Forgive me; I was shaking my head. Estonia is highly respected, no question. I personally would not want to go with one card with one chip that contained all your data. That's a centralized model that is just going to be so problematic, in my view, not only now but especially in the future.
There are so many developments. You may have heard of what's happening in Australia. They've just passed a law that allows the government there to have a back door into encrypted communications. Why do you encrypt communications? You want them to be secure and untouched by the government or by third parties, unauthorized parties. Australia has passed a law that allows it to gain back-door access into your encrypted communications and you won't know about it. No one can tell you about it. It is appalling to me.
Personally, I am not in favour of one identity card, one chip, one anything.
Having said that, I think we have to go beyond the existing laws to protect our data and find new models, and I say this with great respect. I was privacy commissioner of Ontario for three terms, 17 years. Of course we had many laws here and I was very respectful of them, but they were never enough. It's too little too late. Laws always seem to lag behind emerging technologies and developments. That's why I developed privacy by design. I wanted a proactive means of preventing the harms from arising, much like a medical model of prevention. Privacy by design was unanimously passed as an international standard in 2010. It has been translated into 40 languages and it has just been included in the latest law that came into effect last year in the European Union called the General Data Protection Regulation. It has privacy by design in it.
The reason I'm pointing to this is that there are things we can do to protect data, to ensure access to the data, digital access by governments when needed, but not across the board, and not create a model of surveillance in which it's all in one place, an identity card, that can be accessed by the government or by law enforcement.
You might say that the police won't access it unless they have a warrant. Regrettably, to that I have to say nonsense. That's not true. We have examples of how the RCMP, for example, has created what are called Stingrays. These impersonate cellphone towers so they can access the cellphone communications of everyone in a given area when they're looking for the bad guy. Of course, if they have a warrant, I'd say to them, “Be my guest, by all means. Go search for him.” Did they have a warrant? No. They did this without anyone knowing, but CBC outed them, and they finally had to come clean that they were doing this.
With the greatest of respect and not to say anything negative about Estonia, that's not the direction I would want us to take here, one of greater centralization. I would avoid that.