A leaked memo revealed that David Blunkett is pushing the Cabinet to back national identity cards for everyone aged 16 and over, carrying biometric information, such as fingerprints, to allow police to confirm the holder’s identity. Under Mr Blunkett’s scheme, the card will cost £39 for most people between the ages of 17 and 75.
An opinion piece about the identity cards news in Telegraph is yet again explaining what is wrong with Blunkett’s argument. Basically, each of the claims made by the Home Secretary in support of his pet scheme is wrong.
- First, Mr Blunkett says that there is strong public support for the idea. In fact, the Home Office’s recent consultation exercise focused on the concept of an entitlement card, a very different prospect. (Also, according to this Out-law article, the goverment has admited that the public opposes the ID card scheme.)
- The Home Secretary goes on to argue ID cards will help fight crime. This is one of those assertions that is forever being made, but hardly ever substantiated… The public mood is said to have changed since September 11, 2001, but no one has explained – or even seriously tried to explain – how ID cards would have thwarted those bombers, many of whom died in possession of forged papers.
- Nor, by the way, are ID cards a solution to illegal immigration. The root of the asylum problem is not that we cannot find clandestine entrants, but that we never enforce their deportation.
- More faulty still is Mr Blunkett’s central proposition, as set out in a letter to his Cabinet colleagues: “The argument that identity cards will inhibit our freedom is wrong. We are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; if we are able to access the services we are entitled to; and if our community is better protected from terrorists.” In an appendix to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell describes how a concept can be traduced if the words used to express it lose their meaning. The example he gives, uncannily, is the word “free”. Now here is Mr Blunkett using “freedom” to mean more state control.
- Any doubts as to the wisdom of the scheme must surely be removed by the Home Secretary’s final argument in its favour: that we are “out of kilter with Europe”. Indeed we are, thank heaven. Policemen in Britain are seen as citizens in uniform, not agents of the government.
The most worrying is Blunkett’s spin on the concept of freedom. In his view we are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; if we are able to access the services we are entitled to; and if our community is better protected from terrorists. This is vaguely based on the distinction between negative and positive liberty, which are not merely two distinct kinds of liberty; they can be seen as rival, incompatible interpretations of a single political ideal.
Negative liberty is the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints. One has negative liberty to the extent that actions are available to one in this negative sense. Positive liberty is the possibility of acting – or the fact of acting – in such a way as to take control of one’s life and realize one’s fundamental purposes. While negative liberty is usually attributed to individual agents, positive liberty is sometimes attributed to collectivities, or to individuals considered primarily as members of given collectivities.
Blunkett and his New Labour chums are classic and rather unexceptional anti-liberals. (I use the term liberal in its original meaning, based on negative definition of liberty and claiming that in order to protect individual liberty one should place strong limitations on the activities of the state.) In Blunkett’s mind, the pursuit of liberty (whether of the individual or of the collectivity) requires state intervention, which, by definition, is not contradictory with limitations on personal freedom. As a result, the protests of civil liberties groups do not make sense to him.
The concept of freedom as being unprevented from doing whatever one might desire to do is alien to him. According to Isaiah Berlin the defender of positive freedom will take an additional step that consists in conceiving of the self as wider than the individual and as represented by an organic social whole – “a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the living and the dead and the yet unborn”. The true interests of the individual are to be identified with the interests of this whole, and individuals can and should be coerced into fulfilling these interests, for they would not resist coercion if they were as rational and wise as their coercers.
I will not grant Blunkett’s social and political philosophy such level of ‘sophistication’. I will say that his are the simple and toxic insticts of a collectivist and a statist and that those protesting policies based on them will have their words muffled by the Big Blunkett.
Cross-posted from White Rose
we are “out of kilter with Europe”
How out of kilter? They haven’t managed to institute a Europe-wide ID card yet, have they? Is it still country-by-country, and what sort of biometrics are we talking?
It will not be popular,but it is what I have thought for some time.
This is what you get when you make a blind man one of the 2 or 3 most powerful in the land.Our ancestors would think us mad and they would be right.
We are strengthened in our liberty if our identity is protected from theft; – Big Blunkett
I would argue that we are strengthened in our liberty if our property is protected from theft. Yet year on year it seems that it is less and less well protected by the state who insist that it is best placed to do it.
