Identity

This page considers personal identification (eg passports, national identity cards and DNA registers).

It covers -

• issues
• passports
• birth, death, marriage registration
• national identity card schemes
• fingerprints
• bertillonage
• chips
• tattooing and branding
• DNA registers
• other biometrics

It is complemented by a more detailed profile on the Australia Card and 2006 Access Card.

Questions of web site and document identification are explored in the Security & Infocrime guide on this site. There are supplementary pages on Identity Theft, on Forgery & Forensics and on Vetting & Identity Referencing.

     issues

As a German policeman once said, you are who your papers say you are. Take away those papers and you have no identity.

Identitification schemes - whether based on an individual's innate characteristics (eg DNA) or external attributes such as password or code number - facilitate participation by individuals with the requisite credentials in the "economic, social and political dimensions of society", including

• travel (eg through use of a passport)
• access to a location (eg a region, building or document)
• utilisation of a service
• receipt of a benefit
• recognition that the individual so identified is a member of a community and not a member of a stigmatised group

Identification regimes similarly facilitate exclusion (even extermination) of those who do not possess the required credentials.

Questions about privacy (eg data profiling) and the efficacy of particular technologies such as biometrics continue to be become more pertinent as governments - and nongovernment organisations - seek to leverage technologies and data archives - by identifying and tracking a range of actors and attributes.

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.

     passports

A passport 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 citizens are entitled to an Australian passport to facilitate travel overseas (except in prescribed circumstances). 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), which is moving towards a new generation of passports (including potential incorporation of microchips that feature facial biometrics). The New Zealand equivalent is the Passports Act 1992.

John Torpey's The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship & the State (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2000) and Mark Salter's Rights of Passage: The Passport in International Relations (Boulder: Rienner 2003) are essential reading. Torpey's 1998 paper Coming and Going: On the State Monopolization of the Legitimate Means of Movement is recommended, as is Daniel Turack's The Passport in International Law (Lexington: Lexington Books 1972).

There are comprehensive pointers to legal frameworks, technological developments and writing about passports in a more detailed note elsewhere on this site.

     birth, death, marriage 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).

     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 Australia proposals in 1987 for a national Australia Card collapsed amid concerns about cost, implementation and maintenance challenges and the balance between benefits (eg relating to enhanced health services) and problems (eg privacy). Calls for a ubiquitous identification regime resurface periodically, most recently in October 2004 on grounds of national security. We have examined the Australia Card debate in a supplementary profile.

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.

The 11 September 2001 events revived enthusiasm in the US for a national identity card, with Oracle's Larry Ellison for example offering his support. The report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (9/11 Commission) questioned the notion of national ID card as a panacea. It suggested that a key problem was insufficient rigour in issuing and checking documents, rather than the lack of a uniform identification document. Introducing an additional form of identification might exacerbate problems by diverting resources. Some Commission members commented that it would be more effective (and cheaper) to make existing forms of identification more secure, something that would also be less harmful to civil liberties.

Other 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, 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).

In 2005 former White House security supremo Richard Clarke asked

Have you ever wondered what good it does when they look at your driver's license at the airport? Let me assure you, as a former bureaucrat partly responsible for the 1996 decision to create a photo-ID requirement, it no longer does any good whatsoever. The ID check is not done by federal officers but by the same kind of minimum-wage rent-a-cops who were doing the inspection of carry-on luggage before 9/11. They do nothing to verify that your license is real. For $48 you can buy a phony license on the Internet (ask any 18-year-old) and fool most airport ID checkers.

     fingerprints

Fingerprinting is the biometric with which many people are most familiar, either through supplying a print or exposure to academic and popular media.

Systematic printing and analysis little more than a century old but follows recognition in a range of cultures that body parts have a unique and discernable signature. Japan and China, for example, have used thumb prints and cow muzzle prints to solemnise legal agreements or uniquely identify a breeders certificate with a cow nose print.

At the turn of last century in an excess of enthusiasm Argentina started to compile a national fingerprint register of all citizens. There have been few other overt national registers; most countries have followed the US approach of tacit registers based on criminal records and prints supplied for job applications or security clearances.

Simon Cole's Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting & Criminal Identification (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 2001) offers a serviceable introduction to dactyloscopy.

     bertillonage

Anthropometry or bertillonage (after its founder Alphonse Bertillon) - supposedly unique identification of criminals and worthies through detailed measurement of body features - is of interest as an early competitor to fingerprinting.

