On Tuesday, September 17, the "people's deputies" almost unanimously (with the exception of the Communist Party faction that sabotaged the vote) adopted draft laws in the first reading that bring the digital economy lobbyists closer to the dream recently voiced by Deputy Prime Minister Maxim Akimov: "Control (of the people) from the first breath to the grave. " It is about PFZ No. 759897-7 "On a single federal information resource containing information about the population of the Russian Federation", as well as about PFZ No. 748684-7 "On amendments to the Labor Code of the Russian Federation (regarding the formation of information about labor activity in electronic form)" … In the course of the discussion, the government's cyber-lobbyists behaved confidently, without even bothering to clearly answer sharp questions. Alas, their positions in power, cemented by the president's words about the need for the country's "big leap" into the digital future, are very strong today.
Why it is impossible to adopt the bill on the formation of a unified register of the population, we told in detail earlier - in an analytical note and in a sample application to the authorities. Let us briefly recall: the bill introduces the compulsory collection of personal data of citizens, processing by the operator (the Federal Tax Service) in one database of many incompatible data categories. According to the experts of the "Committee for the Protection of Personal Data" movement, the bill poses a threat to personal and national security, violates the privacy of citizens, normalizes the division of society into castes through "special categories" in the register, etc. … However, First Deputy Minister of Finance Tatiana Nesterenko, who presented this project of digital lobbyists in the Duma, interpreted its tasks differently.
“Many years ago it was planned to create a single federal information resource containing information about the population of the Russian Federation. Back in 2006, when adopting the law on personal data, the legislator provided for the possibility of creating a state register of the population, the legal status of which should be established by federal law. The purpose of the formation of this resource is to create a system for recording information about the population, ensuring the relevance, reliability, and harmonization of information from all state and municipal information systems.
Thus, all data about a person will be lined up in one chain. In addition, it will include information about foreign citizens and stateless persons. The infrastructure of the registry office will be used to create the resource infrastructure. It will also be the basis for the harmonization of information about citizens in all other state resources, which will shorten the time frame for the provision of state services, improve their quality , - with such famous mantras, Nesterenko tried to add positive to the discussion.
Co-rapporteur, Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Information Technologies Leonid Levin predicted the end of the era of direct communication of citizens with living officials and the transition to a "proactive" (automatic) algorithm for the provision of public services.
“The goal is to reduce paperwork as much as possible, to ensure that government agencies work with a specific individual and legal entity as a“one-stop-shop”service: you will no longer need to visit departments, the system will automatically provide each individual with the government services he needs in electronic form,” Levin said.
That is, without the creation of a register, where, in addition to SNILS, TIN, OMS policy and other "personal identifiers", information about marital status, parents, children and education of a citizen also "merges", public services turned out to be very bad, and now we will finally heal? It is highly controversial, although the deputy from the Liberal Democratic Party Igor Toroshchin did not think this was enough - he asked Nesterenko if it was planned to add information from the traffic police, Rosreestr to the register to "combine all information on citizens in one database."
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“Yes, this is precisely the goal the bill pursues,” Nesterenko answered without batting an eye. At this point, a high-ranking official should recall the best practices of "respected partners" and tell the deputies that in Great Britain, after several years of a similar experiment, the parliament directly called the unified population identification register "Orwellian" and vetoed its further work. And in Germany, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled 30 years ago: there should not be a single means of storing all personal data, because According to the constitution, every citizen has the right to information secrets, and the state, in turn, has no right to monitor citizens, collect and centrally store data about them. A similar position is taken by the authorities of France and the United States, perfectly aware thatthat the main task of introducing such unified registers is "strengthening police supervision" over the population.
Further, the head of the Federal Tax Service Mikhail Mishustin, whose structure is assigned the role of the operator of the implanted system, puffed for a colleague from the Government. He tried to reassure the Orthodox and in general all persons who, for personal reasons, do not want to be identified by their personal numbers.
“The Unified Population Register does not provide for any receipt of numbers. We are talking about the harmonization of identifiers and basic information in one resource in order to make it convenient for a person,”Mishustin said.
It turns out remarkably: the citizens themselves will be neither a dream nor a spirit about what dossier they are collecting by government agencies, and they will not be able to legally find out this (a citizen's access to the unified population register is closed, the mechanisms for requesting personal information from it in the PFZ are not spelled out). The collected personal data will in fact no longer belong to us, and Mr. Mishustin continues to hang noodles about “human convenience”.
