[fc-discuss] Financial Cryptography Update: Just another day in the office of Identity Control

[iang@iang.org]

 Financial Cryptography Update: Just another day in the office of Identity Control 

                             March 15, 2006


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https://www.financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/000675.html



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Over at CeBIT I spent some time at the CAcert booth checking out what
they were up to.  Lots of identity checking, it seems.	This process
involves staring hard at government Id cards and faces, which gets a
bit tricky when the photo is a decade or two out of date.  What do you
say to the heavy-set matron about the cute skinny teenager on her
identity card?

One artist chap turned up and wanted to sign up as an artist.  This
turns out to be a 'right' in Germany.  Lo and behold, on his dox there
is a spot for his artist's identity name.  Much debate ensued - is
CAcert supposed to be upstream or downstream of the psuedonymous
process?

In this case, the process was apparently resolved by accepting the
artist's name, as long as the supporting documentation provided private
clarification.	Supporting nymous identities I think is a good idea -
and age old scholars of democracy will point out the importance of the
right to speak without fear and distribute pamphlets anonymously.

CAcert is probably downstream, and over in Taiwan (which might be
representative of China or not) we discover more government supported
nymous identities:  passport holders can pick their own first names for
their passport.  Why?  The formal process of translating Kanji into
Latin for passports - popumofu? - so mangles the real sense that
letting a person pick a new name in Latin letters restores some
humanity to the process.

This development is not without perverse results.  It places CAcert in
the position of supporting nyms only if they are government-approved
yet frowning on nyms that are not.  Hardly the result that was intended
- should CAcert apply to sponsor the Big Brother awards - for
protecting privacy - or to receive one - for supporting government
shills?

Most people in most countries think Identity is simple, and this was
evident in spades at the booth.  For companies, one suggestion is to
take the very strong German company scheme and make it world standard. 
This won't work, simply because it is built on certain artifacts of the
German corporate system.  So there is a bit of a challenge to build a
system that makes companies look the same the world over.

Not that individuals are any easier.  Some of the Assurers - those are
the ones that do the identity verification - are heading for the
Phillipines to start up a network.  There, the people don't do
government issued identity, not like we do in the West.  In fact, they
don't have much Id at all it seems, and to get a passport takes 4
visits to 4 different offices and 4 different pieces of paper (the last
visit is to the President's Office in Manila...).

The easy answer then is to just do that - but that's prohibitively
expensive.  One of the early steps is visiting a notary, which is
possibly a reliable document and a proxy for a government ID, but even
that costs some substantial fraction of the average monthly wage (only
about 40 Euros to start with).

A challenge!  If you have any ideas about how to identify the
population of a country that isn't currently on the identity track, let
us know.  Psuedonymously, of course.

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