So for the last few months we’ve been saying “we need travelers.” And now that we’re about to get travelers, people are getting worried.
The European Union’s system of digital COVID-19 travel certificates is due to come into force on Thursday, but airports group ACI and airlines representative bodies A4E, IATA and ERA warned in a letter to EU national leaders of a “worrying patchwork of approaches” across the continent.
Of course, we’ve known for some time that the EU Digital COVID Certificates are being implemented on a national basis. But now the airport and airline industries are warning that checking the certificates can be dizzying.
The letter said the only way to avoid huge queues and delays during the peak summer season was to implement a system whereby both the vaccination certificate and passenger locator forms are processed remotely before the passenger arrives at the airport.
Checks must only take place in the country of departure and not on arrival and national governments should manage the health data and provide equipment to check the QR codes, the letter said.
So there will be some confusion on Thursday. But will the confusion outweigh the benefits of increased travel?
Back in 2017, when you referred to a tech CEO going to a spaceship, you thought of Apple CEO Tim Cook staying on this planet and going to Apple Park, Apple’s new building in Cupertino. One of Steve Jobs’ last great accomplishments, Apple Park was a $5 billion corporate headquarters that provided Apple employees with an insanely great place to work.
Of course, not everybody went to an office to work in 2017. In fact, Silicon Valley had discussed this in 2013 when Yahoo’s then-CEO Marissa Mayer saw all of the Yahoo employees working from home and deemed it, um, essential that Yahoo employees work in the office whenever possible to help build Yahoo’s culture.
In February 2019, remote culture advocate Sarah Dixon looked back at the Yahoo episode. Among other things, Dixon stated:
…there’s no doubt that Mayer’s announcement did some damage to the acceptance of remote working. If you’ve tried to persuade a reluctant boss to let you work from home, they may have even used Yahoo! as the reason they don’t think it’s a great idea.
Ah, way back in 2019. I remember those days.
A little over a year later, attitudes toward remote working changed in ways that even Sarah Dixon couldn’t have imagined. In March, Dixon’s coworker Gabriela Molina was providing a step-by-step guide to working remotely during COVID-19.
Due to COVID-19 restrictions, a lot of us were forced to work from home, whether our companies liked it or not. Security systems were updated. Videoconferencing systems installed on our computers were used much more frequently. Additional collaboration tools were adopted.
But now, at least in the United States, COVID-19 is receding. More and more people are theoretically able to go work. Yet many people continue to work from home today, including employees of some major tech companies.
Apple, however, would like its employees back in the spaceship three days a week (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday). After all, Apple spent $5 billion on the thing; might as well get some use from it.
But some Apple employees aren’t so eager to return to the practices of old.
…we would like to take the opportunity to communicate a growing concern among our colleagues. That Apple’s remote/location-flexible work policy, and the communication around it, have already forced some of our colleagues to quit. Without the inclusivity that flexibility brings, many of us feel we have to choose between either a combination of our families, our well-being, and being empowered to do our best work, or being a part of Apple. This is a decision none of us take lightly, and a decision many would prefer not to have to make.
The letter from the Apple employees uses many terms such as “flexibility,” “empowered,” “unconstrained,” and “tearing down cross-functional communication barriers.” The employees claim that remote work allowed them to do their best work ever…and they don’t want to go back.
It’s hard to predict how all of this will play out for Apple and other companies. On the one hand, many companies are taking advantage of distributed working models. Ever since August, my consultancy Bredemarket has conducted ALL of its business without setting foot inside any of my clients’ offices. Actually, my clients themselves aren’t setting foot in their own offices; for one of my clients, I frequently deal with two employees who live several states away from their employer’s office.
On the other hand, out of sight, out of mind. Unless your corporate culture has a habit of firing up Zoom or Facetime at any moment to talk to someone, interactions with remote workers are going to be more limited than they were if you were down the hall from each other.
My perspective on this is admittedly unusual. From 2017 to 2020, my corporate supervisor was on the other end of the country from me. Over the nearly three years that I reported to him, I probably saw him in person less than a dozen times. So I sort of had an experience with remote work before COVID sent all of us home in March 2020, and things worked out well.
But how are you going to get a company with hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue, who paid more to build their corporate headquarters than many companies make in a year, to change its way of doing things and “think different”?
If you didn’t already hear this on my recent podcast (microcast?) episode, Pavlina Navratilova of IDEMIA discussed three vaccination certificate standards that affect Europeans. One of these is the Digital Green Certificate, also known as the EU Green Pass.