I would also argue that it is more of a problem than having our identities stolen as I have yet to have a friend or collegue complain to me of such a theft.
Big Blunkett is suffering from a case of prioritisationitis with an added dose of nothidinghisrealintentverywellococcus.
I don’t care – I’m not carrying one of these cards. Sod Blunkett, sod the lot of em.
Nothing will be improved as a result of these cards. I watched a telly documentary a few months ago about driving licences. If ID cards are as easy to forge as those, the whole thing will be a total farce.
Maybe we Brits have turned into sheep, but I have a sneaking feeling that these could be a hate symbol for New Labour and hasten this government’s removal from office. Here’s hoping.
BTW, whenever I need a picture of Blunkett I use this one:
Gormless.
I wouldn’t be as screamingly angry about this if the bloody card did anything, but it doesn’t. We lose a chunk of liberty, it costs us money and the card is of neither use nor ornament.
I wait with interest to see the ground swell of civil disobeydiance I hope this engengers, as it stands at the moment I’m planning to fork out good money for one of these.
Given the rather “fluffy” remit of these cards, wouldn’t it be easier to say that it is compulsory for all people over 16 to hold a passport? At least that would be of some use.
Insert NOT PLANNING into the obvious bit of the above. I do not intend to carry one.
I am not entirely happy with the notion that ID cards are a product of a governmental drive for control over our lives. There is something ever so slightly wild-eyed and ideologically unreasonable about it.
Only in a perfectly beautiful world would anonymity be the just estate of every free-born man, if he so chose. Naturally, that perfection would exclude ill-intent, and perfect mores would engender perfect faith and trust among men. But this is not the world that we know today nor will it ever be so. And given that knowledge is indeed a medium of state control – and the state cannot simply put away such advantages (and temptation) that it offers – a balance in the power and knowledge of the state must be found somewhere along the line between anonymity and absolute disclosure.
The question, therefore, is where? What degree of faith and trust can we have in our fellow man? At some point the answer comes back: enough to justify an effective identity card, with all the implications that entails. At some point – an extreme one, I admit – the answer comes back an identity card with DNA profile.
There are easily imaginable circumstances of such extremity. We have not reached them yet, of course not. But we may be passing beyond that point where perfect anonymity is a practical aspiration, even if its more committed adherents haven’t yet realised it. I don’t that that I would baulk too much at the introduction of an ID that works.
Guessed: but, up until now, we’ve had an expectation of reasonable anonymity. What has changed? Other than the fact that government (among others) has new and amazing technologies for tying together many disparate bits of personal information with minimal effort.
As other have pointed out, an ID wouldn’t have prevented September 11. The authorities don’t use the information they have now to deport illegal aliens. And anything short of a subdermal transmitter is going to be possible to forge.
What exactly do you see being gained?
Guessed: For me its nothing to do with anonymity. Glancing in my wallet and at my mobile, there are lots of ways for big brother to track me. That’s generally a good thing as actually making sense of that value of data is a task way beyond us at the moment.
That is irrevelent.
I have no problem proving who I am. If I am stopped in my car and have to prove that I am legal to drive in a road worthy and insured car, then no problem – I’m driving a tonne of metal at high speeds, controls are sensible and needed.
I do not accept that in the course of my life, however, a police officer can ask me to produce government documentation which has no other use than to say I am myself. Its pointless. It doesn’t prove anything.
If they want to prove that sort of thing, make it compulsory to have a passport, or at least a document that has some other practical use. Paying good money for something which won’t work, doesn’t meet the stated objections and removes the free right to move without challenge is not acceptable.
Socialism argues that someone or some structure should act in loco parentis for the great mass of men. It parasitizes the notions of individual freedom and liberty while at the same time deriding them, as the following collectivist points out:
CHAPTER II.
LABOR, SKILL AND CAPITAL.
“Nothing written on the subject of slavery from the time of Aristotle, is worth reading, until the days of the modern Socialists.
