[IP] Re: 2 on fingerprinting in Japan
Gohsuke Takama
gt at twics.com
Sat Nov 24 03:16:13 PST 2007
for IP, if you wish.
as an advisory member of Privacy International, I'd like to inform
here that Privacy International sent a letter below to Japan's
Ministry of Justice which manages immigration process on Nov 19,
regarding to recent start of fingerprint scanning and digitized facial
picture taking at the immigration. 68 organizations from 30 countries
endorsed this letter reflected the issue was containing much broader
problems, not just for foreigners visiting or living in Japan.
BTW if you compare the US-VISIT and the Japanese system, you would
notice the similarity of both and would wonder who did system
intergration.
Gohsuke Takama
-------------------------------------------------------
http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?
cmd[347]=x-347-558619
PI leads coalition of organisations against Japanese Government plans
for fingerprinting at border
19/11/2007
Today, in a coalition with 18 Japanese rights groups, Privacy
International delivered a letter to the Japanese Minister of Justice
to protest against the implementation of a fingerprinting system and
face-scanning system at its borders. All visitors and many foreign
residents to Japan will be fingerprinted under this plan. Our letter
to the Minister is endorsed by 68 organisations from 30 countries.
In our letter, we show that there are numerous problems with the
Government's plans. On top of infringing the rights to privacy of all
visitors to Japan, the Japanese will run the risk of repeating the
mistakes encountered by the U.S. Government in its border management
systems that have lead to serious technology and management failures.
We call on the Minister to reconsider their plans for treating
business visitors and tourists as though they are terrorists.
The letter is available in PDF at
http://www.privacyinternational.org/issues/borders/lettertojapan.pdf . A
version of the letter is available below, though within footnote references.
--------------
The Rt Honourable Kunio Hatoyama
Minister of Justice
1-1-1 Kasumigaseki
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo
Nippon
November 19, 2007
Dear Minister Hatoyama
Regarding plans to fingerprint and face-scan all visitors to Japan
We, the undersigned human rights and civil liberties groups from
around the world are writing to you to express our grave concerns
regarding the Ministry of Justice's imminent implementation of the
Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act.
We believe that your plans to fingerprint and face-scan foreign-
residents and visitors to Japan are a gross and disproportionate
infringement upon civil liberties, copying the most ineffective,
costly and risky practices on border management from around the world.
We respectfully call on you to reconsider your plans to implement this
system. We also call on you to explain to the world why potential
visitors should travel to your country and face these inconveniences
when you have done so little to explain the nature of this human
processing. We believe it is likely that the implementation of this
system will create a negative impact on your tourism industry and on
the flow of foreign workers to Japan, thus hurting Japan's economy and
in turn giving rise to possible claims of Japanese isolationism.
Background
According to your plans for Immigration Control:
"In order to detect and oust, at the border, terrorists or foreign
nationals who have been deported from Japan or committed crimes, one
effective method is to further enhance measures against forged and
falsified documents and to utilize biometrics in immigration
examinations.
In order to take facial portraits and fingerprint data during landing
examinations of foreign nationals under the b Action Plan for
Prevention of Terrorismb (as adopted at the Headquarters for
Promotion of Measures Against Transnational Organized Crime and Other
Relative Issues and International Terrorism on December 10, 2004),
necessary preparations will be made by putting in order points for us
to keep in mind, observing relevant measures taken by foreign
countries and developing relevant law."
It has come to our attention that you plan to implement this system
within a matter of weeks that you will face-scan and fingerprint all
visitors to Japan and retain this information for an extended period
of time (some reports claim that you intend to do so for up to 80
years), and combine this data with other sources of personal
information.
Infringing upon the Right to Privacy
Your plans are in breach of individuals' human rights, and in
particular, their right to privacy. The right to privacy is recognized
specifically by numerous international human rights treaties. The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises the right to privacy
under Article 12. Similar language is adopted in the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights under Article 17, the United
Nations (UN) Convention on Migrant Workers in Article 14, and the UN
Convention on the Rights of the Child under Article 16. We note that
the Japanese Supreme Court has recognized the right to privacy under
Article 13 of the Japanese Constitution.
