mechanisms

This page considers the basis of vetting and identity referencing, including mechanisms and data sources.

It covers -

• introduction
• documents
• biometrics
• histories
• psychometrics
• substances
• hidden in plain sight?

It is complemented by more detailed notes elsewhere on this site regarding the shape of 'resume massaging', the 'degree mill industry', passports and the Australia card.

     introduction

The preceding page of this note suggested that personal referencing and vetting is essentially concerned with two questions - who are you and what you are.

Answers to those questions are provided by a range of mechanisms that include -

• provision of official documentation (the bearer is accredited through possession of what appears to be a legitimate identity card or passport)
• biometrics (the individual's fingerprint or other unique, innate characteristics match a record of those characteristics)
• testing of blood, hair and urine to determine whether the individual has ingested narcotics or other prohibited substances
• verifying 'life history' claims by searches of databases concerned with criminal convictions, educational attainment, international travel and consumer credit
• use of tools such as polygraphs that purport to determine the truth of responses to questionnaires.

In some instances it is sufficient to determine that an individual is who she claims to be, a process that can be as simple as matching a face to the photo on an identity card or confirming that the photo, the face and a register are 'as one'.

In other instances the individual's identity is not in doubt. The aim instead is to determine whether that individual has attributes that provide a basis for admission or exclusion from particular locations, relationships or responsibilities. A key attribute may be simply whether the individual has been truthful, for example has omitted a criminal conviction or invented an academic qualification in providing a CV.

     documents

Identification through possession of official documentation (or more broadly through a key or even password) assumes that such documents will only be issued to authorised recipients and that the documents will not pass into the hands of unauthorised persons and be illicitly used by them.

Public and private sector issuers of documentation have traditionally recognised that those assumptions are problematic. Identity papers can be mislaid or stolen: mere possession does not necessarily establish a person's identity. Papers can be illicitly altered or completely forged. In ordinary use few people scrutinising documents have forensic skills; in many contexts something that 'looks right' will be sufficient to get the bearer through the door or to gain another document. Authentic papers can be improperly issued to an unauthorised person, eg because an official takes a bribe. Papers may inadequately describe the bearer, with identification resting simply on possession.

Organisations have responded to those challenges in four ways.

Firstly, they have increasingly incorporated photographic or other identifiers into documents in an effort to match the document to the bearer. A photograph, for example, is a key element of a contemporary passport.

Secondly, they have adopted anti-forgery technologies, including copy-resistant paper or inks and inclusion of holographic seals, in an effort to preserve the integrity of documents.

Thirdly they have addressed imposture through administrative mechanisms, such as 100 Points regimes, which aim to determine identity by requiring the individual to supply multiple proof of identity documents and that weight documents on the basis of whether they are likely to be corrupt.

Finally, some have emphasised online verification, with for example datamatching of identity numbers, signatures, photographs and other identifiers during the course of a transaction or on a retrospective basis.

     biometrics

Biometrics, explored in more detail elsewhere on this site, leverage unique physical characteristics such as fingerprints, palmprints and retina patterns to describe an individual and thereafter identify the individual through reference to a record of that description.

Biometric technologies have proliferated over the past two decades. Some are highly contentious because of disagreement about the stability of supposedly unchanging characteristics such as gait or even smell and about pretensions to measure 'truth' rather than merely match an individual to an identity.

     histories

Much identity referencing is mechanistic. It is centred on questionnaires about life histories and on CVs, one reason why resume fraud is of concern. It is also centred on -

• verifying documentation - contacting the issuer to confirm that x document was indeed issued to person y
• searching for exclusionary information - eg that the individual is not on an offender register, is not listed on a bankruptcy or professional discipline database, has not professed membership of a terrorist organisation
• recognising inconsistencies, errors and omissions in information provided by the individual - eg that the person claims a qualification from a non-existent academic institution, was employed by a fictitious organisation, was employed in a lower ranking position than that claimed, or "isn't on the radar" for a particular period (potentially indicating that the individual has "something to hide")
• evaluating some claims - eg recognising that an individual has indeed received an academic qualification but dismissing that because the degree came from a diploma mill.

Vetting on the basis of histories can be problematical because it involves value judgements, because it may be subverted through collusion and because eliciting some information is necessarily intrusive.

     psychometrics

Some organizations have turned to what have variously been badged as psychometrics or psychographics, either to supplement other mechanisms, to supposedly confirm assessments based on those mechanisms or even as a replacement for those mechanisms.

Psychometric tools include polygraphs, devices that measure eye blink rates and other mechanisms that purport to accurately identify whether a person is telling the truth by measuring involuntary physiological responses to questions. Some, such as the penile plesmograph, purport to accurately measure other states. They are contentious given disagreement about the accuracy of measurements - false positives and false negatives are common - and because use may be coercive.

Figures on the use in Australia and elsewhere of those technologies are unavailable.