Nobody, treating of it, thought it worth while to enquire from history and statistics, whether the physical and moral condition of emancipated serfs or slaves had been improved or rendered worse by emancipation. None would condescend to compare the evils of domestic slavery with the evils of liberty without property. It entered no one’s head to conceive a doubt as to the actual freedom of the emancipated. The relations of capital and labor, of the property-holders to the non-property-holders, were things about which no one had thought or written. It never occurred to either the enemies or the apologists for slavery, that if no one would employ the free laborer, his condition was infinitely worse than that of actual slavery – nor did it occur to them, that if his wages were less than the allowance of the slave, he was less free after emancipation than before. St. Simon, Fourier, Owen, Fanny Wright, and a few others, who discovered and proclaimed that property was not only a bad master, but an intolerable one, were treated as wicked visionaries. After the French and other revolutions in Western Europe in 1830, all men suddenly discovered that the social relations of men were false, and that social, not political, revolutions were needed. Since that period, almost the whole literature of free society is but a voice proclaiming its absolute and total failure. Hence the works of the socialists contain the true defence of slavery.”
George Fitzhugh CANNIBALS ALL: OR SLAVES WITHOUT MASTERS, (1857) pp. 33-34
Note that Fitzhugh is arguing for the validity of slavery on socialist principles.
I don’t think id cards are such a big deal but the idea of a giant national database of biometric information that can be cross referenced for whatever purpose the government chooses scares me. Unlike other unique identifiers such as the national insurance number you leave your dna behind wherever you go regardless of intent. I don’t think the gov’s legitimate aim of finding miscreants justifies the loss of liberty this implies.
In anycase if the gov. just enforced its own laws and repelled unjust or unworkable ones it would find that an id card is not needed.
This punishes the law-abiding citizen by taking his money and making him vulnerable. The thieves and dealers won’t comply. I don’t see this solving anything.
Lorenzo – Laws should lapse after three or five years and only be reinstated if there were a proper case made, given that the issue would no longer be where it was when the law was enacted and events may have overtaken it.
David Fordwych – OK, I’ll go out on the same limb. I don’t think a blind man should be in such a critical position in government either. Obviously, he cannot read people’s expressions and therefore, as an acute person sometimes can, their hidden thoughts, their twitches, their evasions, their subtle signals to others. He can’t draw conclusions from body language, which is an essential language between all humans and most higher mammals. Anyone can tell when a cat or a dog – with two totally different sets of physical signals – indicates that it is losing patience. A blind person has to wait until he’s scratched, bitten or pulled away by a friend. This isn’t a subtle analogy. Animals give out clear visual signals regarding irritation, and so do people. A cat’s tail twitches and the cat pretends not to meet your eye, for example, while it tries to contain itself. Humans look at their nails. They swing their crossed leg. They keep looking at the clock on the wall, they clench their toes, they exchange glances …
It is inappropriate to have a blind person, no matter how intelligent and dedicated, in such an important government position. (Notice I said “inappropriate” – a Nulabour term which means “you are not free to argue the point”.)
You can bash me about the head and shoulders, but Blunkett is totally dependent on the observations of civil servants who, of course, would never superimpose their own agendas. Heaven forefend!
And this is the individual in charge of responses to terrorist attacks. How many officers would have to risk their lives, in the case of a bomb or sniper, because David Blunkett didn’t have a clue where to dive to safety?
So David Forwych, thank you for bringing it up. This is in no way meant to be one of my normal cruel attacks on stupid people. I think the appointment itself was stupid, not Mr Blunkett. Although, he’s also stupid. But separately.
I think it is to the credit of the people of this country, actually, that we are unprejudiced enough to let a blind man become this senior in government.
That said, it is clearly now time for David Blunkett to retire, and quickly.
ID cards make terrorism and crime easier, in fact, because they create a clear-cut way for criminals to impersonate people, but their real goal is to control and pacify law-abiding people and has no link to fighting crime.
In particular, a compulsory identity card creates a special new crime (not carrying the card) where I am immediately in the wrong until I can prove myself innocent to an official of the state. It neatly reverses the already tattered presumption of innocence until proven guilty. I must first prove to the state that I am a good boy, not the other way round.
I believe its real purpose is to reverse that presumption in a small but pervasive way that is felt in all everyday activities, and subtly make citizens more deferential to the state.
Mark
It is not a question of prejudice,actually.
It is a question of common sense.