Your system proposes to indiscriminately collect sensitive personal
information from all foreign travellers. This mass project for the
processing of human beings is tantamount to treating all visitors to
your country as though they were criminals.
We are surprised by the lack of information regarding proposed
safeguards and appeal methods. Instead we hear rhetoric about the
importance of combating terrorism and threats to force the return of
anyone who fails to comply with this new requirement.
This is particularly worrisome because Japan's privacy laws are
regarded as weak by international standards. We note that Japan has to
some extent applied international standards such as the OECD's Privacy
Guidelines into two recent privacy laws. The law that covers
commercial entities partially follows international standards, yet the
law that applies to the use and sharing of data held by government
agencies is very weak. This decreases our confidence that your
government has the necessary accountability structures to collect such
vast amounts of personal information.
The protection of human rights is at its weakest when individuals are
waiting for entry at the border of a foreign country. Traditionally,
governments afforded respect to visitors from other nations on the
basis of reciprocity: if you treat one nation's citizens with respect
that nation's government will treat yours similarly. Japan is showing
a remarkable level of disrespect to the dignity of tourists and
foreign business travellers by collecting detailed information on
them, in an indiscriminate manner as a condition of entry, with no
promise of safeguards, or any means of appeal.
We also note that the Japanese Government previously criticised
systems such as the one you are about to implement. In 2002 at a
meeting of the International Civil Aviation Organisation the Japanese
delegation stated that "the Japanese people are saddened by the
approach of the United States", and the delegation could not
understand "why the United States can not longer trust Japanese
citizens" and that the unilateral use of biometrics will have a
negative impact on the 17 million Japanese that visit the U.S. every
year. We are surprised by this turn of events and opinion.
A Complex and Risky System
The collection of all this personal information and its centralisation
into databases will create privacy risks, and will also lead to likely
security risks.
We believe that Japan is making a grave mistake by following the path
forged by the United States of America with its US-VISIT programme.
Until the implementation of your system, the U.S. was alone in the
world in fingerprinting and face-scanning all visitors and retaining
this information for vast periods of time. Years into their programme
it is clear that the U.S. should serve as a cautionary tale rather
than as an example of best practice.
The US-VISIT system was approved in a similar manner to the Japanese
system. That is, it was approved through a highly political
environment with little public debate or policy deliberation. In the
U.S., the government relied on its rhetoric about fighting terrorism
and crime rather than careful policy development and deployment. Now,
years later, the US-VISIT system is finally receiving some of its much
needed oversight, and the reality of advanced border systems is
becoming clear. According to U.S. Government reports, we now know that:
b after spending $1.3 billion over 4 years, only half the U.S.
system has been delivered.
b expenditures continue on projects that "are not well-
defined, planned, or justified on the basis of costs, benefits, and
risks", lacking "a sufficient basis for effective program oversight
and accountability".
b the U.S. government has "continued to invest in US-VISIT
without a clearly defined operational context that includes explicit
relationships with related border security and immigration enforcement
initiatives".
b "management controls to identify and evaluate computer and
operational problems were insufficient and inconsistently
administered" and thus "continues to face longstanding US-VISIT
management challenges and future uncertainties" as it continues to
"fall short of expectations".
b "lacking acquisition and financial management controls", and
project managers have failed to "economically justify its investment
in US-VISIT increments or assess their operational impacts", "had not
assessed the impact of the entry and exit capabilities on operations
and facilities, in part, because the scope of the evaluations
performed were too limited."
b "contracts have not been effectively managed and overseen".
b and finally, security "weaknesses collectively increase the
risk that unauthorized individuals could read, copy, delete, add, and
modify sensitive information, including personally identifiable
information, and disrupt the operations of the US-VISIT program."