Ken Alder's 2002 'A Social History of Untruth: Lie Detection and Trust in Twentieth-Century America' in 80 Representations (1-33) comments that

By the middle of the twentieth century nearly two million polygraph tests were being administered each year in the United States by five to ten thousand operators. The polygraph was used in investigative police work, to screen business employees, for national security checks, and as a publicity stunt. Its use continues, even though many studies have documented the machine's fallacies and limitations. In the mid-1980s, when the Reagan administration tried to impose routine polygraph examinations on civilian federal employees, the U.S. Congress ordered its Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) to assemble a meta-study. The results of the study accorded the method an 80 percent success rate, an achievement significantly less impressive than the 98 percent success rate regularly touted by polygraph examiners. And even the OTA's study was considered optimistic by the noted psychologist David Lykken, who pointed out that in field studies conducted under "true double-blind conditions," the number of false positives jumped to 47 percent (that is, the innocent were called truthful only 53 percent of the time).

Alder suggested that the polygraph is

squarely in the current of the early-twentieth century American push for intelligence testing and post-Taylorist industrial management techniques offered by the newly emergent discipline of professional psychologists eager to sell their services to their patrons in the state and corporate

One might say the same about other vetting technologies.

For a point of entry to the literature on the polygraph see Kerry Segrave's Lie Detectors: A Social History (Jefferson: McFarland 2004), The Polygraph Test: Lies, Truth, and Science (London: Sage 1988) edited by Anthony Gale, David Lykken's A Tremor in the Blood: Uses and Abuses of the Lie Detector (New York: McGraw-Hill 1981), Ken Alder's The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (New York: Free Press 2007), Geoffrey Bunn's 1998 foucauldian dissertation The Hazards of the Will To Truth: A History of the Lie Detector and the US National Research Council's sobering The Polygraph and Lie Detection (Washington: National Academies Press 2003).

Fashions in testing are evident in use of face to face and questionnaire (manual and electronic) psychological evaluation. US business employers for example have adopted kiosk-based interviews to sort applicants for McJobs and also relied n more comprehensive - although just as problematical - online questionnaires, often similar to the pseudo-scientific 'compatibility' tests used by dating sites.

Contemporary critics echo past empirical research demonstrating that such tests can be readily spoofed, are often a poor predictor of executive performance (or an employee's honesty) and are likely to be taken too seriously by employers. Few jurisdictions provide for meaningful licencing of offline/online psychological tests.

     substances

The past thirty years have seen uptake by employers (and by agents such as recruitment services and commercial vetting services) of 'substance abuse testing' mechanisms.

Those mechanisms include chemical analysis of an individual’s blood, breath, hair or urine to detect consumption of stimulants, narcotics, alcohol or other prohibited substances.

Uptake reflects systematisation of a precautionary approach (recurrently test all staff, designated staff or potential employees to minimise legal liability and confirm the truth of statements made in questionnaires), fashions in management styles (testing by some US employers for example underpins a coercive approach to bluecollar workers), and the increasing cheapness of such testing (particularly if conducted in bulk).

Community expectations about such testing vary. There have been no large scale detailed surveys but it appears that consumers are comfortable with testing of people in 'sensitive' positions (eg airline pilots, surgeons, nuclear plant operators) but unsupportive of testing of themselves or their peers. Some are supportive of mandatory testing of students.

     hidden in plain sight?

In discussing blogs, dating and equaintance services we have noted potential consequences of people placing parts of their life online rather than keeping intimate thoughts, tears and avocations in a locked desk drawer. Some organisations have sacked employees for criticising peers in a public blog, divulging the workings of that organisation (candour for example conflicts with expectations of confidentiality and comportment in law firms and medical service providers) or making inappropriate comments in chatrooms and bulletin boards.

Much engagement online is anonymous or pseudonymous and evanescent. Use of online statements for vetting is accordingly inhibited by uncertainties about whether there has been an 'exact match' and the effort required to filter large amounts of information ("having everything online" does not mean that data is easy identifiable), problems understated by some online vetting 'experts'.

Contrary to claims, noted on the preceding page, of systematic searching we thus doubt the efficacy and comprehensiveness of most online searches. (That is consistent with some of the more egregious cases of executive identity fraud, where leading recruitment agents failed to detect that candidates for million dollar positions had fabricated key parts of their CVs, awarded themselves military honours and invented academic qualifications - all of which could be readily identified through a few phone calls).

Potential sources of information include -

• personal and corporate blogs
• homepages and blogs of family and associates
• statements in newsgroups
• statements in archived chatrooms
• personal profiles on dating and equaintance services
• reviews and recommendations in retail sites such as Amazon.com
• employee biographies and contact details on corporate sites
• online academic yearbooks and alumni lists.

In practice search engines can be a mechanism for revealing what is "hidden in plain sight". Potentially valuable sources of information include newspaper reports: career progression, inconsistent statements about career, political or other affiliations, tangles with police or corporate regulators. It is difficult, for example, to shed an inconvenient past merely by moving to another jurisdiction when an assiduous research can follow the online breadcrumbs.

Bibliographic databases can also be useful. One Australian executive's tiresome boasting about his supposed academic prowess was crimped when unhappy employees competed to find a trace, any trace, of supposed journal articles and monographs by the new supremo.



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