Estonia's e-residency program expands abroad

https://e-estonia.com/e-residents/apply-2/

by Sami_Lehtinen • 11 years ago

113 39 11 years ago

e-estonia.com

raverbashing• 11 years ago

Can someone fix the title? It should be residency (like in the website)

joelrunyon2• 11 years ago

Does anyone know what obligations the e-residency program you have to submit to?

polymatter4• 11 years ago

I couldn't find any obligations. Its probably a good idea to keep your PIN secure to reduce the probability of ID fraud. As far as I can tell its a state backed digital signature and authentication system so wouldn't confer any obligations.

However, there is some discussion about whether its a completely new legal status which would do things like make you liable for double taxation. Personally I find that highly unlikely, but IANAL, YMMV etc.

joelrunyon2• 11 years ago

However, there is some discussion about whether its a completely new legal status which would do things like make you liable for double ta

Yeah, that was the type of obligation I was referring to.

octaveguin3• 11 years ago

I recently applied for an Estonian e-residency. Heres what I did:

The first thing to know is that you have to physically be there to apply. I went to Estonia and applied at the local police station. I know that sounds weird but thats how you do it. In Estonia, this is where you go to renew driver's licenses and a lot of governmental things.

It was relatively painless. I didn't need to make an appointment. It's just like a DMV. You take a ticket and wait. The woman behind the counter asks some questions, for your passport, biometrics (photo and finger prints) and 50 euros. You then you wait to hear a response within two weeks.

An annoying part is that you have to show up again in two weeks to pick it up in person. Mine is still waiting for me in Estonia as I've not been back yet and I can't have a friend pick it up for me (it has to be me!).

Be prepared to spend two weeks in Tallinn, therefore, which isn't bad as the prices are quite reasonable and the food is good.

ProblemFactory• 11 years ago

From the linked website, it seems that they expanded applications to overseas embassies a few days ago, so visiting in person might no longer be necessary.

Out of curiosity, what was your motivation for applying? It seems to me that the only obvious use-case for e-residency is to run a company registered in Estonia while living elsewhere.

octaveguin3• 11 years ago

Yes it seems like it'll be easier now. Exciting really. I bet a lot of people will now take advantage of it.

My motivation is eventual real residency. This just makes it easier.

qb• 11 years ago

You can write to the Estonian Police and Border Guard (teenindus@politsei.ee) and ask for your card to be sent (free of charge) from the police station where you applied to any Estonian embassy. My card was waiting in Tallinn as well since I don't have the time to go there again to collect the card in the next couple of months, so I had it sent to Berlin. Might take two or three weeks for it to arrive.

higherpurpose• 11 years ago

Step 1: get Estonian e-citizenship by giving them your fingerprint to keep in their centralized database

Step 2: NSA, GCHQ, Russia and China steal the whole fingerprint database, which includes your fingerprint

Step 3: Now your iPhone/Android phone that uses fingerprint reader is vulnerable to hacking

retroam• 11 years ago

From personal experience, the US has been fingerprinting non-US nationals at the airports for a decade now. So NSA has had such a database for a significant time. However, I still doubt they have figured out to hack the iPhone using said database. But this is just my personal opinion...

brownbat• 11 years ago

Be prepared to spend two weeks in Tallinn, therefore,

I'd recommend everyone visit Tallinn.

On a quick walk you can see a medieval castle, renaissance architecture, soviet architecture, and postmodern examples from the sprint west after Baltic independence. It's like a walking through a timeline of European history.

I'd strongly advise against January though. :)

cryptophreak• 11 years ago

The first thing to know is that you have to physically be there to apply.

Not anymore, according to the article.

genesem• 11 years ago

Could someone expalin why this is needed? so much hustles for such thing.

octaveguin3• 11 years ago

It makes it easier to start a business, open a bank account, and things like that in Estonia. That's important because it's an EU country with a reasonable tax system, stable government and an overall ease of doing business. Being part of the EU makes a lot of things easier in dealings with other countries depending on your line of work.

That's the theory anyway. We'll see if it pans out.

Personally, it's an important step for me in getting a real residency beyond one tied to a company that isn't my own in the EU.

shubb• 11 years ago

It's really nice to see a government backed on line identity system, backed by 2 factor authentication and real background checking.

ptaipale• 11 years ago

Estonia has little natural resources, a small population, an unstable neighbour and it is a bit at the periphery of Europe. They have invested a lot of effort into becoming strong in Internet. This is one example of those efforts.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/apr/15/estonia-us...

coretx2• 11 years ago

The Estonian system is incredibly insecure. Not only because of legal and procedural errors, but also because of technical issues.

