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Manila's ID plan sure to
bomb
By Miriam Grace A Go
MANILA - On Valentine's Day, after the
expenditure of some US$100 million in military aid
from Washington for the Philippine front of the
"war on terror", bombs exploded one after another
in three key cities across the country. One of the
explosives was set off in a bus in the commercial
district of Makati City, just meters away from a
hotel where President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was
going to have dinner with her husband. The Jemaah
Islamiyah-linked Abu Sayyaf owned up to these
incidents, which killed 12 people and injured more
than 100.
Here was a showcase of how the
greatest amounts of foreign aid and the most well
publicized of presidential pledges of a strong
alliance with powerful countries couldn't
guarantee a successful anti-terrorism campaign.
Sound strategy, a corruption-free bureaucracy, and
good old political will are required of the
assisted country as well.
This, however,
seemed lost on Manila. The official reaction to
the February 14 bombings has been the revival of
proposals to establish a national identification
system to enable authorities to monitor the
movement of suspected terrorists.
This was
a proposal that, when first brought forward in
1998, was defeated in court and in public forums.
The reasons ranged from the system's
unconstitutionality, to possible abuse of the
system, to the lack of guarantees that it would
curb criminality. And in the seven years since the
proposal was first made, not much has improved in
the Philippines' political and bureaucratic
systems that would make the establishment of a
national ID system feasible and widely acceptable.
Yet, to date, six bills for this purpose have been
filed at the House of Representatives.
Without waiting for the slow grind of the
legislative mill, President Arroyo announced that
she would issue an executive order so the
government can start collating demographic and
other personal data that would be used in the ID
system. She has also ordered provincial
governments to go ahead and issue ID cards while
waiting for a law that would formalize the system.
The mayors of the 17 cities and municipalities
within Metro Manila, the national capital region,
said they would implement this soon.
Ironically, neither the bills before the
House nor the president are clear on how the state
will go about implementing a national ID system.
So far, the point of reference in debates about
the proposal has been the salient features of the
ID system the administration of president Fidel
Ramos wanted to put in place in 1997-98, but which
was met by protests.
In 1998, Ramos issued
Executive Order 308 for the adoption of a National
Computerized Identification Reference System. The
purpose was to issue to every citizen a single ID
card that he or she could use in all transactions
with different government agencies and private
entities, such as banks. The idea was to
consolidate the social security, health, tax, and
voter IDs into one.
But by that time,
various sectors had become suspicious - paranoid
is a more appropriate word - because a year
earlier, Ramos's interior secretary, a former
police colonel, had drafted his own ID-system
guidelines for curbing criminality in the
villages.
According to the guidelines
formulated by secretary Robert Barbers, every
resident of a barangay (village) would have
to register his or her basic demographic data with
a secretary designated by the village's elected
leaders. The barangay leadership would then
issue the resident an ID that the latter should
carry at all times.
Whenever an individual
would go to another village - and this could mean
the street next to his - he would have to present
himself to the barangay chairperson or the
latter's designate, show his village ID, and state
where he was going, whom he was seeing, and the
purpose and intended length of his visit. If he
stayed in the visited place for more than 24
hours, the village leadership could investigate
him. If he refused to show the ID issued by his
home village, it would be assumed that he had
committed a crime or was contemplating committing
one.
Amid public concern that this could
lead to violations of human rights (the
Philippines, after all, lived through martial law
for 14 years under dictator Ferdinand Marcos not
long before that), Ramos ordered Barbers to drop
the proposal. A surveillance kind of national ID
system was not what he had in mind, Ramos
clarified.
Nevertheless, the Barbers
proposal left the public paranoid about any kind
of national ID system. So when Ramos' EO 308 was
issued to have a national ID system that would
facilitate transactions, it was hauled to court by
an opposition politician.
The Supreme
Court struck down EO 308 as unconstitutional
because, it said, the enactment of a law, and not
just an order from the president, was required to
establish a national ID system. But assuming that
an executive order were sufficient to promulgate
the mechanics of a national ID system, the court
decision said, it still "cannot pass
constitutional muster as an administrative
legislation because facially it violates the right
to privacy".
The Supreme Court,
furthermore, provided guidelines that Congress
should consider when it drafts a
national-ID-system law. It basically said the
system should never be used to spy on people, and
that there should be safeguards on who can control
and access the data and for what purpose.
In the past, it was mostly opposition
politicians and leftist organizations who opposed
the idea, obviously fearing that the system could
be used to monitor their anti-government
activities and harass them. There are additional
concerns now. Human Rights Commissioner Eligio
Mallari fears that such a system might be used by
corrupt government personnel to get information on
rich families that are possible
kidnapping-for-ransom targets.
