Shenzhen visitors may not have to endure this trauma for long. Starting in March 2003, the government will be issuing smart-card identification to Hong Kong residents that may make crossing the border not much harder than taking the subway. A computer chip embedded in the new cards will hold, among other data, a digital version of the bearer’s thumbprint. If it matches the real one (as read by an optical scanner at the border crossing) passage is automatic–no need to show papers to an immigration officer.
Digital ID cards have received increased attention since the September 11 attacks because they are, at least in theory, more difficult to forge than conventional ID cards and they more reliably verify the owner’s identity. But they’re not foolproof and are expensive to issue. Hong Kong plans to spend $400 million issuing cards to 6 million residents by 2009. “This is the largest national-ID smart-card implementation in the world in terms of number of cards to be issued,” says Aloysius Lee, an executive at PCCW, Hong Kong’s telephone company, which last week won a $21 million contract to begin rolling out the new ID scheme.
The new cards will be mandatory, but residents will have the choice of activating different functions, which would allow them to use the cards as library cards, driver’s licenses or digital certificates that could verify electronic transactions. The cards would also be able to hold electronic money and be used to gain access to medical data, but these functions won’t be immediately available.
It sounds convenient, but the plan has privacy advocates worried. “I am afraid it could be abused and turned into a tool of surveillance on the people and that the data might be available to too many people,” says Emily Lau, an opposition legislator. And even though the government claims that encryption technology makes the cards next to impossible to forge, some experts worry that a determined criminal or terrorist who somehow manages to do so may be able to do more damage than with a conventional ID card. So far residents haven’t raised a ruckus, probably because they’ve had to carry conventional ID cards for more than 50 years. “It’s a way of life already,” says legislator Sin Cheung-Kai.
Many claims about the new cards, both positive and negative, strike Immigration official Eric Wong as verging on the hysterical. “It’s just a card,” he says. “People should know that it is not like a magic wand. People should not expect too much.” Either Wong is displaying the natural caution of a civil servant, or he’s trying to convince himself that not much will change. Hong Kong residents are about to find out if that’s true.