Bertillon based his scheme on the claim that the size of adult bones does not change throughout life and can be readily measured to create a unique identifier searched through a card system. Data included the height, length and breadth of the head, the length of different fingers and the length of forearms. Measurements were supplemented by photographs and, in some countries, by fingerprints (which were believed to be less reliable). Bertillon estimated that the odds of duplicate records were 286,435,456 to 1 if 14 such traits were used.

The 1898 International Anarchist Conference - a precursor of official gatherings in the contemporary 'war on terror' agreed to introduce the 'portrait parlé' (spoken picture) method of criminal identification, a refined version of bertillonage with measurements numerically expressed and transmitted from one country to another by means of telephone or telegraph.

Enthusiasm for Bertillonage evaporated in 1903, when identical measurements were obtained from two individuals at Fort Leavenworth prison in the US.

There is a useful and entertaining introduction in Caplan & Torpey (2001).

     chips

Many Australian cats and dogs feature an identification chip inserted under their skin, a development that is become more popular with declining costs and reconciliation of competing incompatible registers.

Proposals to so identify kids or adults with radio-frequency identification chips (RFID) such as VeriChip resurface periodically, most recently after the 11 September 2001 hijackings. We'll be citing particular proposals and responses in the near future.

     tattooing and branding

Towards the end of the 1800s there was a bout of enthusiasm - a sort of tropical gothic - for mandatory tattooing of all criminals or even all citizens for identification with a code number, a precursor of both the barcode that features in the nightmares of some Christian fundamentalist groups and numbering used in Nazi concentration camps. Developments are highlighted in Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 2000) edited by Jane Caplan and Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (London: Routledge 2003) edited by Robert Mitchell & Phillip Thurtle.

Branding of criminals or practitioners of stigmatised professions has a longer history, with liberalisation of regimes being reflected in movement of the brand from the cheek or forehead to the hand and later to the arm or torso. In late ancien regime France, for example, those sentenced to hard labor were marked on the upper arm with 'TF' (for travaux forcés), with a life sentence being signified through the letter P (en perpétuité). UK offenders were sometimes branded on the thumb (with a 'T' for theft, 'F' for felon or 'M' for murder). Branding of criminals in France formally ceased in 1832 and in UK in 1834.

     DNA registers

For use and abuse of genetic material as a unique personal identifier see Who Owns Information? From Privacy to Public Access by Anne Wells Branscomb (New York: Basic Books 1994), Genetic Information: Acquisition, Access and Control (New York: Kluwer 1999) edited by Alison Thompson & Ruth Chadwick and Stored Tissue Samples: Ethical, Legal & Public Policy Implications (Iowa City: Iowa Uni Press 1998) edited by Robert Weir.

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.

The Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) and Australian Health Ethics Committee (AHEC) 2001 community consultation paper on Protection of Human Genetic Information is here, along with the ALRC 2003 report Essentially Yours: The Protection of Human Genetic Information in Australia, a 1,200 page study covering regulation of human genetic databases, genetic privacy and discrimination, use of genetic testing and information in employment, insurance, immigration, parentage testing, sport and other contexts.

Other documents of particular value are David Crosby's Protection of Genetic Information: An International Comparison (London: Human Genetics Commission 2000), the 1999 Model Forensic Procedures Bill: DNA Database Provisions Discussion Paper from the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General in Australia.

The Centre for Genetics & the Law (CGL) in Hobart has a project to map Australian and overseas legislation.

     other biometrics

Four methods of biometric authentication have gained some degree of commercial acceptance as mechanisms for comparatively low-cost, timely and reliable validation (ie not requiring recourse to a specialist laboratory). They are fingerprint (noted above), voice, iris and face recognition.

Other proposals include recognition of retina patterns, blood chemistry and antibody signatures, ear structure, heart rhythm, thermal imaging of body parts (head, torso, hand), gait (walking style), typing/writing style, the pattern of subcutaneous bloodvessels and even - on the wild side - body odour. Steady on the garlic or cologne before you visit the sniffer!

There is a more detailed discussion of particular technologies on the following page. There are few published overviews of significance; most of the literature is narrowly technical and devoted to specialities such as retina scanning or armpit sniffing. Two recommended introductions are Biometrics: Advanced Identify Verification: The Complete Guide by Julian Ashbourn (Berlin: Springer Verlag 2000) and Biometrics: Personal Identification in Networked Society (New York: Kluwer 1999) edited by Anil Jain, Ruud Bolle & Sharath Pankanti. For privacy aspects see the Ontario Privacy Commissioner's 1999 discussion paper Consumer Biometric Applications.

Vendors and industry bodies abound: useful starting points are the US Biometric Consortium (BC), the UK Association for Biometrics (AFB) and the International Biometric Industry Association (IBIA).





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