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January 7, 2006
Pronoun Trouble
Francis Porretto at Eternity Road asks if there should be a national identity card, and a lot of subsidiary questions about why you might want one, and how to control its use. My answers are too big for a comment, as were Mark Alger's. I will not reproduce — or likely even answer — the questions here; you can go to the aforementioned sites to read up so you know what was in my head while I was typing this.
The first question that needs to be asked is what constitutes your identity as relates to the government. There are, as Mark notes, two answers to that. The first is who you actually are, and the second is what you actually are. Who you are, that which separates you from all other entities from the point of view of an outside observer, is really just a set of differentiating characteristics such that no two people share the same set of characteristics, the characteristics do not change (at least over a sufficiently short period of time for the purpose your identity needs to be demonstrated), the characteristics cannot be easily falsified and the characteristics cannot be alienated (transferred to another entity).
The most detailed identity characteristic that we know how to measure is one's DNA, which has sufficient individuality to be useful almost by itself — the odds of a two people sharing a duplicate DNA fingerprint when a complete and un-degraded sample is available is so close to zero as to be not worth worrying about in practical terms. And given a certain period of time in which to examine the samples, two people — even identical twins — can be reliably distinguished with only human error to worry about. The DNA fingerprint is also essentially unchanging over a person's natural life span and is inherently inalienable. But DNA fingerprinting would constitute an unacceptable claim of identity to most people, because who wants to walk around getting poked or otherwise sampled every time you have to demonstrate who you are?
The most meaningless identity characteristic we can measure is one's name — at least if one's name is sufficiently common. Even name and birth date do not work. Nor do name and place of birth, or name and height and weight. But if you pile on enough of these not-very-individual characteristics, you eventually get to something reasonably unique and permanent and non-transferrable. As Mark notes, this is hardly an efficient way to demonstrate identity, and is certainly an intrusive way to do so. Worse, the characteristics are largely falsifiable.
Biometrics other than DNA fingerprinting have different degrees of stability and uniqueness, but all are inalienable. Any document you could carry around is alienable and falsifiable, and thus useful only as a shorthand, rather than as a reliable identifier.
So demonstrating who you are as a unique individual can be quite difficult to do with sufficient reliability and precision and security. As Mark also notes, it's much easier to denote what you are than who you are. What I mean by what you are is really a way of saying what you may do because of some characteristic that attaches to you. For example, a citizen of a certain age may vote in a national election. A holder of a state or Federal identity card may fly on a commercial aircraft or enter a courthouse (most courthouses, at least). But while it is easy to document someone's status in such a way as to determine whether a person may do a thing, it's not easy to do that in a verifiable way. All status is granted by some agency or method. You are a citizen because you were born here, or born to American parents abroad, or naturalized by the appropriate government procedures and rituals. You demonstrate your citizenship by showing a passport, a birth certificate, a State Department certification of natural birth abroad, or a naturalization certificate. As a shorthand for any of these, you can obtain from the Federal government a passport that says that you have somehow proved to the satisfaction of the government that you are a citizen.
But these methods are all inherently alienable and falsifiable, so merely demonstrating what you may do is not very reliable. It may work for you, but may not work to, say, the TSA's standard of reliability. In other words, knowing what you may do without being able to demonstrate who you are, so that it can be verified that you legitimately carry the documents or instruments that demonstrate what you are, is essentially meaningless because it is essentially unreliable.
So to reliably show what you are, you have to have some instrument that ties together who you are and what you are: both sides of the identity question are meaningful. You must authenticate in order to authorize. (This is not true in all cases. For example, your bank does not care who you actually are when you authenticate to their online banking system, only that you are eligible to access a certain account because you have authenticated to the system's satisfaction as an entity with the characteristics appropriate to accessing that account.)
Generally, there are two reliable classes of instruments for this purpose: either a combination of something that you have and something that you know, tied to a centrally-available record of what permissions apply to an entity so authenticated; or something that can be reproduced from your physical presence, tied to a centrally-available record of what permissions apply to an entity so identified. Because centralizing records across so many domains of ownership, control, and purpose is effectively impossible, either multiple identities, each suited to a subset of possible purposes, are required or some portable instrument easily verified (at least to a reasonable accuracy, as with a photograph) is required. The determination of what kind of instrument to use is dependent on technological limitations, but even more so on the consequences of a wrong assignment of identity. (Courts, for example, must have very reliable identities to work with; liquor stores may require much less reliability; the TSA has to have good but not perfect reliability.)
The second question that must be asked is to what extent the government has a right to know your identity. I think that it would be relatively uncontroversial to say that the Federal government has a right to know your identity in so far as you are getting access to something controlled by the Federal government or services from (or serviced by if you are unlucky or deserving enough to have to deal with Federal law enforcement) the Federal government; state governments have a similar right within their own domains of action; one government may or may not take the instrument of another government at face value, and may or may not require the holder of an instrument from another government to undergo further verifications; individual non-governmental organizations have similar rights and abilities within their own domains of ownership or action; and that no one should be able to force you to demonstrate identity except for a court, but anyone may deny you access or services if you fail to demonstrate identity.
Therefore it should be uncontroversial to say that the Federal government can create an instrument of identity and require it to be shown for any benefit, access or service within the Federal government's domain, and any state government or private entity could likewise accept and utilize such an instrument. The reason that this in actuality is controversial is that there are insufficient limits on the ability of Federal, state and local governments as well as private entities in obtaining and utilizing such information.
In particular, the worry that most people (me included) have is this: that the Federal government will create an identity document for people that is inalienable, difficult to falsify and quite accurate at distinguishing individuals; that other governments will require this identity document as pre-requisite to their identity documents (or just use the Federal identity document directly); and that private organizations will similarly use the Federal identity document as their identity document. The practical upshot of this is that, even were the government not to randomly stop people on the street to verify their identity documents, a person is still trapped within their identity: they could never be clear of anything they had done in the past, could never prevent their information from being freely shared among all kinds of organizations without their consent, and that they therefore would have no privacy worthy of the name. What privacy is there when the government could easily determine what shows you watch, and corporations could easily determine your income and benefits?
So in order for such a scheme to be workable, there is a layer of laws that must be put in place. Specifically, it must be possible to refuse to use your Federal identity as an identity for any other government or organization (and vice versa), requiring other organizations to independently establish your identity; it must be possible to prevent the transfer or sharing of information tied to your identity except in very limited circumstances (with a court order, for example); and it must be possible to opt out of the system entirely, though the price of that may be forfeiture of services to which you are otherwise entitled.
Without that, it will be impossible to obtain public acceptance of a universal government-issued identity.
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