There are
bases for these fears. Here in the Philippines,
peace and order are threatened not just by lawless
private individuals but by people with sworn
duties to protect and serve the public. Two
decades after martial law was lifted, military and
police officers, as well as politicians, are still
reportedly behind the abduction and torture of a
number of leaders of progressive sectoral
organizations and communities, the murder of
hard-hitting journalists, large shipments of
illegal drugs, and the kidnapping of rich
Filipinos and foreigners.
In areas where
rebellions by both communist and extremist Muslim
groups are thriving, a national ID system doesn't
show much promise of easing the work of
authorities seriously out to nail down the
dissidents. The rebels are camping out in those
areas precisely because the communities are either
friendly to or afraid of them. Either way, they
won't give them up to the authorities.
In
the province of Sulu on the island of Mindanao,
for example, the residents belong to huge clans
that almost always include members of the
terrorist Abu Sayyaf group. In Quezon province
south of Manila, local officials don't catch
members of the leftist New People's Army visiting
families supportive of them - they just realize
that at certain periods of time, bakeries
experience a considerable increase in sales of
pandesal, the staple bread for breakfast in
Filipino homes. In the tony subdivisions, where
many drug dealers, gambling lords and coup
financiers are believed to reside, no lowly cop or
village official would dare question the residents
about their activities.
Assuming the
national ID system wouldn't be used to spy on
perceived enemies of the state - although the
Arroyo government has already made clear that this
is the purpose of its proposed ID system - its
implementation would still present a logistical
nightmare.
For one, the program would
require billions of pesos. Clearly, the government
cannot afford this. It's projected to have a
budget deficit of P180 billion (about US$3.3
billion - a very conservative estimate, actually)
this year, and is having a hard time persuading
people to sacrifice by paying additional taxes.
So far, the government has not given the
public an idea how much the computerized ID system
would cost. It has yet to determine who will be
issued ID cards. There are 82 million Filipinos,
and the census is not clear whether these include
the 7 million who are working overseas. There are
42 million registered voters, but they don't
represent the entire population of voting age. In
fact, many of those who registered found their
names missing from the lists in the last
elections.
There is also the corruption
factor, which would largely determine the cost of
the establishing a computerized ID system. About
five agencies perceived to be the most corrupt
have successfully dodged computerization efforts
for almost a decade now. For the 2001 and 2004
elections, the Election Commission signed a
contract that would produce voters' ID cards at
more than triple the amount of what the Social
Security Commission spent on cards using the same
technology. The poll body also purchased counting
machines that were overpriced by as much as P300
million but were not used in the end.
For
another, how would an ID system work in far-flung
villages, where one is related to almost everybody
and would be offended or embarrassed to be asking
for or presenting an ID when visiting? Or, if the
IDs would be machine readable, how would they work
in villages where there is no electricity, and
where elected leaders have not seen or touched a
computer?
The fact should also be
considered that the Philippines is composed of
42,000 villages, scattered across 7,100 islands.
But even if the Philippines remedies all
these logistical problems to establish a
computerized ID system, constitutionalist Joaquin
Bernas asks, "How long will it take Filipinos -
terrorists or not, or maybe merely money makers -
to beat the system?"
Bernas, a member of
the commission that drafted the Philippine
constitution, quotes a report gathered by the
group Privacy International from another country:
"It costs only $10 to get a counterfeit ID card.
The system hardly works. We all know how fake IDs
(one guy's photo, another one's name) can be
obtained ..."
Some operators for
politicians reproduce voters' IDs so their
followers can vote more than once. There's an
entire street in Manila where shops are known to
produce fake diplomas, transcripts of records,
theses, even professional licenses. Even some
insurance companies accredited by government sell
fake insurance policies to vehicle owners who
register with the Land Transportation Office.
And the most sensible point, of course,
is: which person would present an ID before
setting off a bomb?
Weeks after the
Valentine's Day bombings, members of the Abu
Sayyaf group who were jailed in Taguig, the city
next to Makati, tried to escape. Authorities had
to storm the jail after the Abu Sayyaf inmates
killed three guards and held the other inmates
hostage. When the dust settled, 23 persons had
been killed. The terrorists, it turned out, had
stored high-powered firearms and had communicated
with their cohorts through mobile phones while in
jail.
How were the firearms and the phones
smuggled in? The inmates and their frequent
visitors had befriended the guards, gave them
gifts at one time or another, and were eventually
allowed to roam freely in the maximum-security
building. And, one assumes, they were never asked
for IDs.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for
information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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