where effectively being hugely subsidized. I ignored the comment about making the users pay, hell, our border fees would be thousands of dollars if we charged for the privalige of using the card.

It then went on to discuss how safe the data on the cards was. Considering the need over the last ten years to constantly replace the darn things, I knew that calling it anything like secure, was about a honest as saying our Microsoft computers where stable, in fact it was pretty rare for the office network to be working these days, with computer viruses so common, and I was sure that those pesky hackers had free reign on our internal network. But again, we had a standard line here 'ample procedural and system safeguards are in place to prevent unauthorized access or disclose of data'. The fact that you could download a piece of software from a Russian website, written for a Chinese group of Illegal immigrant smugglers, kind of went against this, but that was the party line. No one was allowed to mess with the cards in Hong Kong, but the rest of the world was not our problem. I ended the response with my favorite line, 'The system has been reviewed by a reputable data security expert and certified to be a secure system in contempary technology standard.' I cant remember where I first go that line from, but I suspect it was from the manufacturer who sold us the damn things.

After filling in the updated answer letter, I fed the original letter into the scanner tray, and went for a coffee break. When I got back, I had a stack of responses sitting on top of the printer. The machine had also fired of an email to the centralized Customer relationship management software, to flag up the ID Card numbers of the individuals who had complained. I knew this was probably aimed a flagging them up when it came to voting. By some miraculous coincident, it seemed that the fingerprint reader at the voting stations always had trouble with anyone who sent in complaint letters. So coincidental, that the current government had managed to get re-elected at every election. It had nearly lost back in about 2003, but, that was a major wakeup call to get the ID card registration moving along, and introduction of ID card checks at polling stations.

As I headed home, I pondered again, It had been a good day, I had been defending the jobs of many civil servants by ensuring that the Smart ID card had been justified, and I had managed to give the impression of listening to the public while totally ignoring them at the same time. A good productive day.