In this post I’ll explain what the Digital Green Certificate is, why some people think this health measure is essential to the continuance of civilization, and why some people think it destroys civilization as we know it.
Or something like that.
What is the Digital Green Certificate?
First, a clarification. The word “green” in Digital Green Certificate does not refer to saving the whales. It refers to “green means go” in terms of COVID-19. Specifically, a Digital Green Certificate is a digital proof that a person has either
been vaccinated against COVID-19
received a negative test result or
recovered from COVID-19
The certificate will also be available in paper format for us old-school types, but the digital version is what interests me.
The certificate will not be issued by the EU itself, but by entities within each EU country such as health authorities or individual hospitals. The certificate will be in a person’s national language and in English (for those who have forgotten, English is no longer a national language within the European Union due to Brexit).
Each certificate will contain a QR code to ensure authenticity, and these QR codes will be tracked at the EU level.
Each issuing body (e.g. a hospital, a test centre, a health authority) has its own digital signature key. All of these are stored in a secure database in each country.
The European Commission will build a gateway. Through this gateway, all certificate signatures can be verified across the EU. The personal data encoded in the certificate does not pass through the gateway, as this is not necessary to verify the digital signature. The Commission will also help Member States to develop a software that authorities can use to check the QR codes.
The idea is that any EU citizen can provide national proof of vaccination, negative test, or recovery from COVID and that this national proof will be accepted in any other EU country, subject to the specific rules of that country.
On the other hand, the EU does not want to restrict freedom of movement within the EU.
The Digital Green Certificate should facilitate free movement inside the EU. It will not be a pre-condition to free movement, which is a fundamental right in the EU.
Like anything COVID-related, there are entities that support the Digital Green Certificate, and entities that oppose it.
One group of entities that supports the Digital Green Certificate is the European airline industry. Because of the adverse economic effects of COVID travel restrictions, the airline industry not only wants Digital Green Certificates, but it wants them in time for the summer travel season. Here’s an excerpt from a statement from Airlines for Europe (A4E):
A4E welcomed today’s decision by the European Parliament to fast-track the European Commission’s Digital Green Certificates proposal using an Urgent Procedure. A positive decision by the European Council later today would set in motion a vote on the certificates by the end of April, facilitating the European Commission’s plan to have the certificates operational by June….
“With vaccination programmes underway, I am even more confident travel will be possible this summer. Airlines are ready to re-connect Europe and support economic recovery. I look forward to working with A4E members and policy leaders on this critical work ahead”, (A4E Chairman John) Lundgren added.
The “get people on flights” message is loud and clear.
And (most importantly!) the general concept is supported by Vince, who though he is no longer in the EU (did I mention Brexit?), wrote this back in April:
And then there is the view of the European Data Protection Board (EDPB) and the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS). They support the idea, but with some qualifications:
Andrea Jelinek, Chair of the EDPB, said: “A Digital Green Certificate that is accepted in all Member States can be a major step forward in re-starting travel across the EU. Any measure adopted at national or EU level that involves processing of personal data must respect the general principles of effectiveness, necessity and proportionality. Therefore, the EDPB and the EDPS recommend that any further use of the Digital Green Certificate by the Member States must have an appropriate legal basis in the Member States and all the necessary safeguards must be in place.”
Wojciech Wiewiórowski, EDPS, said: It must be made clear that the Proposal does not allow for – and must not lead to – the creation of any sort of central database of personal data at EU level. In addition, it must be ensured that personal data is not processed any longer than what is strictly necessary and that access to and use of this data is not permitted once the pandemic has ended. I have always stressed that measures taken in the fight against COVID-19 are temporary and it is our duty to ensure that they are not here to stay after the crisis.”
This raises an interesting point that was also raised (after I left) in the ID4Africa webinar: what will happen to the Digital Green Certificate in the long term? The attendees were polled on this question.
Obviously the EDPB and EDPS prefer option 3, in which the Digital Green Certificate disappears once the pandemic is over.
Entities opposing the Digital Green Certificate
But not everyone believes that the Digital Green Certificate is a wonderful thing. Take the attitude of the the Dutch section of the International Commission of Jurists (NJCM), as expressed in a liberties.eu post.