Then it was Nesterenko's turn to take the blow. Let us note that the question of the deputy Mikhail Sheremet sounded very topical.
“I would like to clarify: the transition to a qualitatively new level of calculating taxes on personal income - what does this mean? I would like a more convincing justification for the implementation of such a system. There is no need to collect the data that you have listed - they are already in the departments, in their subject matter. And most importantly, you will ask people whether they want or don’t want their data to be collected and accumulated? Especially taking into account the latest trend - practice shows that we cannot save information in full - leaks are constantly occurring,”Sheremet summed up.
The Deputy Minister of Finance tried to fight back: “As for the record of citizens, the population register does not form a single new record. He makes connections between records that are already formed in the electronic registry office, and others. In fact, this creates, first of all, for the citizen himself, in order to provide public services, the correct, therefore, message … the accuracy of the formation of the person who, in fact, either pays taxes or is rendered services, and this is extremely important.
As for the tax component - indeed, by the Presidential Decree, it was in connection with the improvement of tax administration that the task of creating a registry of registry offices was set. This is extremely important, including within the framework of insurance premiums, payment of taxes, because every person with us is a taxpayer or payer of contributions."
As you can see, there is again solid water in the answer - they say, we need to precisely "shape a person", otherwise suddenly he will pay taxes somewhere in the wrong place. In fact, we draw conclusions: there was no convincing justification for improving tax collection as a result of the adoption of the bill by Nesterenko, no one intends to ask citizens about their desire to be listed in the unified register.
Then the communist Nikolai Osadchiy drew the attention of government rapporteurs to the threat to national security
“The bill provides for the concentration of information about citizens from different, separate databases in one resource, in one hand. Will this not increase the vulnerability of the collected information, what are the guarantees, for example, against foreign interference in this single database? Has Russia already achieved complete independence in information technologies today?”Osadchiy asked.
“The unified register does not collect all (personal) data of citizens, it converts them. To ensure the reliability of storage, identifiers (ID) are used along with the basic data,”Nesterenko sounded unconvincing again.
One of the last to ask the question was Vice-Speaker Pyotr Tolstoy, who had previously made many statements against the reckless digitization of the population:
“In our law on personal data, it is clearly stated that it is inadmissible to combine information bases with incompatible goals. In fact, the point is that the law you are proposing today is becoming a model, the rest will be rewritten under it. Is this so and how safe do you see this prospect for the private life of Russian citizens?”Tolstoy asked.
Nesterenko again tried to reset the degree of discussion: “The registry does not accumulate all the data, it creates chains by which information about this person can be found in different state systems. We do not unite, we make a path there - that's all."
That's all - no responsibility for possible PD leaks - after all, they are simply “making a path”. Surprisingly, the unconvincing Nesterenko eventually managed to convince almost all deputies, including those who asked tricky questions, to vote for a unified federal population register. As the saying goes, either the heated discussion was a well-staged performance with a pre-known ending, or one of two things.
The voting results were expected. The entire United Russia faction voted in favor, including Natalia Poklonskaya, Vitaly Milonov and Pyotr Tolstoy, representing conservative Russians. LDPR and Fair Russia were in the same team with them. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation called the document unfinished (since it does not specify in detail the procedure for submitting information to the register) and also traditionally ignored the vote.
According to a similar scheme, only much faster in time, the deputies approved in the first reading the draft law on the transition to electronic work books from January 1, 2021 (in order for the employer to continue to keep the book on paper, the employee must submit an application before the end of 2020.). The Zyuganovites also preferred not to vote on this document. The only MP who found the courage to openly vote against both laws was the communist Olga Alimova.
This is what turns out to be, to put it mildly, not the most optimistic balance of power before the Duma considers bills on the "digital profile" of a citizen, the Government is preparing to legalize electronic passports and the National Data Management System (NDSM) - a mega-platform that merges together 800 types of personal data of Russians. But this does not mean that conservative patriots should give up. We know very well that statements against toxic digital bills go to parliament in hundreds, if not thousands. And on the eve of the second reading, everyone who did not have time can write to the “people's choices” (a statement against the single register + analyst from the OUZS). The struggle for Holy Russia - not digital - is just beginning to flare up.