Discussion/Proposal: Major Overhaul to Citizenship System

The Magisterium
1

Resident rights? Scared of big data? Regional security? Why can’t we tackle all of those concerns? The secret is that we can! We just need throw out the current citizenship system for something new.

Resident Rights?

It’s impossible. Let’s just get that out there. Residents don’t have rights. So what the solution? A Non-Voting Resident is a unregistered Citizen that may or may not have WA status. Wow. So easy.

Big Data (IP checks) and Regional Security

Legitimately some people have concerns about IP checks. While I believe this is a minority. It can be a valid concern. We already verify by TG (maybe dispatch if Magisters commented on that other discussion but that would be part of this overhaul now) and that takes care of “are you the nation you say you are?”

So let’s eliminate the need to do an IP check as a standard operating procedure by WA Nation Only Voting for Delegate and Referendums. A Voting Resident is a registered voter that has a WA nation anywhere, NationStates. They must still have a puppet in TEP.

Will IP Checks still be used? Yes but the basic one that shows duplicate accounts. Mostly will apply to Magisters. Why? Because you don’t need a WA nation to be part of the Magisterium! So we need to ensure the game is played fairly.

As I was limited in time I will cut this off right here for the discussion to start. But I will say that it would be 3 total classes of citizens. Residents, Non-Voting Citizen and Voting Citizen.

I won’t lie and say this will be a piece of caek as it will effect every branch of government. Something will be improved by this also. A brief idea was the viziers can proscribe but must have a conclave hearing. That sounds pretty cool.

2

Don’t Residents already have rights though? I’m pretty sure we discussed this in length, and is the reason why Article F was so abused.

3

Someone lost their deeta despite having an antivirus (and hasn’t thought beyond antivirus, and thought Protegent yet)… >.>

Anyways, this kind of overhaul would be hard, but our goal is to not disenfranchise the RMBers (they’re disenfranchising themselves but no matter-) sooo uh

maybe we should hide the fact we do ip checks so nobody gets concerned??? idk

4

The fact that you said that here in a public forum means that it’ll be difficult to hide it IMO

5

For some reason I hesitate at suddenly opening barriers like this, mainly in regards to security.

By allowing any resident to do anything in our government, don’t we leave ourselves too vulnerable? This will mean little to no checks on any individual who waltz into government. Not bad for engagement at all, and it’s an interesting system. But given there will be no security checks outside the Magi, this will have to be considered.

IMO, my ideal system would simply be that residents (and just that- residents, not “unregistered voters etc etc”) have full legal rights besides the right to vote and the right to participate in government (excluding Executive staff).

“Citizens” in this system would be nations with a verified WA-nation whom we know are one individual. Only said nations can vote in Referendum and Delegate elections, and they can fully participate in government.

6

I don’t get it. I don’t see what problem this solves. And if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
So from (1) Residents and (2) Citizens, we now go to (1) Residents, (2a) Non-voting Citizens and (2b) Voting Citizens. And this is a simplification how?
We’ll still do IP checks, so there’s no difference. And I don’t see a problem with IP checks and don’t understand why someone would. Your IP address is sent along with everything you do on the internet, because the internet needs to know where to send the information to that you have requested by going online.

So all in all, I do not understand why a change is needed, and how this proposed change would be an improvement.

7

I’ve maybe or even probably misunderstood all this because I’m going through a very heavy work at the moment and my brain isn’t functioning.

But, here’s the thing. It’s been a people’s claim for a long time to make the citizenship processing less of a process: less bureaucracy. I have as motto to lower bureaucracy the most possible, but there’s one thing that can’t be lowered IMO, and that’s essential security as IP checking. It’s essential to prevent any unwanted individuals, may that be voter fraud, banned people, etc. If we check only IPs for the Magi, then we are exposing ourselves.

I know and understand people might have concerns about their IPs, but this matter is regulated by privacy laws worldwide and mods need to keep absolute secrecy about people’s IPs because of it. And, as VW said, there’s many companies that already collect not only our IPs but also any terms we might search or the interests we show in the Internet. Being connected to the world wide web implies showing a good amount of yourself to unknown people. So, if someone’s concerned about that, then I think simply being on the Internet is a bad option for them.

8

I’m not one of those concerned with an IP, but I believe the problem with such a thing was sufficiently described by Lerasi. I think this screenshot encapsulates it:

9

Thing is, TEP is in fact a corporation legally, a nonprofit one, so there might be legal accountability to the whole site

10

I’ll let EM answer this because he will know the whole proceeding, but as president of another real life nonprofit organization, when people join us they need to provide personal identification (we only require an IP here) so we keep on functioning as an active association, and for administering that we have a specific person in charge. It’s private data to which only that person and the president at request have access to, and sharing it in any way outside of that is literal crime, of which the president is in account of as representative. It’s a different country, but privacy law is similar in most countries afaik.