According to the chairman of the U.S. Senate Homeland Security
Committee, Senator Joseph Lieberman, the U.S. government "is spending
$1.7 billion of taxpayer money on a program to detect potential
terrorists crossing our borders yet it isn't taking the most basic
precautions to keep them from hacking into and changing or deleting
sensitive information."
It is therefore of little surprise that the U.S. border systems
occasionally fail. On a number of occasions the U.S. border systems
have broken down resulting in thousands of people being forced to wait
until the system problems could be resolved. For instance, in August
2007, 20,000 travellers were left stranded at Los Angeles airport,
with visitors spending the night on the airport floors and planes
prevented from even coming into the gates for passengers (both
citizens and visitors) to de-plane because the airport was overwhelmed.
More stories are emerging from around the world where weak security
protocols have made personal information held on visa databases widely
available to the public and potential identity thieves, and where
fingerprint mismatches have lead to gross injustices. Without
competent planning and care, visitors to Japan have no reason to be
confident that the personal information that they are forced to
disclose will be adequately protected by your system.
Towards Effective Border Management?
Japan should be careful not to follow the U.S. lead. Recent surveys
have shown that the U.S. is now rated as the worst place to visit
because of its immigration and entry procedures, followed by the
Middle East.
There are better ways of greeting visitors to your country than
treating tourists and business travelers as though they were
terrorists. There are privacy-friendly ways of identifying criminals
at borders without invading the privacy of all visitors and making
them vulnerable to identity theft through the leakage of data from
your systems.
For instance, border officials could verify passports against the
INTERPOL list of lost and stolen passports from around the world.
Remarkably so few countries actually do this. It would be a far more
effective and proportionate solution.
Even this step must be made with great care as errors are still likely
which will inhibit the flow of travellers. As an example, in a test of
1.9 million passport records collected over 16 days by U.S. border
officials, 273 documents were identified as stolen documents.
Eventually however, 219 cases were cleared and 64 remained unresolved.
As with any watchlist program, clear oversight and accountability
structures must be established to allow for the necessary appeals
against erroneous data. We have already seen numerous problems with
the U.S. watchlists wrongly flagging innocent individuals as
terrorists, growing out of control with serious integrity problems. We
expect that any system your government implements will likely give
rise to similar problems.
In our experiences, technological systems fail most when they do not
receive adequate policy deliberation. We also believe that immigration
policy is a complex domain that rarely attracts the necessary
attention and deliberative care that it deserves. Your plans to
fingerprint and face-scan every visitor to your country appears to
exemplify this risk. It is unfortunate that we could not offer our
views earlier but your consultation was only conducted in the Japanese
language.
Your plans will damage Japan's standing in the world, making a
wonderful and beautiful country less inviting to tourists, and will
unnecessarily hurt Japan's role as a global economic leader. If
serious changes to your plans are not made, we worry that individuals
who are concerned about the privacy and security of their personal
information will avoid travel to Japan.
Please reconsider your plans. Also, please note, that if you move down
this path, other governments may well follow and will start
fingerprinting your own citizens on the grounds that you do it to
theirs. These systems will likely be as complex, risky and insecure as
yours. This is not the type of world that you, your citizens or we
would like to live in.