Well, all right Dave…. but we both agree Mr Blunkett can leave now, right?
Weasel,
I know you are right to predicate the current ideas from government on technological advances. It is opportunism of a kind. I don’t defend it. I would simply like to see people think about the practicality of the status quo and at what point, if at all, that practicality ceases to obtain.
Let me raise a delightful prospect with a sting in the tail. Suppose that in ten years from now the EU, a rag-bag of economically failing, borderless non-nations, implodes. But suppose also that in the interim the current rates of growth in unemployment, crime, terrorism, mass immigration have continued and that these emerge into the new dawn as causes of massive social instability. Suppose that some countries, freed from central control, even enmesh themselves in communal warfare. After all, Europe has done it all before, rather often in fact.
Would you, in such circumstances, welcome the possibility of a SECURE identity card system? Could you grant that it might perform a useful and honourable purpose?
This is the ultimate scenario, I know. But if you can say OK to this the question can fairly be asked: in what circumstances, then, does such a system cease to be necessary?
I don’t know about others here, but in response to Guessedworker’s plausible scenario I think any kind of compulsory identity system is more likely to bring about the kind of social disruption he/she describes than be a serious remedy to it.
Continental Europe is indeed an apparently peaceful place which is yet regularly racked through history by puzzling (each time) outbursts of violence and general nastiness. I think the real key to this is that in the turbulent interior of the continent, states and rulers have always historically controlled or tried to control citizens (often aiming to build a grander state reliving the Glory That Was Rome), while in a few exceptional peripheries (for some periods the Republic of Venice, for others Holland or Britain, for others the Swiss Confederation etc) during some eras, citizens tried and for a while succeeded in controlling states and rulers.
The use of secret-police informers, for example, has for centuries been defended across Europe on exactly the same public-order grounds Guessedworker suggests would justify a secure identity-card system. Wherever it has been standard, the use of government political informers has poisoned public debate and spread distrust between people – exactly as it was intended to of course. Parts of Europe ruled at some time by the Habsburg family (which include Belgium, Austria, Spain and most of the parts of Eastern Europe which – not coincidentally – fell rapidly to fascism and communism) are still marked by the apathy, cynicism and corruption centuries of use of government informers causes. Russia likewise – the Tsarist police state ironically made the Soviet communist takeover easier and quicker because there was a complete, readymade apparatus of control that could strike a deal with the Bolsheviks.
I repeat that I think the real purpose of identity cards is to subtly make law-abiding citizens more deferential to, and easily controllable by, the state.
Dave: For me its nothing to do with anonymity. Glancing in my wallet and at my mobile, there are lots of ways for big brother to track me. That’s generally a good thing as actually making sense of that value of data is a task way beyond us at the moment.
Actually, its well with in our capabilities, and continues apace. All of us are leaving a progressively larger electronic trail and nothing the government or any group can do to stop this technological trend. All they can do is throw up rules and regulations to impede the trend.
A unique identifier for each individual would do a lot to simplify the technical issues, but absent such an identifier, it will not stop.
Its businesses that are taking the lead – banks to identify credit risks, telcos to identify usage trends, retailers to get an overall pattern of a consumers purchases.
Data is property like any physical property and as a good Libertarian, I think the owner of the property should have unrestricted (or minmally restricted) rights to use the property as they see fit. Which brings us to the $64K question, who owns the data? Historically the collector of the data owns it, but I think the person or entity that the data pertains to should be the owner, with (perhaps) certain data mandated common property that anyone can use. Some of us would then make more data common, or sell our data to the highest bidder.
Coming back to the identity (card) system, under the above regime using an identity system would make my data more valuable and I would likely voluntarily use it.
Anyone who thinks this is not technically feasible, doesn’t understand how information technology is enabling managment and pricing models orders of magnitude more fined grained that previously possible.
Phil,
The issue is not handling the data, I’m sure that you can have databases full of the stuff, its then finding the resources to actually do something practical with that data in the sense of a “Big Brother is Watching You” way.
That’s not practical, and the more data that piles up in terms of location based services, and so force, it will get harder to track individuals unless you really need to find them.
My comment was aimed more at the idea that suddenly the government will be mapping individual locations, making associations and then deciding to act based on that sort of thing. That sort of one to one mapping is currently beyond us. Although there are some interesting Maths algorythms for many-to-many mapping of large databases for mobile phone dating applications.
