registration

This page considers forgery of official identity documentation: passports, birth certificates, driver licences and other items.

It covers -

• introduction
• passports
• birth, death, marriage and driver registration
• rebirthing
• national identity card schemes
• biometric forgery and fraud
• studies

There is a more detailed examination of document- and biometric-based identification regimes here and here. A supplementary profile considers identity crime.

Questions of web site and document identification are explored in the Security & Infocrime guide on this site.

     introduction

Elsewhere on this site we have noted the quip that in a modern economy you are who your papers say you are - take away those papers (and a plastic card or two) and you have no identity. Manipulation of the documentation can conversely improve the bearer's attributes: enable access to services or facilities, eliminate age-based restrictions or enhance career opportunities by adding spurious qualifications.

Documentation regimes have historically been undermined in three ways -

• legitimate documents have been illicitly obtained by those without an entitlement (eg genuine passports have been purchased from corrupt officials)
• existing documents have been massaged through the inclusion or deletion of data (eg an expiry date has been modified or a personal photograph replaced)
• an entirely new document has been created, with the appearance of a legitimate document

Successful misuse is based on factors such as -

• assumptions that particular documents cannot be readily forged (eg because they feature technological protections such as threaded and watermarked security paper, photographs or holograms)
• assumptions about the integrity of the government or private sector entity issuing the documentation
• the plausibility of particular documents or suites of documents (an isolated document is suspect, ten documents are prima facie genuine - although a single illicit document may have been used to 'breed' nine apparently legitimate records)
• poor practice in data matching
• poor assessment of risk in verifying documentation and claims of identity (eg security guards 'waving through' anyone who appears to have the requisite corporate identity pass and wears a suit or other appropriate uniform)

For an introduction to changing practices and issues see the outstanding set of essays in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices since the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2001) edited by Jane Caplan & John Torpey.

False birth certificates, Social Security cards and drivers' licenses continue to be foundation or 'breeder' documents for the procurement of genuine documents. A US government study suggested that the birth certificate is the "single most vulnerable document" - and a key 'breeder' of other documents - because it is accepted by most governmental agencies as proof of identity and citizenship. Testimony in 2000 claimed that over 8,000 US state and local registrars' offices issue birth certificates, with over 10,000 variations of US birth certificates being issued at any given time.

A government spokesperson commented

The best certificate to use fraudulently is a genuine birth certificate. Some states furnish a birth certificate to anyone who requests it. Other states may have issuance requirements, but these requirements can also be circumvented. Some states are experiencing malfeasance in their issuing offices. In these cases, it is very difficult for most people who are responsible for examining birth certificates to detect this type of fraud, because the document is genuine and in many cases the document is received without the person being present.

Bruce Schneier offered a perspective by warning that

ID checks don't make sense. Everyone has an ID. Even the 9/11 terrorists had IDs. What we want is to somehow check intention; is the person going to do something bad? But we can't do that, so we check IDs instead. It's a complete waste of time and money, and does absolutely nothing to make us safer.

     passports

Misuse of official travel documents predates the industrial revolution. In 1403 for example John of Sultania used a forged letter to pose as an envoy from Tamerlane, successively gathering letters of recommendation and ambassadorial missions from the rulers of Paris, England, Venice, Hungary and Constantinople before recognition by the pope as rchbishop of the Entire Orient.

A passport (discussed in more detail elsewhere on this site) is an official travel document that

• allows an individual to leave and return to his/her country of citizenship and to facilitate travel from one country to another
• is issued by official sources and clearly "evidences the officially accepted identity and nationality of the bearer"
• is dependent for validity on the issuing government vouching for the person named in the document

In Australia under the Passports Act 1938 and New Zealand under the Passports Act 1992 citizens are entitled to a passport to facilitate travel overseas. As official identification documents - perceived as having a higher integrity than drivers' licences, the de facto identifier for most adults - passports have a secondary use in providing personal identification for individuals accessing a range of government and non-government benefits. Around one million passports and associated travel documents are issued each year by the Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade (DFAT). DFAT is moving towards a new generation of passport (including potential incorporation of microchips that feature facial biometrics).

In practice illicit passports in many third world countries have not involved a craftsperson painstakingly mimicking official stamps and seals. Instead, someone has simply bribed or coerced an official to provide the requisite document or has stolen blanks.

In 2003 the government of Papua New Guinea thus announced the theft of that nation's passport database, computer backups and blank passports. It is not clear whether the theft was an 'inside job' or preempted investigations into alleged sale of documentation.

A year later the French government revealed the disappearance of 10,000 blank French passports, 5,000 blank French driver's licenses, 10,000 blank car ownership certificates and 1,000 international driver's licenses without any identification numbers. In 2004 two Kuwaiti men were convicted in New Zealand of conspiring to forge passports from Australia, Yemen, Brazil, El Salvador, Bolivia, Liberia and other countries, apparently taking orders from across the globe.

