Shakespeare on Identity Theft

On the Loss of Two CDs by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs containing the Records of 25 Million Taxpayers and their Children.

Shall I compare thee to a string of digits?
Thou art more personal and more private.
Rough Humphreys doth quiz the Darling on Today,
And Gordon's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too close the eye of Google shines,
And oft is gold from banking accounts skimmed;
And every mother’s maiden name declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed.
But thy perfect database shall not leak
Nor lose possession of that CD they sent;
Nor shall the hacker spam and phish and phreak,
When with eternal ID card thou went,
So long as cars have chips and streets have CCTV,
So long lives your identity, and this gives life to thee.

Sources: BBC News, The Register, Robin Wilton, Into the Machine.

Double Bluff 2

Barry Briggs worries that the bad guys might get to scan our data, thanks to Passport RFID.

"Achieving international cooperation for RFID encryption would probably never work anyway, and of course there are those nations that would be fine letting the algorithms/decoding chips into the wrong hands."

Now, which nations would those be? In my post Double Bluff, I commented on the fact that the British security forces deliberately leaked some technologies to the IRA, playing a devious game they thought they could control. These technologies later led to the death of British soldiers in Iraq.

We can't even trust our own side to look after our own security, or to think through the consequences of their actions.

Identity Differentiation

Kim Cameron asks

"if there is some blood alcohol level after which informed consent no longer applies?"

According to an informal view of identity, there is some blood alcohol level at which you are no longer the same person. Can a sober person repudiate the past or future actions of his drunk alterego? Or vice versa?

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I thought this would be a good opportunity to republish some of my earlier notes on Security and Identity and Signatures.

It is not unusual for decisions of trust to make a distinction between different identities of the same person. Let's say I have a friend called John. JOHN-SOBER and JOHN-DRUNK are two different identities, with recognizably different patterns of behaviour and risk. I am happy to lend my car keys to JOHN-SOBER, but not to JOHN-DRUNK.

If a person has a gun to his head, or his children are held hostage, his behaviour is likely to be uncharacteristic. ("You are not yourself today.") Signatures and voice patterns change under stressful conditions, including duress and torture. If this uncharacteristic behaviour is detected at a security checkpoint, then it might be appropriate to hinder a person's entry, until the identity difference is resolved.

This is about a difference in identity, not just a difference in behaviour. I am not refusing John my car keys because of his slurred speech; I am refusing them because he is drunk It may be his slurred speech that alerts me to the fact that he is drunk; but if he convinces me that his slurred speech on this occasion is a result of a visit to the dentist, I may let him have the car keys. Conversely, if he learns to speak normally even when drunk, I shall just have to find a different way to determine when he is drunk and when sober.

After his attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament, Guy Fawkes was taken to the Tower of London and tortured to extract a confession. His signature - an important token of identity - degenerated under torture, and on his confession it is barely legible. There are serious questions about the validity and authenticity of confessions extracted under torture. The Guy Fawkes example indicates that the identity of the person signing the confession may be brutally transformed by torture, or perhaps even destroyed. We also know that identity and character may be tranformed by brainwashing - which we may sometimes regard as just another more subtle form of violence. In other contexts, identity may be altered by advertising or other modes of influence.

And can Hogwarts parents trust Professor Lupin with the care of their children? Not when there's a full moon. Remus Lupin has two identities - man and werwolf. As man, he is an excellent teacher. As werwolf he is a danger to himself and others. However, the werwolf identity manifests itself only at the full moon; at other times Lupin is perfectly safe. [Hogwarts Security]

Can "user-centric" identity deal with these cases? How does "user-centric" identity deal with context-dependent identity?

Technorati Tags: identity trust

Identity Cards

The identity card is seen both as a mechanism for Government agencies to provide citizens with some set of services (in a reliable and secure manner), and as a mechanism for Government agencies to perform some set of mandated controls over the citizenry. These objectives naturally conflict, and this is part of the reason for the distrust mentioned by Aidan.

Furthermore, there is a common pattern of service providers distrusting their users/customers. Banks assume all their customers are engaged in money laundering or some other fiddle, while Insurance companies assume all their customers are in a perpetual state of moral hazard, and that all claims are potentially fraudulent.

And yet service providers expect their customers to trust them absolutely - trust them and their staff and their overseas contractors and their extremely complex computer systems. Government agencies are no different in this respect from any other service provider.

This is an example of Asymmetric Trust. See also Finance Industry View of Security.