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By CARLOS ISAGANI ZARATE

Representative, Bayan Muna

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THE National Identification System Bill that has just passed the House committee level is not only be violative of the people’s right to privacy but will even pose a serious security implication to our country.

Aside from the fact that this is an invasion of our people’s privacy this measure may have some very serious security implications since the proposed repository of all these data is the  Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) that is now being  controlled by a US-based firm called Unisys.

The Civil Registry System-Information Technology Project Phase 2 (ITCP2) deal between PSA and Unisy will be the second contract for the US-based firm, which also won control of the first phase of the project from the defunct National Statistics Office (NSO.)

Unisys had committed gross violations of the contract provisions for the project’s first phase,  according 2005 and 2015 reports, respectively, of the Commission on Audit (COA).

With Unisys having unbridled control of the civil registry system, the US government can easily have undiminished access to all civil documents of more than 100 million Filipinos.

CRS-ITP 2 was still awarded to Unisys, despite the company’s and glaring contractual violations and failures during the project’s first phase, as reported by the Commission on Audit in 2015.  On Oct. 3, 2016, Unisys executive Juan Ingersol Castro and PSA chief Dr. Lisa Grace Bersales signed the concession agreement for Phase 2 of the Civil Registry System-Information Technology project (CRS-ITP 2), under the Public-Private Partnership (PPP) program.

We raise the possibility that having foreign companies Unisys and PriceWaterhouseCoopers (who shall supervise the project) control the country’s civil registry system would permit them to collect and retrieve stockpile of information about Filipino citizens and share the same with their other clients, such as various branches of the US armed services and possibly, US intelligence agencies. Unisys is in a rolling contract with the US government for ClearPath defense systems that support US Air Force logistics and operations, such as missions in Syria.

What is more alarming is that PSA could not even disclose safeguarding measures to monitor how troves of information would be kept and managed by these foreign companies. Legislators should oppose the national ID system and to look into the Unisys issue and move for the PSA to finally take over the operations of the country’s civil registry system.

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