
Rohingya turn to blockchain to solve identity crisis - andygates
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/21/rohingya-turn-to-blockchain-to-solve-identity-crisis
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scott_s
A people's lack of identity in a nation is a _civil_ problem. Technology does
not solve civil problems. I don't see any indication in this article how
blockchain-based identities will solve the civil problems faced by the
Rohingya people; specifically, if the nation they are in does not want to
grant them citizenship or basic rights, I don't see how asserting one's
identity in the blockchain solves that.

The article states: _" Noor’s goal is to give Rohingya the power to reclaim
their identities with a resilient system that their host countries will
recognise, allowing them access to social programmes, legal rights, education
and healthcare."_ But that's begging the question. The problem is that the
state won't recognize them. Why would a blockchain based solution change that?

~~~
sowbug
It's valuable to remember facts today, before they're forgotten, even if
today's institutions don't attach the desired significance to them.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _It 's valuable to remember facts today_

The last thing you want to do to an oppressed minority in an autocratic state
is compile a public membership list. This article is someone tagging their pet
fad to a humanitarian crisis.

~~~
sowbug
I doubt an identity system designed today would have JPEGs and plain text in a
great big XML file. More likely it'd contain digital signatures of hashed
documents, including structures that could verify but not reconstruct
biometrics. So the blockchain (or "list," if you prefer) would be able to
answer yes/no questions, but that's it.

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Moodles
Blockchain person: "Hey just prove to me you're a real Rohingya refugee and
I'll add you to my blockchain"

Rohingya refugee: "But isn't a blockchain supposed to be trustless. Aren't we
just trusting you to verify me?"

Blockchain person: "Yeah whatever, do you want to be on my blockchain or not?
I got a lot of funding for this"

Rohingya refugee: "Sure okay"

Rohingya refugee Myanmar government: "Hey I'm a real person. I'm on this
fella's blockchain. That proves it."

Myanmar govenrment: "We don't care."

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psergeant
I’m close to some aid workers in this part of the world. There appear to be a
bunch of wide-eyed technologists desperate to foist blockchain on the whole
crisis, from recording health records to this. That the “Rohingya are turning
to it” rather than a few people are Really Excited About Blockchain is not
well supported.

~~~
tCfD
Sadly, the history of people faced with difficult, complex problems turning to
opportunistc 'one weird trick' quacks out of desperation is long and
depressing.

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ben_w
“Immutable record” doesn’t really work with “birth”, “death”, or “accidentally
incorrect details”.

Allowing mutability to any of those things doesn’t work well with preventing
hostile forces with far more resources from corrupting your records — even a
bug free implementation should, on topics like this, _presume_ the hostile
attackers can mount a 51% attack.

(I’d go further and assume hostile actors could mount a 99.99% attack when
it’s homeless stateless refugees fleeing hundreds of thousands of armed
malitia).

~~~
beaconstudios
if you treat the blockchain as an event-sourced datastore, you could publish
amendment updates. Then you can rebuild the original record and all the
amendments into a latest-accurate record.

~~~
ben_w
How do you know which “death” records are accurate? Or if such records are
complete?

~~~
beaconstudios
It's impossible to know without eg signing the record with the person's key,
but you can at least see the history of modifications so information can't be
hidden by overwriting or deleting it.

~~~
ben_w
Overwriting and deleting are not the only ways to hide things. Truth can be
hidden if buried under a randomised pile of noise, of “corrections” and
counter-corrections - who would rely on a database which needs to be cleaned
up against deliberate hostile damage?

~~~
beaconstudios
presumably you would want to restrict writing anyway. I thought that was
implicit - any open-write platform is going to go to shit if it's immutable.

~~~
ben_w
Then you (still, but this time explicitly) remove the only benefit blockchain
really provides — of not needing to trust anyone involved.

~~~
beaconstudios
I'm not arguing that using a blockchain makes sense here - I'm firmly in the
anti-blockchain-overuse camp. I was making a point about how you could provide
a mutable record within an immutable event chain.

~~~
ben_w
Then we are in agreement — I was mistaken about your position mainly because
of your “implicit”-ness argument.

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have_faith
Putting disenfranchised poor people on a list to keep track of them that is
controllable by whoever has the most electricity/money doesn't sound like a
form of empowerment.

~~~
lagadu
But blockchain!

------
rlpb
How is the blockchain useful here? Why don't they maintain a git repository as
a distributed database and issue digital identity cards using X.509?

~~~
arif_sohaib
Part of an undertaking this big is securing funding and political/social
support. Being a bit "trendy" helps with those.

~~~
notahacker
This is the most plausible rationale for doing it with blockchains (see also:
many other blockchains)

The whole system appears to rely on a trusted group certifying the [probable]
authenticity of an individual's records and Rohingya refugee status, in which
case you might as well let them host it on a well-backed up regular
database...

~~~
sowbug
It's possible, even easy, to insert fake attestations that biometric B
corresponds to identity I. But an append-only log has the advantage over other
databases that a simple older-record-wins heuristic is likely to prefer
genuine identity records.

A regular database has no way to make it infeasible to insert fake old
records. Sure, you can publish checkpoints. But that doesn't work so well when
you're up against a government that wants to erase your entire ethnicity.

~~~
notahacker
Isn't the _sufficiently determined government_ with the ability to compromise
an organization's computers almost as much of a threat to carry out 51%
attacks on its private blockchain as to successfully target distributed copies
of database checkpoints?

