TALLINN, ESTONIA—An Egyptian government official says that his country is hoping to work with Estonia to release one of the largest number of deployed digital ID cards in the world for the country's 85 million people.

Sherif Hashem, a senior advisor to the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, told Ars on Wednesday that representatives from his ministry as well as the Egyptian embassy in Helsinki met with Estonian officials this week to begin a possible collaboration with the North African country.

Hashem added that in a post-Mubarak Egypt, with many tech-savvy younger Egyptians pushing for change, and with a mobile penetration rate of over 100 percent, the time is right to modernize Egypt’s government services.

“In a country with a revolution, we are a country short on resources,” he said on the sidelines of the International Conference on Cyber Conflict currently underway this week in Estonia. “The insistence on keeping the paper-based transactions is unjustifiable.”

Currently, he said, data on the existing ID card must frequently be re-entered manually into a computer when people deal with government agencies, schools, hospitals, businesses, and banks. Hashem hopes that by standardizing a digital ID card, Egyptians will be able to interact with the government in a much more efficient manner, much like Estonians have already been doing for over a decade.

Hashem added that this month, his colleagues would be presenting their findings to Mohamed Salem, the Minister of Communications and Information Technology. However, ultimately the decision would rest with the incoming Egyptian prime minister—the country is set to hold a runoff election later this month.

“We've proposed this five years ago, but we now have a clear case,” Hashem said. “When we discussed this before [with our government], they said they don't see it in Europe or United States.”

Be patient, advisor suggests

Hashem noted that all Egyptians born since 1900 have digital birth records at the Civil Service Organization, and that this information can already be accessed in a limited form on Egypt’s current barcode-enabled national identity cards.

The cards became a source of controversy in the 1990s and 2000s, since they also store a stated religion value; for a time, one's religion could only be listed as Muslim, Jewish, or Christian. Since a 2008 court ruling, Egyptians citizens can decline to state a religion and have that value represented as a dash instead, a move that was applauded by Baha’i Egyptians.

Hashem cautioned that full deployment of the new digital ID cards would take time to spread across Egypt, but he was optimistic, calling it a “very important project.”

“The point is that in Estonia it took 12 years [to reach all 1.3 million Estonians],” he said. “One of the enemies we have is that people expect results immediately.”

UPDATE: Adept Ars readers have pointed out that larger biometric ID card deployments are currently underway in Indonesia (Google Translate) and India, which, when complete, would be larger than Egypt's.

Listing image by Baha'i World News Service