11

— Begin quote from ____

Thing is, TEP is in fact a corporation legally, a nonprofit one, so there might be legal accountability to the whole site

— End quote

But how does a random newbie know that?

And this is probably where the concern stems from, and another thing mentioned by Lerasi. What you said is true and we both know TEP Admin is pretty strict with IP stuff regardless, but there isn’t a way for a newbie to know. It’s easy to assume that NS as a game or Facebook as a social site will deal with IPs appropriately. It’s less easy to assume the same for a group within such a site.

Anyways, as AMOM pointed out on Discord, WA tends to be a better security check than IP as NS mods are thought to use methods beyond IP to determine who is WA or not, whilst IPs can be fooled by VPNs.

12

To answer the the nonprofit end and the rest later. Legally 99.999% is covered under Tapatalk TOU, Privacy, EULA and SOLA. The links at the bottom of the forum.

It’s impossible to hide an IP from a forum staff member. But we could nearly eliminate the process and still have the same level of security.

13

I don’t care if TEP is an actual nonprofit organsation or not. It should not matter. Anyone who enters “forum.theeastpacific.com” in their browser bar and hits enter, also sends their IP-address to that domain. There is nothing special to it. Your IP-address is just a bunch of numbers, kinda like a telephone number. It doesn’t give your house address, it doesn’t contain your phone number, it does not contain your google, facebook, or XXX account, nor your bank account number, nor your social security number, etc. etc.
If you don’t want anyone to know your IP address, then never open your browser, never open an app, never write or check your e-mail, in fact never power on your mobile phone, your tablet or your computer or anything connected to the internet.

— Begin quote from ____

Anyways, as AMOM pointed out on Discord, WA tends to be a better security check than IP as NS mods are thought to use methods beyond IP to determine who is WA or not, whilst IPs can be fooled by VPNs.

— End quote

I don’t believe that this is true. NS mods cannot have other means that (A) the IP address and (B) the email address needed for confirmation. The only “additional” (between brackets because you can argue if it is actually additional) is that by clicking the link in the confirmation email they could verify if the email also indeed comes from the same IP address. (I don’t know if they check that at all, and if so, how they proceed when the email’s IP differs from the user’s IP.
And the same goes for TapaTalk (and thus: our Forum). For a Tapatalk account you have to supply an email address, and as said before, when visiting the Forum your IP address is also transmitted.

With regard to the VPNs mentioned. The Citizenship Application should not be made from a public computer and not via a proxy/VPN. This is a requirement to make sure that every Citizen is indeed just one person. All other posts can be made using a VPN, but we need a way to make sure that we don’t have multiple Citizens who are actually just one person in reality.

I am a great proponent of privacy but this takes it too far. This ‘problem’ is overly exaggerated in my opinion.

[hr]
But I thought this was about an overhaul to the Citizenship System. However, that’s what I’m missing in this discussion.

14

Making every resident a citizen by default is a security flaw and granting WA residents voting rights is open to abuse. Anyone Conclave banned would be able to come back and influence votes by creating a puppet with WA. I am deeply conerned about that.

If you want more resident rights then I would love to see ideas but I believe that it alone doesn’t merit an overhaul of the citizenship process. I agree with VW that privacy concerns are overblown.

I still don’t understand what problem we’re trying to solve. If we don’t have a problem to solve then how are we trying to help TEP? And what brought this to our collective attentions now rather than a month ago or a month later?

15

— Begin quote from ____

Don’t Residents already have rights though? I’m pretty sure we discussed this in length, and is the reason why Article F was so abused.

— End quote

They do but the discussion never seems unfinished and always comes up again that we should do more.

16

— Begin quote from ____

Someone lost their deeta despite having an antivirus (and hasn’t thought beyond antivirus, and thought Protegent yet)… >.>

Anyways, this kind of overhaul would be hard, but our goal is to not disenfranchise the RMBers (they’re disenfranchising themselves but no matter-) sooo uh

maybe we should hide the fact we do ip checks so nobody gets concerned??? idk

— End quote

Hard? I don’t think so. Improving the system should always be welcomed with open arms.

17

— Begin quote from ____

For some reason I hesitate at suddenly opening barriers like this, mainly in regards to security.

By allowing any resident to do anything in our government, don’t we leave ourselves too vulnerable? This will mean little to no checks on any individual who waltz into government. Not bad for engagement at all, and it’s an interesting system. But given there will be no security checks outside the Magi, this will have to be considered.

IMO, my ideal system would simply be that residents (and just that- residents, not “unregistered voters etc etc”) have full legal rights besides the right to vote and the right to participate in government (excluding Executive staff).

“Citizens” in this system would be nations with a verified WA-nation whom we know are one individual. Only said nations can vote in Referendum and Delegate elections, and they can fully participate in government.

— End quote

Right now it’s a wall. Now we’re adding a boarder crossing.