At the end of the day you still need a human to review the data and decide what to do. That will be a bottle neck for several decades yet, although, when that changes I suspect our discussions here could become rather moot.
Dave
I have to disagree that a human is needed to review or otherwise intervene to relate data from disparate sources in order to reach some conclusion.
I cite Google as an example – a hundred or so programmers, 15,000 servers and effectively zero direct human intervention. Remember that Google didn’t exist 5 years ago and they have barely scratched the surface of the problem.
the more data that piles up in terms of location based services, and so force, it will get harder to track individuals unless you really need to find them.
As the cost of computer power tends towards to zero, then processing very large datasets becomes easier, cheaper and progressively more real-time.
That sort of one to one mapping is currently beyond us.
In fact there are a number of commercial offerings that do this right now. Here is a paper on the subject – http://demo.openwave.com/pdf/location/LSt2.0_WhitePaper_v9.pdf. Note that these technologies relate known identities in databases to known identities in mobile networks and do so in real-time.
Phil,
I am not arguing that the tracking and matching is impossible, just that the effort to turn that into something a government or police force can practically use is not feasible.
I have to disagree that a human is needed to review or otherwise intervene to relate data from disparate sources in order to reach some conclusion.
The question is both what conclusions can the machines draw on their own and what is done with them then? At some point, while we still have humans running the legal system, a person will have to get involved and review the data.
It is like the public perspection of fingerprint ID engendered by shows like CSI and the publicity machines of Fingerprint ID companies. The reality is a print is rarely good enough to give anything other than a pretty rough idea of identity, normally, in a country the size of the UK, spitting out a “short” list for review which can run to a tens if not hundreds. This is a vast improvement on the weeks it would take historically to idenitfy a print, but its not, at least in the UK, enough to make an arrest within hours on.
I’ll not deny that this sort of technology exists, but controlling it and getting practical data you can use to do things is currently.
One of the problems cited for 9-11 is that over the last decades the “Intelligence” services have moved away from using agents in favour of computer analysis of movements and trends. The evidence is that unless the raw data is analysed and placed into a human context, it isn’t much use.
This will not always be the case, certainly as the hardware increases in power, it will become easier to track things. However, those days are still quite some way off.
I think that as humanless software filtering and tracking improves, it becomes more important, not less important, to oppose identity cards and unique identifier numbers.
Biometric or electronic information can, of course, be stolen, copied and forged by insider people, even if strong encryption remains strong.
The key element that I think Phil is missing is not if but where the human is in the system. If I walk into a bank in most European countries and present an impeccable (but impeccably forged) identity card, I can withdraw all of someone’s money. If I walk into a bank in Britain, I might offer a tatty gas bill as proof of identity and the clerk might then ask me a question (such as my previous postal address minus one) which I – the conman – have failed to memorise. In the Continental system, the clerk is downgraded to machine, goes through a mechanical (and therefore hackable) process to check the ID card’s veracity, and can lazily assume someone somewhere else has sufficiently checked the ID card – not her responsibility. In Britain the clerk is expected to show a little initiative, responsibility and common sense – in fact act like a human. Do I look a bit shifty? (Criminals usually do.) How did I seem when I couldn’t answer the first security question? If I am asking to withdraw twenty five pounds from an account with two thousand in it is it not cheaper and quicker to assume I am legit?
If banks want to introduce unique numbering, they’ll say it’s to offer a better service to us, but that’s untrue. It’s to make things more convenient and cheaper for them. Bank managers will be convinced this will mean more secure, but it will actually mean less secure. Continental Europe is full of ID cards and full of conmen.
Dave, I don’t deny that certain things require human intervention. But what we have seen over a very short period of time is an increasing number of interactions without direct human intervention. You may well be right about finger prints, but I doubt it is a technical problem. Rather it looks like legal/beauracratic conservatism.
Mark, this is the identity problem. To perform any transaction other than a purely anonymous one, requires some kind of verifiable identity. We talk about strong identity to mean an identity that is difficult to forge/fake. I would much prefer that identities are voluntary and the government is not involved, and there have been repeated attempts to do this in the private sector with a fair degree of success. Unfortunately governments are uniquely able to verify identities and I don’t see a way out of this problem (and believe me I would love for there to be one).