As NJCM explains in a letter to the European Parliament, the EU has set up a system and infrastructure for Green Certificates, but only partially regulates the use of these Green Certificates. This leaves it up to member states to make their use mandatory, or to use Green Certificates in many more areas than just border control. Such mandatory use of Green Certificates may limit the freedom of movement, the right to not be discriminated against, the right to privacy, the right to data protection and, indirectly, the right to the integrity of the person (since the ability to travel is made conditional on undergoing testing or vaccination).
While the UK is (as I may have previously mentioned) outside of the EU, that country’s National Museum Directors’ Council has weighed in on the concept of vaccination certificates in general. Unlike airlines that believe that such certificates will encourage travel, the museum directors think these certificates will actually restrain it.
In the UK, where a government consultation on vaccine passports has proved controversial, a coalition of leading museum directors has spoken out against their potential use in museums. Such a scheme “sits at odds with the public mission and values of museums”, the National Museum Directors’ Council said, warning that it would constitute “an inappropriate form of exclusion and discrimination”.
And, to be truthful, the existence of any type of vaccine certificate allows a distinction between those who are (believed to be) COVID-free and those who are not. You can use the emotionally-charged word “discrimination” or the less-charged “distinction,” but either way you’re dividing people into two groups.
The only way to remove such a distinction is to automatically assume that everyone has COVID. That could close the museums…
…but at least everyone will be treated equally without discrimination. So that’s a good thing…I guess…
Since I’ve discussed vaccination certificates in the past (most recently here), I thought I should alert you of an event later this week that covers the topic.
Parts 1 & 2 of our trilogy on Vaccination Certificates & Identity Management have set the pace for discussions on policy deliberations and innovative solutions in the development of COVID verifiable credentials. Both events continue to be praised as being our best series yet and… there’s still more to come!
Join your host, Dr. Joseph Atick, for a series finale, tour de force coverage on CV19 credentials where he shifts gears with a league of domain experts in a live collaboration searching for a framework for harmonizing national, regional and international efforts in this domain.
The webinar will take place on Thursday, May 6, from 12:30-14:30 GMT (or 14:30-16:30 CEST). That translates to 5:30 am in my timezone, but it looks like there will be a replay if I oversleep.
I admit to a bit of frustration. For years, some states resisted REAL ID because of federalism concerns. (When MorphoTrak was briefly trying to win driver’s license contracts by competing against our sibling MorphoTrust, I remember one state RFP that explicitly stated that the state would NOT comply with the REAL ID mandate.)
Finally, after hemming and hawing, all of the states agreed to become REAL ID compliant (15 years after the original mandate). Then, as people rushed to get REAL IDs, #covid19 hit and the driver’s license offices closed.
The offices are now open, but some people STILL haven’t gotten REAL ID.
Prediction: if the deadline is extended to 2022, significant numbers of people won’t have REAL IDs by 2022.
Well, I will never get the chance to see if my prediction was accurate, because in the end, the REAL ID deadline was NOT extended to 2022.
It was extended to 2023, according to sources. (As I write this, the DHS website has not yet been updated.)
The Department of Homeland Security will delay the requirement for air travelers to have a Real ID-compliant form of identification, pushing it back 19 months, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Tuesday.
The deadline was supposed to be Oct. 1, but it’s now being postponed until May 3, 2023.
Here’s the rationale that Secretary Mayorkas provided.
“Extending the Real ID full enforcement deadline will give states needed time to reopen their driver’s licensing operations and ensure their residents can obtain a Real ID-compliant license or identification card.”
Of course, since may people object to REAL ID on principle, it could be extended again and again for ANOTHER fifteen-plus years and people STILL won’t get it.
I’ve gone on ad nauseum about the plethora of vaccine certificate options that are being developed by public and private entities.
Wouldn’t it be nice if all of these different options were able to talk to each other, so that my existing blue certificate would talk to health systems that require the orange certificate or the red certificate?
The Global Information for Public Health Transformation (GIPHT) initiative of the Learning Health Community has collaborated with CDISC to develop a minimum set of key data elements for documenting vaccinations. The goal of the collaboration is to achieve multinational agreement around one global core data standard that will enable the success of vaccine credentialing applications and secure sharing of essential information for uses such as safe travel.
The organizations have published a draft standard for public review. This draft attempts to define the minimum key data elements, and draws upon the work of several different organizations.
The set of common data elements proposed has been based upon recommendations made available by the European eHealth Network as referenced by the European Commission in announcing their plans for a Green Certificate to facilitate travel by Europeans among EU countries. This set of common data elements has also been informed through U.S. CDC. The elements have been aligned with standards from HL7, CDISC and ISO (standards development organizations), where applicable.