Don’t we do that right now with the [resident] executive staffers? You still need to put in an application. You still need to have a nation in TEP. You just can’t vote for the Delegate Elections and Referendums. Could even have restrictions on how high up they can go on the leadership totem pole. Anything is possible with a new system.

Sure I’m throwing out terminology that is as generic as possible with terms we know for the purpose of making it easier to explain. The term “Resident” would preferably be eliminated. In my view it be as equal as possible on the surface and simply calling everyone one singular term – Citizens – is the best possible solution. We can further define who can vote without having exactly specific roles.

18

— Begin quote from ____

I don’t get it. I don’t see what problem this solves. And if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
So from (1) Residents and (2) Citizens, we now go to (1) Residents, (2a) Non-voting Citizens and (2b) Voting Citizens. And this is a simplification how?
We’ll still do IP checks, so there’s no difference. And I don’t see a problem with IP checks and don’t understand why someone would. Your IP address is sent along with everything you do on the internet, because the internet needs to know where to send the information to that you have requested by going online.

So all in all, I do not understand why a change is needed, and how this proposed change would be an improvement.

— End quote

If it works but sucks… we should keep it?

So we could go from Residents and Citizens to only Citizens. Depending on your WA status would determine if you can vote in Delegate Elections and Referendums. With WA verification it would then eliminate the need to do IP checks for anyone with a WA nation (as they would need to TG us from that nation). Why would we need to do an IP check for someone that is in the WA? Let the NS Mods handle that. You go from WA to Ejected from the WA due to rule violations then we should proscribe that nation IMO. I changed my opinion.

19

— Begin quote from ____

I’ve maybe or even probably misunderstood all this because I’m going through a very heavy work at the moment and my brain isn’t functioning.

But, here’s the thing. It’s been a people’s claim for a long time to make the citizenship processing less of a process: less bureaucracy. I have as motto to lower bureaucracy the most possible, but there’s one thing that can’t be lowered IMO, and that’s essential security as IP checking. It’s essential to prevent any unwanted individuals, may that be voter fraud, banned people, etc. If we check only IPs for the Magi, then we are exposing ourselves.

I know and understand people might have concerns about their IPs, but this matter is regulated by privacy laws worldwide and mods need to keep absolute secrecy about people’s IPs because of it. And, as VW said, there’s many companies that already collect not only our IPs but also any terms we might search or the interests we show in the Internet. Being connected to the world wide web implies showing a good amount of yourself to unknown people. So, if someone’s concerned about that, then I think simply being on the Internet is a bad option for them.

— End quote

That argument is huge multinational corporations vs a hole in the wall forum. I totally get it. Does it stop me personally? No. Does it stop some people? Yeah. But to go back to the start of your conversation and to tag [mention]vw53a[/mention] this is something I think is very important. Processing time for “voter registration” (Citizenship Thread) would be cut down in time.

20

— Begin quote from ____

I don’t care if TEP is an actual nonprofit organsation or not. It should not matter. Anyone who enters “forum.theeastpacific.com” in their browser bar and hits enter, also sends their IP-address to that domain. There is nothing special to it. Your IP-address is just a bunch of numbers, kinda like a telephone number. It doesn’t give your house address, it doesn’t contain your phone number, it does not contain your google, facebook, or XXX account, nor your bank account number, nor your social security number, etc. etc.
If you don’t want anyone to know your IP address, then never open your browser, never open an app, never write or check your e-mail, in fact never power on your mobile phone, your tablet or your computer or anything connected to the internet.

— Begin quote from ____

Anyways, as AMOM pointed out on Discord, WA tends to be a better security check than IP as NS mods are thought to use methods beyond IP to determine who is WA or not, whilst IPs can be fooled by VPNs.

— End quote

I don’t believe that this is true. NS mods cannot have other means that (A) the IP address and (B) the email address needed for confirmation. The only “additional” (between brackets because you can argue if it is actually additional) is that by clicking the link in the confirmation email they could verify if the email also indeed comes from the same IP address. (I don’t know if they check that at all, and if so, how they proceed when the email’s IP differs from the user’s IP.
And the same goes for TapaTalk (and thus: our Forum). For a Tapatalk account you have to supply an email address, and as said before, when visiting the Forum your IP address is also transmitted.

With regard to the VPNs mentioned. The Citizenship Application should not be made from a public computer and not via a proxy/VPN. This is a requirement to make sure that every Citizen is indeed just one person. All other posts can be made using a VPN, but we need a way to make sure that we don’t have multiple Citizens who are actually just one person in reality.

I am a great proponent of privacy but this takes it too far. This ‘problem’ is overly exaggerated in my opinion.

[hr]
But I thought this was about an overhaul to the Citizenship System. However, that’s what I’m missing in this discussion.

— End quote

NS will never tell but it likely is something related to IPs and people get ejected all the time because they are violating NS game rules. They accepted that when they joined. I said we should proscribe those nations that do get the kick above. Thinking on it – no bar them from voting – no WA = no vote.