Yours sincerely,
c
Privacy International
c
Action on Rights for Children (UK)
APC Africa Women (Africa)
APC.au (Australia)
ArabDev (Egypt)
Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (Japan)
Association For Progressive Communications (International)
Associazione per la Liberta` nella Comunicazione Elettronica
Interattiva (Italy) ATTAC Japan (Japan)
Australian Privacy Foundation (Australia)
AZUR Developpement (Congo)
Big Brother Awards (France)
Bluelink (Bulgaria)
British Columbia Civil Liberties Association (Canada)
BytesForAll.org (South Asia)
Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (Canada)
Colnodo (Colombia)
Community Education Computer Society (South Africa)
Digital Rights (Denmark)
Digital Rights Ireland Electronic Frontier Finland (Finland)
Electronic Frontier Foundation (US)
Electronic Privacy Information Center (US)
European Digital Rights (EU)
Fantsuam Foundation (Nigeria)
Focus on the Global South (Asia)
Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR)
Foundation For Media Alternatives (Philippines)
GreenNet (UK)
Greenspider (Hungary)
Index on Censorship (International)
International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group (International)
International Movement Against All Forms of Discrimination and Racism
(Japan)
International Solidarity Action of the Have-Nots (Japan)
IRIS - Imaginons un reB4seau Internet solidaire (France)
Iuridicum Remedium (Czech Republic)
Japan Computer Access for Empowerment (Japan)
Japan Lawyers Network for Refugees (Japan)
JCA-NET(Japan)
Jinbonet (South Korea)
Joint Labor Union of Christian Offices and Businesses (Japan)
Laneta (Mexico)
Network Against JUKINET(Japan)
Networkers against Surveillance Task-force (Japan)
Netzwerk Neue Medien (Germany)
No2ID (UK)
NODO Tau (Argentina)
OneWorld Platform South West Europe (Bosnia-Herzegovina)
Open Rights Group (UK)
Peace Boat (Japan)
Peace Not War Japan (Japan)
People's Coalition against Wiretapping Law and Organized Crime Law
(Japan)
People's Plan Study Group(PPSG) (Japan)
PINCH! Against War and Surveillance (Japan)
Privacy Journal (US)
RITS - Information Network for the Third Sector (Brazil)
San'ya Welfare Center for Day-Laborers' Association (Japan)
Sex Worker and Sexual Health (Japan)
Solidarity Network with Migrants Japan (Japan)
Statewatch (UK)
StrawberryNet (Romania)
Swiss Association to Defend Fundamental Rights (Switzerland)
Swiss Internet User Group (Switzerland)
Ungana Afrika (Africa)
VOICE (Bangladesh)
Wamani (Argentina)
WiLAC (Uruguay)
WomensNet (South Africa)
At 8:28 PM -0500 11.22.07:
>Begin forwarded message:
>
>From: Joichi Ito <jito at neoteny.com>
>Date: November 22, 2007 4:26:14 PM EST
>To: dave at farber.net
>Cc: ip at v2.listbox.com
>Subject: Re: [IP] Re: fingerprinting in Japan
>
>The US requires fingerprints for many kinds of visas including some
>benefits for permanent residents. Also, I think they require a
>photograph showing your earlobe as another biometric. It's on your
>card. It is slightly different from requiring a finger print every
>time you enter the country, but it's not really true that
>"fingerprinting requirements don't apply to permanent residents."
>
>See:
>http://www.uscis.gov/portal/site/uscis/menuitem.eb1d4c2a3e5b9ac89243c6a7543f6d1a/?vgnextoid=b6629c7755cb9010VgnVCM10000045f3d6a1RCRD&vgnextchannel=b6629c7755cb9010VgnVCM10000045f3d6a1RCRD
>
>Also, as far as I know, the Japanese are not fingerprinting transit
>passengers. My understanding is that even if you are just connecting
>via a US city, you still have to fill out the forms and get scanning.
>
>Basically I think that expecting us to go through US fingerprinting
>to visit the US, then deciding not to go to Japan because of
>fingerprinting is slightly hypocritical unless you have been vocally
>opposed to the fingerprinting in the US.
>
>Anyway, maybe this is a good opportunity for American who travel to
>Japan to take a good look at what the US does to its visitors and be
>reflective. I think a lot of Japanese government behavior just
>tracks what the US does and often is "encouraged" by the US. See
>crypto exports, the new Japanese corporate law or "JSOX" and
>copyright terms for other examples.
>
>- Joi
>
>From: "Brock N. Meeks" <bmeeks at cox.net>
>Date: November 22, 2007 7:28:47 PM EST
>To: <dave at farber.net>
>Subject: Re: [IP] Re: fingerprinting in Japan
>
>Yep, it's a heinous U.S. policy as well; does that make it OK for
>others to
>emulate?
>
>But hey, I'd advocate the same thing: stay home; don't come to the
>U.S.
>
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