Of course, we have to ask the question: why listen to GIPHT and CDISC? Well, these two organizations claim a previous success, as noted in their press release.
“CDISC developed and published a COVID-19 data standard in less than a month by leveraging existing global clinical research standards, including those for vaccines, virology and Ebola,” stated Rhonda Facile, Vice President of Partnerships and Development, CDISC.
However, there is one significant difference between exchanging COVID-19 data and exchanging vaccine certificate data. The former is an exchange of medical data which is of primary interest to health professionals. The latter has much greater ramifications, since it can potentially affect border crossings, travel in general, and access to facilities such as casinos, sports stadiums, and concert venues.
Is it even possible to develop a vaccine certificate interoperability standard that satisfies the foreign affairs and transportation ministries of multiple countries, the major airlines and airports, the casino operators, the major sports leagues, AND Taylor Swift?
LOS ANGELES – MARCH 14: Guest arrives for the 2019 iHeartRadio Music Awards on March 14, 2019 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Glenn Francis/Pacific Pro Digital Photography). By Toglenn (Glenn Francis) – This file has been extracted from another file: Taylor Swift 2 – 2019 by Glenn Francis.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81523364
(We know Ms. Swift’s views on facial recognition, but as far as I know she has not expressed her views on vaccine certificates.)
And if it is possible, will all of these parties agree that GIPHT and CDISC are the ones to develop the standard?
This is a follow-up to my April 9 post, with a slight correction. I need to stop using the term “health passport,” and should instead use the term “vaccine certificate.” So starting now I’m doing that. Although I still think passports are cool, even if vaccine certificates aren’t passports.
It’s also a follow-up to my February 16 post, which noted that there are a whole bunch of health pa- I mean vaccine certificates that are being marketed by various companies and organizations.
Obviously it takes a while to solve such issues, so you can’t expect that all of this would be resolved by April.
And you’re right.
As Chris Burt of FindBiometrics recently noted, the whole vaccine certificate issue was recently discussed by a panel at an ID4Africa webinar. Now even if you haven’t heard of the organization ID4Africa, you can reasonably conclude that the organization is in favor of…IDs for Africa.
And even they are a bit skittish about vaccine passports, at least for now.
Questions around how these digital health certificates should work, where and whether they should be used, and what can be done to mitigate the risks associated with them remain, and were explored by an international panel of experts representing major global organizations convened by ID4Africa. They found that too much remains unknown to inform final decisions…
The panel warned against rushing headlong into adoption of vaccine certificates without a better understanding of what they were, how they would work, and how individual information would be protected. And there are major questions all over the “how they would work” question, including the long-standing question of how vaccine certificates would be interoperable.
It quickly emerged that while several groups represented are working on similar projects, there are some key differences in goals.
The WHO is building specification which are intended to create digital records not for crossing borders or proving health status to any third party, but merely for continuity of care. Its working group also includes ICAO, IATA, and ISO, each of which have their own applications in mind for digital health credentials.
See the list above.
And even if you just look at the WHO’s project, it’s still not finalized. The present timeframe calls for a version 1.0 of its specification by the end of June, but timelines sometimes slip.
Chris Burt details many other issues in his article, but for purposes of my post, it’s relevant to say that it will be months if not years before we will see any sort of interoperability between vaccine certificates.
I took this picture on the morning of April 5, 2017. I had just flown from Ontario, California to Las Vegas, Nevada to attend the ISC West show for a day, and would fly home that evening.
The idea of gathering thousands of businesspeople together in Las Vegas for a day obviously wasn’t unusual in 2017. While many think of Las Vegas as a playground, a lot of work goes on there also, and Las Vegas has superb facilities to host conventions and trade shows. So superb, in fact, that Oracle announced in late 2019 that it was moving its annual Oracle OpenWorld conference from San Francisco (up the road from Oracle’s headquarters) to Las Vegas.
But then 2020 happened.
One month after Oracle started planning for the Las Vegas debut of Oracle OpenWorld, the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show took place in Las Vegas. Unbeknownst to the 170,000 attendees at that show, they were unknowingly spreading a new illness, COVID-19. They did this by doing things that people always did at trade shows, including standing next to each other, shaking hands, and (in business-appropriate situations) embracing each other.