John Torpey's The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship & the State (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2000), Mark Salter's Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations (Boulder: Rienner 2003) and Daniel Turack's The Passport in International Law (Lexington: Lexington Books 1972) are essential reading.

     birth, death, marriage, driver and vehicle registration

Secularisation of Western societies has been reflected in a shift from formal registration of births, marriages and deaths by religious entities (typically details entered by clergy in a parish register) to registration by government officers.

It is now mandatory to register those events within a specified period, for example under the NSW Births, Deaths & Marriages Act 1995 all children born in the state must be registered with the NSW Registry of Births, Deaths & Marriages within 60 days of the birth.

Many agencies now provide online access to historical and current registration data. NSW for example offers internet access to indexes for births (1788-1905), deaths (1788-1945) and marriages (1788-1945).

Some sense of the significance of documentation is provided by the Slovene Republic's 'un-birthing' of members of some ethnic groups in 1992, when it parted from Yugoslavia. Some 130,000 Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and ethnic Albanians were ostensibly given a deadline to apply for permanent residence and citizenship of the new state; failure to apply meant erasure from state records. Without identity cards or driving licences the erased lost health care, pensions and employment. The European Commission notes that few victims of that upmarket ethnic cleansing had indeed been alerted to the deadline. In parts of the Third World substantial numbers of children - millions in China and Indonesia for example - are not registered and thus do not have a legal existence, a problem discussed here.

46,000 blank UK Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) vehicle registration certificates "went missing" in 2007 on their way to a shredding facility; police later seized 250 of the reject V5C certificates accompanying at least 110 stolen cars.

In Australia a 2007 Victorian Ombudsman report (PDF) on deficiencies in that state's driver registration regime noted the ease of concocting fake driver identity cards and use by figures such as Tony Mokbel.

     rebirthing

In the US fraudulent applicants are able to obtain legitimate birth certificates of deceased persons because some states do not cross-reference birth/death records and because - as in Australia - there is no central population register. Some US states participate in a voluntary program to exchange information when an individual under 46 dies, although limited personnel mean that records may not be cross-referenced immediately. Lags in cross-referencing records are important because impostors are prepared to take advantage of any delay between a death in one state and its recording in another state.

In the testimony cited above it was noted that

We have seen cases where an individual born in one state is killed in an accident in another. Someone spots the obituary, gets a copy of the birth certificate, obtains identification under the identity, and applies for a passport - all before the death record is filed in either state.

'Re-birthing' isn't restricted to people: a NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption report on the involvement of officials in re-birthing vehicles is here.

     national identity card schemes

National identity cards - typically issued to all adults in a nation, tied to a manual/electronic registration database and featuring information such as name, age, occupation and place of residence - have attracted interest since the first decades of last century when perceived community/bureaucratic needs coincided with new technologies and institutions.

Use of a single identifier is comparatively recent, driven initially by pension or other welfare schemes and subsequently by taxation schemes. The US federal Social Security Number (SSN) for example dates from the 1935 Social Security Act, with adoption by the Civil Service Commission as the official federal employee identifier in 1961, by the Internal Revenue Service as official taxpayer identification number in 1962 and by the Department of Defense in 1967 in lieu of the military service number.

In Britain a national ID card for adults was introduced in 1915 as under wartime legislation, dropped in 1922, reintroduced in 1939 under the National Registration Act and dropped in 1952 after Lord Chief Justice Goddard ruled in 1951 that police demands for individuals show their ID cards were unlawful because not relevant to the defence purposes for which the card was established.

In December 2003 the UK Home Office announced moves towards introduction of a new compulsory national ID card, with prototype cards featuring biometric data (including fingerprint, iris and facial recognition information) and other personal details.

Questions about such schemes are highlighted in the US National Academies' 2002 report IDs - Not That Easy: Questions About Nationwide Identity Systems and 2003 report Who Goes There?: Authentication Through the Lens of Privacy and in the 2004 European Commission report Biometrics at the Frontiers: Assessing the Impact on Society (PDF) which conclude that the goals of any national identity system must be clearly stated and that a compelling case must made before any proposal can move forward.

Joseph Eaton's Card-Carrying Americans - Privacy, Security & the National ID Card Debate (Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield 1996) calls for a national ID card scheme in the US to restrict illegal immigration and fraud. SSNs are questioned in Robert Ellis Smith's 2002 Social Security Numbers: Uses & Abuses (PDF).

     biometric forgery and fraud

The notion of "the body as data" - and identification of individuals through inherent properties such as DNA or iris configuration rather than attributes such as documentation assigned by a government agency - has posed questions about manipulation of testing procedures and technologies.

In the film Gattaca for example the hero defeats a DNA-based regime by engaging in identity fraud: simply substituting another individual's hair, blood and skin samples when tested. Fingerprint readers have been defeated by using latex gloves or more spectacularly by using a gummi bear.

There is a useful discussion in Caplan & Torpey's Documenting Individual Identity, noted above, and in Genetic Secrets: Protecting Privacy & Confidentiality in the Genetic Era (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 1997) edited by Mark Rothstein.

We have explored the major biometrics technologies and associated issues in a more detailed note elsewhere in this site.

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