Accenture, JAPAN-VISIT, and the mystery of the 100,000 yen bid

As far as I know this story has not been touched by the mainstream media or blogs, other than a mention by Debito which linked to the above article. The story is basically about how Accenture got the deal to implement the fingerprinting system just over a year ago at a bid of only 100,000 yen, after it was already acting as “consultant” on the project. The article includes translations of a blog entry by Hosaka Nobuto, a newspaper article on the topic, and two sets of Diet session proceedings. It’s long but there’s a lot there. The translations are from a year ago, but since this thing is going to go into effect in November of this year (as far as I know), it’s all still very relevant, seems to me.

But you knew that, didn’t you?

I suppose that payment means that Tom Lantos’s involvement in bringing another human rights issue to a vote in committee makes the new issue invalid.

The logic is that Tom Lantos was on a commission that should have publicly looked into Kuwaiti human rights abuses in 1990, but the Kuwaiti government made some contributions (probably unnecessarily, considering that in 1990 the Kuwaitis needed to be poor, oppressed friends of America for American PR purposes), so now a resolution calling for an official apology from the Japanese PM over a WWII-era issue should be quashed just like the Kuwaiti investigation was because pointing possible impropriety on Lantos’s part is more important than the human rights you’re oh-so-slyly pointing out that he didn’t adequately protect?

If there was a point there, I missed it.

Random political trivia is great, but even better when relevant.

Matt, I agree - primarily b/c you just can’t control a person’s temperament, moral or otherwise. It doesn’t really matter if an employee actually agrees with the law or likes it, only that the employee understands that the law is considered a serious issue and that violations of privacy protections, for any reason, are not to be and will not be taken lightly.
Just as importantly, police and people in other positions with special powers need to be reminded that every law applies to them, regardless of what was allowed in the past.

What all this means is that, whatever policies might be in place, the government has clearly not imparted the importance and seriousness of the protection of private information to lower-level employees.

This is probably true, but there is a real limit here with just how well you can inform people.

I’ve noticed in some situations in Japan, there’s this sense that people make mistakes because they lacked a specific mentality or morality. There’s this sense that if only the relevant people could be inoculated with just how important performing the task correctly is, they’ll then do it. A large emphasis is placed on the moral qualities of the person involved and getting them to show how sincere they are in performing their job.

I think this is a mistake, a waste of time, and actually an invasion of one’s private moral world.

I think there need to be random audits and serious punishments. There needs to be a structural solution, and not a solution that relies on just making employees better understand (in some moral sense) the importance of what they are doing.

Anyway, it’s here: Japan’s Personal Information Protection Act.

We have already seen a wide variety of cases in which public servants have mishandled or abused such information. Police still routinely engage in warrantless searches, civil servants still take personal information home with them, foreign residents’ files are still kept (at least in a few Tokyo wards) on paper, in unlocked filing cabinets. In Fukuoka, Keisuke Mori’s homeroom teacher used private information about the boy to publicly humiliate him and create an atmosphere in which he could be bullied with impunity.

What all this means is that, whatever policies might be in place, the government has clearly not impartd the importance and seriousness of the protection of private information to lower-level employees. A situation has been created in which government employees are the biggest risk and the government is charging with amassing yet more private information. As Matt pointed out, this creates an incongruity. The government is making its own duties more difficult to carry out.

Physical fingerprints take time to search and compare. At the very least, someone has to go get them or have them delivered. This makes random or harrassing searches troublesome and means that there is good chance of there being probable cause.

Simply compiling fingerprints does absolutely nothing to prevent crime. At best, it makes the apprehension of suspected criminals easier, but there’s not a whole lot of evidence to suggest that this has happened, for instance, in the US, which has collected the prints and photos of foreign visitors for a few years now. Given that Japanese police are notoriously unwilling, if not unable to engage in forensic investigation, it’s hard to see what relevance fingerprints have other than as an intimidation factor.

As with too many law enforcement initiatives in Japan, this hasn’t yet been thought through. Who will have access to this information? Under what circumstances? What reasonable suspicion or evidence will they have to produce in order to gain such access? How will this law be reconciled with the April 1, 2005 privacy law and which law will supercede the other? Will any law enforcement official ever be denied access to private information? If not, the privacy law is irrelevant.

I’m not sure about Winny (though I know that Winny is not the issue here…). It seems as though the cases we hear about are related to government or defense, usually from an employee having personal/classified info on a machine they shouldn’t. Of course, this is actually information worth stealing, whereas if someone put Winny on my home PC and stole copies of my ramblings, I doubt we’d hear about it, since it would be useless for anyone to take in the first place.

There have been cases where corporate information has been stolen, but I think companies might not always reveal publicly that such a thing has happened, since they know it makes them look bad. I think that we just don’t hear about a lot of the private sector leaks.

Anyway, I agree with you that the government should be protecting rather than hording information, and that private companies are in a better position to develop systems to manage such information. I’m not sure where we’re going to find such small-government policies though…

Also, having your fingerprints kept in a physical form, and having them kept in a computer data base are very different.

This is very, very true.