Some references: https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/ivoting-ccs14.pdf ( Lookup the ID-card part. ) http://www.wassenaar.org/ ( Crypto is defined as a "dual use" weapon. )

The worst aspect of the estonian ID-card is simply the fact that your private key is not private, and stored in the card itself. You as a user, can not revoke or resign it. At the same time however, it holds full legal status and dominion over your identity.

jkaljundi• 11 years ago

Rather read http://estonianworld.com/security/attacks-estonias-e-voting-... and https://www.ria.ee/e-voting-is-too-secure/

ottodv• 11 years ago

Two sources with absolutely no pro-Estonian bias. </sarc>

Buetol2• 11 years ago

I thought of a simple solution to the verifiability problem, what do you think ?

- When voting, each voter receive a receipt with a random number assigned to his vote

- All the votes are published with the random numbers alongside them

- Each voter can verify that his vote was correctly saved by looking at his assigned number in the list

It's not perfect but relying on a central server is far worse I think (like the paper said)

Tomte• 11 years ago

At the very least the voter would need to supply the random number.

Otherwise the server can lump together several voters who voted for the same option.

I don't know offhand how Debian is doing it, but they've got some mechanism like that for their ballots. Since it's been around forever I'd guess it's solid.

aianus• 11 years ago

Unfortunately this enables someone to coerce or bribe you into voting for a certain candidate, since the coercer would be able to demand to see your receipt and verify you complied.

Here's a rather long but very interesting tech talk about electronic voting schemes which maintain the secret ballot property: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDnShu5V99s

Buetol2• 11 years ago

Thanks, I looked a bit at the Helios voting system and thought it was a complicated mess but this video explains everything really well!

coretx2• 11 years ago

The Estonian E-voting system is incredibly broken by design as you can see in this CCC lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY_pHvhE4os ( by J. Alex Halderman )

polymatter4• 11 years ago

That was a very interesting video but I think you misrepresent it slightly. Its clear the Estonian E-voting system was designed very very well in comparison to the ridiculously bad Diabold machines of yesteryear. The problem was that the current state-of-the-art hasn't advanced enough to make major fraud at least as hard as the paper ballot. And that means that e-voting makes it plausible for state actors to dictate election results, which in a democracy is a very bad thing. In other words, there was no way Estonia could make it perfect and anything less than perfect is broken.

The important point for me was that getting e-voting right is so incredibly important to a democracy that it should be treated as a national security issue. The Estonian E-voting system was clearly treated as a government IT project as procedures like "don't plug in a personal USB stick into the master counting server" are violated if its more convenient than replacing the broken DVD drive. Worse, politics gets mixed in which means that security concerns are dismissed with complacent and technically questionable statements like "nice people who care about computer hygiene have no viruses".

salvadors4• 11 years ago

The Estonian voting system already allows you to verify your vote from a second device for a short time period.

This certainly doesn't protect against all attacks (and it's only one part of the security system) — but it _does_ help against the threat of a virus that invisibly intercepts your vote to turn it into something different. If people started reporting that their phone showed a different vote to what they thought they'd cast via their laptop, then the election would be in trouble.

The fact that it only shows you this for a short time period also gets around the problem of you being able to show to a third party how you voted (in cases of vote-buying or coercion), because under the Estonian system you can also vote as many times as you like (with only the final vote being counted). So you could use this verification to 'prove' to someone that you voted the way they wanted you to — and then log in again an hour later and vote for someone different.

polymatter4• 11 years ago

But it also means that a virus that intercepts your PIN and your ID card can log in an hour later and vote for someone different. You then would have no way of knowing.

zura• 11 years ago

Interesting, would it be possible to create a Google Play Store merchant account with this? Estonia is in the list of supported countries for merchants.

zkhalique• 11 years ago

What is the advantage of e-residency in estonia?

krick• 11 years ago

I double that. Honestly, I expected that somebody already explained it in comments. Before reading so detailed and in-depth explanation on "how?" I would expect broad and self-selling explanation of "why?".

jcrawfordor• 11 years ago

The program appears to be oriented towards people who regularly visit Estonia or do business with Estonians. The Estonian ID card is used for authentication to many (perhaps all) Estonian government services and some private services, so it would be inconvenient to e.g. owe taxes there and not have an Estonian e-ID.

exit• 11 years ago

has anyone found a translation of the application document?

https://www.politsei.ee/dotAsset/204085.pdf

kaspa130• 11 years ago

fyi, how to apply: 1.april Estonia opened foreign embassies where you can give paper application. But from May Estonia opens online application where you can pay by credit card. And once you got accepted then you need to physically go and collect the card from your chosen foreign embassy. everything here https://e-estonia.com/e-residents/about/

Why one should? yes, access to EU market, access to good services (google, paypal, soon stripe etc), access to e-banking, and generally digital signature gives hassle-free business environment (signing contracts with partners, filling e-tax declarations, administrating business on a business portal).

Why Estonia is doing it - to increase its economic reach / gain more customers / PR

Estonia's e-residency program expands abroad

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