Otherwise you fall into the error of confusing the card with the identity. I agree that any piece of paper and plastic can be faked without huge difficulty, but faking the identity it represents is an entirely different problem and should be very much harder.
Mark,
I bow before the clean lines and singular purpose of your thinking. It’s like coming across a mint-conditon, completely original XK150. You know it’s impractical. You know your girlfriend will hate it, the soft top will leak in the rain and the motor pack up in winter on the Pennines. But, jesus, it’s good on the open road.
Now, authoritarian governments and secret policemen are all very fine. But are they only the invention of someone who just wants to toe’n heel – four-wheel slide, opposite lock and all. I mean, personally I like the wind in my face. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got the points on my licence to prove it. But the Edgeware Road in rush hour is altogether another proposition.
You see where I’m heading? It’s modern society, isn’t it – that imponderable, complex, perverse, semi-conscious creation that hangs together somehow despite all the foul laws and the freedoms to and freedoms from. It just doesn’t deal in certainties, my friend. That’s why we never stop learning – or one of the reasons anyway. But certainty has its value. It is a legitimate pursuit for government and for law-abiding citizens alike. Anything that increases certainty, and does it irrefutably and to good effect, anything that helps distinguish or secure or even identify, anything like that might – and I stress might – make the old Edgeware Road a safer and more amenable experience all round.
Of course, it’ll never be like the open road with the wind in your face. I’ll grant you that. But my guess is that we are going to see a lot more urban sprawl, a lot more murderous jams. In the face of that, the joy of the open road might just seem a worthless self-indulgence.
Problem is, Guessedworker, that identity cards and strong identity don’t increase certainty. They reduce it.
I suspect you and Phil are the romantics here and I am the practical one.
A couple of hours ago at a bar I was shown a Colombian identity card, which has a chip, a fingerprint sample and other state-of-the-art goodies on it. Of course the actual country of Colombia is – not by coincidence – a chaotic place where one terrorist group can storm the High Courts and kill judges, while the other terrorist group dress up as soldiers and take all of Medellin’s senior gangsters and senators hostage.
Identity cards and government-verified identity are for dreamers. All the real, productive work of the world will always be done in countries where individuals, such as bank clerks, are expected to take some responsibility and think a little for themselves. ID cards are an attempt to take thought out of human interactions, which is why societies that believe in them fall apart, and why they increase uncertainty.
The (amazingly widespread) belief that only governments can uniquely verify identities is the first sign of the uncertainty they foster.
OK Mark, how would you verify identity? I’m sorry if I am a little sceptical about being able to produce old gas bills.
There is an old joke, “When one sees a lion in a zoo with a sign that reads ‘rabbit’ one better believe he sees a rabbit.”
The card cannot ever really prove the identity of a person. All it can do is prove that the person presenting it matches characteristics the card presents to the police officer. Thus faking one would be an equivalent of faking a driver’s license — more or less possible. There is a ton of literature as far as information security is concerned on how pieces of ID in personal posession are never enough to ascertain identity. So while it will dutifully track normal citizens it will do little to stop spies, terrorists, or criminals, much like fingerprinting has not stopped crimes (as was originally thought in late 19th century)
The bigger problem for samizdata readers I am surprised not to see mentioned is the belief of the system in the identity cards. Given a person and a card that claims he is someone else how is one to prove his real identity? Cards will obviously malfunction — a roll in a dryer or a swim in the ocean, a programming bug or intentional tampering — but they will malfunction. If there is an easy procedure to prove your own identitiy as opposed to the card reading, how is one precluded from “proving” a different identity. If the procedure is hard and difficult, you can only imagine how impossibly long lines to these offices will be, and how few actual violent perpetrators will ever stand on them.
Phil,
I agree that there will be more “flagging”, for want of a better term, without human intervention. But, for the moment at least, the machines are still pretty dumb.
What happens if they get smart worries me far more than petty human tyranny. But I digress.
In some respects this can be a good thing. The more rules and issues the government look for, and the more means to track the individual, then the more likely it is for the humans, who at the moment, have to physically get invovled, to miss something or leave it.