Of course, the CES attendees didn’t know that they were spreading coronavirus, and wouldn’t know this for a few months until after they had returned home to Santa Clara County, California and to other places all around the world. By the time that CES had been identified as a super spreader event, Las Vegas convention activities were already shutting down. The 2020 version of ISC West had already been postponed from March to July, was then re-postponed from July to October, and would eventually be cancelled entirely. Oracle OpenWorld’s September debut in Las Vegas was similarly cancelled. As other companies cancelled their Las Vegas conferences, the city went into a tailspin. (Anecdotally, one of my in-laws is a Teamster who works trade shows in Las Vegas and was directly affected by this.)
Today, one year after the economies of Las Vegas and other cities shut down, we in the United States are optimistically hoping that we have turned a corner. But it’s possible that we will not completely return to the way things were before 2020.
For example, before attending a convention in Las Vegas in the future, you might need to present a physical or digital “health passport” indicating a negative COVID-19 test and/or a COVID-19 vaccination. While governments may be reluctant to impose such requirements on private businesses, private businesses may choose to impose such requirements on themselves – in part, to reduce liability risk. After all, a convention organizer doesn’t want attendees to get sick at their conventions.
As I noted almost two months ago, there are a number of health passport options that are either available or being developed. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a bad thing for reasons that I noted in February:
But the wealth of health passports IS a problem if you’re a business. Imagine being at an airport gate and asking a traveler for a Clear Health Pass, and getting an angry reply from the traveler that he already has a VeriFLY pass and that the airline is infringing upon the traveler’s First and Second Amendment rights by demanding some other pass.
When I wrote this I wasn’t even thinking about convention attendance. In a worst-case scenario, Jane Conventioneer may need one health pass to board her flight, another health pass to enter her hotel, and a third health pass to get into the convention itself.
I’m sure that many people imagine that standards are developed by a group of reasonable people, sitting in a room, who are pursuing things for the good of the world.
You can stop laughing now.
I wrote this in the context of the then-emerging compression format WebP (we’ll return to WebP itself later). The point that I was making was that something becomes a “standard” by brute force. If a lot of people like something, it’s a standard.
The issue with standards is that they can take years to develop, so standards are adopted after the fact.
Now let’s look at “health passports.” As you may have guessed, these “passports” can be used to enter a country, or a state, or an office building, and are specifically devoted to certifying the health of the passport bearer. If the person meets the health criteria, they can enter the country/state/building. If not, they are prohibited from entry.
In a sense, the concept of a health passport is nothing new. Before entering a country, you are often required to satisfy various health conditions, such as being free of tuberculosis.
The current impetus for health passports, of course, is COVID. When COVID spread across the world a year ago, and governments began shutting down borders between countries, a lot of people at a lot of government agencies and a lot of companies began asking two basic questions:
When reliable COVID tests are developed, how will we know whether someone has successfully passed a COVID test?
When reliable COVID vaccines are developed, how will we know whether someone has successfully been vaccinated against COVID?
These questions, especially the second one, were mostly theoretical a year ago, but the government agencies and the companies needed answers to them as soon as possible. And the governments and the companies weren’t going to wait for the entire world to agree on a plan; they wanted to move ahead THAT DAY.
It’s a year later, and COVID tests are readily available, and COVID vaccines have been developed and approved in various countries. And we’ve made a lot of progress.
Or have we?
As Jim Nash notes in a Biometric Update article, there are several different solutions to the “health passport” issue. Nash lists two of them:
The state of Hawaii is working with Clear, United Airlines, and Delta Airlines on a solution. Initially this only documents testing, but it could be expanded to vaccine documentation.
The Malaysia Aviation Group is working with “local authorities” on its own solution.
Now the wealth of health passport solutions isn’t much of a problem for most consumers, since we’ll probably need one or two health passports at most as this market matures. Maybe a US person might need one or two health passports for domestic travel, and maybe one to get into the office. In extreme conditions, maybe they’ll be required to enter grocery stores, but this is doubtful considering the resistance of American personalities to governments telling us what to do.
But the wealth of health passports IS a problem if you’re a business. Imagine being at an airport gate and asking a traveler for a Clear Health Pass, and getting an angry reply from the traveler that he already has a VeriFLY pass and that the airline is infringing upon the traveler’s First and Second Amendment rights by demanding some other pass.
Eventually there will be enough of a brouhaha over the multitude of incompatible passes. At that time, several efforts will be made to establish THE standard for health passports, or at least for health passport interoperability.
Yes, “several efforts” will be made. Because each vendor will unsurprisingly advance its own passport as the best one for the standard, or perhaps will form alliances with selected other vendors.
Bredemarket 