09-01-2002, 06:38 AM
Is Japan on its way to becoming a 'stalker nation'?
By MICHAEL HOFFMAN
Shukan Shincho (Aug. 29)
South Korean law professor Yun Byon Sik refuses to participate in his country's equivalent of Japan's new online resident registration system. He pays a stiff price.
"I can't get a passport or a driver's license," he tells an interviewer in a documentary video that journalist Yoshiko Sakurai summarizes for Shukan Shincho. "I can't join a public library. I can't attend international seminars. It's as if you don't exist unless you can be called up on a computer terminal."
Why not cooperate, then? Yun doesn't explicitly say, but Sakurai, who considers Japan's computerized network even more intrusive than South Korea's older one, compresses her worst fears into a capsule phrase. A central government armed with push-button access to our personal data, she says, presides over a "stalker nation."
What difference does it make if an 11-digit ID number, which since Aug. 5 every Japanese citizen bears, can be tapped into a computer to yield your name, date of birth, gender and address?
No difference -- if you have no secrets, no quirks, no past, no concern about who or what, government or not, may take an interest in you, and no fear of the system expanding.
South Korea, whose system was born in 1968 in response to the security threat posed by the North, offers hints of what Juki Net could mean to Japan. A nephew of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il was living, under a false name and with a surgically altered face, as a refugee in the South. In February 1997, he was murdered. His killers had found him with the help of the computerized registration system.
There is nothing analogous in Japan to the tortured politics of the Korean Peninsula, but stalkers nurturing strange dreams lurk here as elsewhere. Might they find Juki Net helpful -- as at least one American stalker-murderer found his country's social security system helpful?
The U.S. social security number, dating back to 1935, has since become the equivalent of an ID number. In 1999, an American woman was murdered by a man who had hounded her since high school. For $45, Sakurai says, he obtained her social security number from a data company called Docusearch. On Oct. 15, 1999, he ambushed her on her way home from work, killed her and committed suicide.
Is the added convenience Juki Net promises in matters such as passport renewal and residence registration worth the feeling, vague but disturbing, that someone creepy -- a malevolent individual, an idly curious stranger, an intrusive government official -- may be out there watching you?
Japanese authorities, Sakurai says, lack a well-developed sense of either computer security or personal privacy. The haste with which Juki Net was stitched together bears her out. By 2006, an estimated 900 million people worldwide will be Internet users. Who's watching you, waiting to pounce with a knife, a sales pitch or simply their unwanted presence? Will Juki Net bring them closer to you? Will it make them seem closer?
By MICHAEL HOFFMAN
Shukan Shincho (Aug. 29)
South Korean law professor Yun Byon Sik refuses to participate in his country's equivalent of Japan's new online resident registration system. He pays a stiff price.
"I can't get a passport or a driver's license," he tells an interviewer in a documentary video that journalist Yoshiko Sakurai summarizes for Shukan Shincho. "I can't join a public library. I can't attend international seminars. It's as if you don't exist unless you can be called up on a computer terminal."
Why not cooperate, then? Yun doesn't explicitly say, but Sakurai, who considers Japan's computerized network even more intrusive than South Korea's older one, compresses her worst fears into a capsule phrase. A central government armed with push-button access to our personal data, she says, presides over a "stalker nation."
What difference does it make if an 11-digit ID number, which since Aug. 5 every Japanese citizen bears, can be tapped into a computer to yield your name, date of birth, gender and address?
No difference -- if you have no secrets, no quirks, no past, no concern about who or what, government or not, may take an interest in you, and no fear of the system expanding.
South Korea, whose system was born in 1968 in response to the security threat posed by the North, offers hints of what Juki Net could mean to Japan. A nephew of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il was living, under a false name and with a surgically altered face, as a refugee in the South. In February 1997, he was murdered. His killers had found him with the help of the computerized registration system.
There is nothing analogous in Japan to the tortured politics of the Korean Peninsula, but stalkers nurturing strange dreams lurk here as elsewhere. Might they find Juki Net helpful -- as at least one American stalker-murderer found his country's social security system helpful?
The U.S. social security number, dating back to 1935, has since become the equivalent of an ID number. In 1999, an American woman was murdered by a man who had hounded her since high school. For $45, Sakurai says, he obtained her social security number from a data company called Docusearch. On Oct. 15, 1999, he ambushed her on her way home from work, killed her and committed suicide.
Is the added convenience Juki Net promises in matters such as passport renewal and residence registration worth the feeling, vague but disturbing, that someone creepy -- a malevolent individual, an idly curious stranger, an intrusive government official -- may be out there watching you?
Japanese authorities, Sakurai says, lack a well-developed sense of either computer security or personal privacy. The haste with which Juki Net was stitched together bears her out. By 2006, an estimated 900 million people worldwide will be Internet users. Who's watching you, waiting to pounce with a knife, a sales pitch or simply their unwanted presence? Will Juki Net bring them closer to you? Will it make them seem closer?