“Quis custodes ipsos custodiet?” Is apt in this circumstance for soon the watchers need a whole barrage of new systems just to monitor the work they are doing.
Hi Phil. Good question. Actually, old gas bills have verified my identity at several British banks, so I wasn’t making that up.
But in general, I think the misunderstanding comes from asking the Continental question “How can you prove you are who you say you are?” – which is of course a suspicious, autocratic question because it demands the individual prove his innocence, rather than the other way round, as we think is right in courts.
An alternative question is “What are the practical consequences of this person being [a] who he claims to be and [b] not who he claims to be?” a question which requires common sense on the part of the bank clerk. Someone saying he is me goes into a bank and tries to empty my whole account. A sensible clerk thinks “Hmm, if this is not Mr Griffith, the real Mr Griffith has grounds for being a bit upset if I give him all Mr Griffith’s money with no further questioning.” so asks a few more questions and does a few more checks [meanwhile noting if the putative Mr Griffith starts looking shifty and anxious] until satisfied I am me. Or someone saying he is me goes into a bank and tries to withdraw twenty five pounds. I answer the first question [such as my birth town] successfully, I know where my home branch is, and I look honest. The clerk decides to risk it since a British clerk has some common sense and knows that cases like mine outnumber frauds by a big multiple. I get the money and it was my money.
Of course, where ID cards are compulsory, the clerk can then cover his or her back perfectly by refusing to move an inch until I/the conman produces the little card or number or whatever that exonerates the clerk from any responsibility for any mistake that occurs. Which is why everything takes longer in ID countries, more mistakes occur [no-one is thinking or taking responsibility], more frauds occur for the same reason, and the whole service experience is more tiresome because clerks have the option – and take the option – of behaving like machines so as to reduce their own exposure to risk of criticism.
A couple of months ago back in Britain I went into my mother’s bank where I had never been before and presented a cheque in her name to withdraw a couple of hundred pounds. They had never seen me and the two women there had not met my mother, so could not see that I resemble her, I had no ID on me and we had to decide what to do. My first suggestion was that they phone my mother up. They pondered this, then checked her signature on the cheque, decided correctly that I look and am honest and gave me the money.
My point is that this is no more fallible a system than lots of identifying numbers and DNA-coded chips etc. Something can always go wrong or be faked with any system and it always will.
At least with common sense the person who is responsible for the mistake takes responsibility upfront and is aware of the risk they are taking when they take it. Once you get into ID cards and identity databases etc all sorts of people blame each other, it can be hard to work out who is at fault, and losses can be enormous while as many people as possible behave like irritating machines so as to pass the buck down a distant chain of other people.
My experience of living for years in Continental countries is that there is enormous fear and enormous incidence of faking – faked school certificates, faked driving licences, faked passports, faked compensation coupons, faked government bonds, faked ID cards, faked cable-TV code numbers – the list goes on and on. I think this is directly because ID cards get people used to trusting paper more than trusting other people. You can achieve anything in identity-land by faking bits of paper or faking numbers, so everything is triple-checked and has extra layers of complication as a result, and yet the fraud just multiplies.
I think this is because identity cards get the whole thing upside down. Everyone on the Continent believes that only the state can verify my identity [as if my mother or my sister or my friends couldn’t….] – a bizarre belief on closer examination which distorts thought.
In fact, the state can verify my identity less reliably than anyone else. The state is just a bunch of people, and in identity-land these are officials wild-eyed enough to think that paper or numbers are more informative than other people. How nutty is that?
Mark
Brilliant and illuminating series of posts.
Gosh Dave, thanks! I’m sorry they were a bit long…
In Spain recently, I discovered that I would be asked for ID whenever I used a credit card. I generally pulled out my British driver’s licence and they were normally okay with this, but if I had been Spanish, the national ID card was the only thing they would have accepted. One instance that particularly struck me was when I was asked for ID when I bought a 7 euro ticket to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. As a fraud detection mechanism this is ridiculous. (How many people, having stolen a credit card, then use it to buy a 7 euro museum ticket?). However, there is simply a mechanical process. Somebody uses a credit card, and we look at their idea. As Mark points out, the mechanical process becomes more important than any thought of what the check is actually for.