(In practice, I think the Myanmar government's strategy would simply be to
disregard the database rather than to attack it anyway, on the basis the local
prejudice against the Rohingya isn't based around their numbers or individual
identities but the claim that they are actually Bangladeshi illegal immigrants
lying about Myanmar ancestry and land)

~~~
sowbug
Yes, it is a threat. That's why I'm not sure why they're not just using
Ethereum. Well, I think I know why -- "let's use Ethereum!" isn't a fundable
startup idea. But it's too bad, because I have a feeling Myanmar doesn't have
even enough compute power to double-spend a single CryptoKitty.

And yeah, a government would certainly try to ignore facts it didn't like.

------
JustFinishedBSG
I don't think it's a very good idea to record immutably and publicly your
"indesirable" status. Sounds like it will just make ethnic cleansing easier

~~~
throwaway555555
Ordinarily, I’d agree with this, except to look at how this series of events
transpired, one gets the sense that the aggressors in this scenario did not
give a shit about identity as they went about (and continue to go about)
dealing death (and worse) to pretty much anything in front of them.

In this case it seemed to be based on regions or zones in rural territories.
Anybody in those towns or villages, was in the wrong place at the wrong time,
and no amount information was going to make a difference.

I don’t think they were going around, checking names and marking clipboards.
By all accounts, there was nothing orderly about this one. Little more than a
perimeter walked down to a kill zone. The people that got away had to move
fast, and of the ones that made it out of the round up, it seemed to be
children and people who played dead.

So, add computerized record keeping to the mix. Will it be used to hunt people
down? It’s probably a concern worth considering, but really the modus operandi
seems to be search and destroy eviction from a territory, to clear out an
area, not understanding and targeting network nodes in a constellation of
peers.

------
nrclark
Don't blockchains need miners to validate every transaction? Who exactly is
going to be running all these computers, and why? What happens when the
internet goes down?

~~~
sowbug
Would you prefer your local bureaucracy to do those things on paper?

~~~
nrclark
Not a question of preference, and not a troll - I'm actually curious about
how/if it could work in practice.

~~~
sowbug
I don't know. But all the questions asked by OP would be applicable to any
computerized system, and I doubt that a identity system designed today would
operate entirely offline.

------
jgh
What happens if you lose your identity card? Do you have to redo the test, and
now there are two of you on the blockchain?

~~~
tenebrisalietum
The right way to do it is put a revocation record of the old identity on the
blockchain.

~~~
have_faith
Who has authority to do that?

~~~
GenericsMotors
> Who has authority to do that?

 _crickets chirping_

------
billpg
"We have a problem."

"Solve it with block-chains!"

"You've not heard my problem yet."

"Doesn't matter!"

~~~
sowbug
Did you read the article? The population has real, historical reasons not to
trust the traditional centralized provider of identity. A trustless solution
is an option worth considering.

Blockchain-overuse snark is not the solution to every blockchain proposal....
especially if you haven't heard the proposal yet.

~~~
scott_s
But the difficulty is that the traditional centralized provider of identity is
the _state_ , and they are the arbiter of identity because they have power.
Being the state in power is why they decide anyone's identity. Declaring your
own identity does not change the power dynamic.

~~~
sowbug
That's a good point, and I hope nobody is taking the position in this thread
that someone has legal rights just because a digital signature matched. Unless
the legal body grants that privilege, the match has no meaning.

A decentralized solution removes the question who maintains a centralized
database. That's important because, as you say, the answer to that question
has always been the state. Which means it's never really been a question.

If you're cool with the government owning your identity -- and truly having
the power to erase your entire existence, so they're not denying you any
rights because there is no "you" \-- then it doesn't matter. But for some
people, it might matter to be able to point to something other than the mirror
and say "I exist, and not just because I say I do. This matters because [this
entity] is taking actions that are inconsistent with my existence and implied
rights."

It's a small step, but it's one that opens up options that don't exist today.

~~~
nrclark
A decentralized solution still needs to be hosted by _somebody_. Where is it
expected to live? On the PCs of Rohingya refugees?

~~~
sowbug
I don't know. Maybe on a Raspberry Pi running on your bookshelf and the
bookshelves of 1,000 more people around the world. We wouldn't have that
choice if it were centralized.

~~~
GenericsMotors
And when you've got this network of RPis running, the Myanmar government
simply says "Nope we don't recognize those individuals as citizens. But thanks
for compiling a convenient persona non grata list for us!"

------
doombolt
Modern nation-state is a racket and oligopoly.

So-called "recognized states" make monumental efforts at disallowing creation
of new states and at making citizenship scarce, to help keep their monopoly.
This doesn't seem to be in the benefit of Earth's people, and also amount of
"unrecognized states" grows year by year. Previously, this backlog could only
processed by holding a World War.

It's an elephant in a room and I'm quite surprised I've never seen this idea
discussed seriously anywhere.

~~~
jcranmer
The creation of new states is far from a panacea for solving these sorts of
conflicts. South Sudanese and Eritrean independence appears to have generally
made their lives more miserable, for example.

The real issue is that cultural identity is a very fluid concept, and states
can try to steer their citizenry to express a very broad, inclusive notion of
cultural attachment (as France and Germany did in the late 19th century) or a
very narrow and exclusive sentiment (as the Ottoman Empire did).

~~~
doombolt
I think being South Sudanese or Eritrean is much better than being murdered
for being a separatist, on ethnic cleansing scale.

What's with the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th century? You seem to refer of
it as of something well-know and yet I have no idea.

~~~
selimthegrim
He’s talking about the millet system, overlaid with a veneer of
constitutionalism and parliamentary activity.

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doombolt
After reading about millet system, I still do not understand why it
corresponds to "a very narrow and exclusive sentiment".

~~~
selimthegrim
Seriously? If you're only judged by the laws of your own community?

