by James Wallace Harris, 3/31/24
The reason we have identity theft is it’s easy to pretend to be someone else with just a credit card number, a password, and a bit of trickery. Because we no longer buy most of what we buy in person, sellers must accept tokens to prove who we are, and it’s easy for others to steal our tokens. We call it identity theft because thieves pretend to be us by using our tokens.
In the old days we had to show up in person to buy what we wanted. The seller was only concerned with the validity of the money. Their concern was counterfeit money, not counterfeit people. Credit cards introduced two problems. They could represent fake money from fake people. That was when the credit card only made an impression on a piece of paper. With electronic validation of funds sellers knew they could get their money, but they couldn’t prove from whom. This was the beginning of modern identity theft.
Thieves had to physically pretend to be someone else when buying in person, but the merchants’ requirements for proving identity weren’t hard to forge. It became even easier on the internet.
To stop identity theft will require perfect identification of a person. And we can’t reply on driver’s licenses, photo IDs, passwords, electronic keys, or other kinds of proofs of identity that can be forged. We need to prove the person is exactly who they are.
Can you prove who you say you are? Even if you had a birth certificate and every piece of printed identity you acquired over your whole lifetime, can you really prove who you are? Who are we really? Identity is an abstract concept. We need to make it physical.
Our bodies are who we are. We can give it any number, password, or electronic key to point to that body, but that won’t stop identity theft.
What the government needs to do is establish identity by having a person visit an agency that establishes physical identity. They record your face, voice, fingerprints, palm print, eye print, DNA, etc. and enter that into a database. Then whenever you need to prove your identity, either in person or online, those identifiers need to be measured again and the results compared to the database.
When validating your identity, it will be vital that no recordings of those biometric factors will be allowed. What’s needed is a machine that sends information back to the database in real time. The database needs to be able to connect to the validation machine and know it’s receiving live data only.
Imagine buying something at a store or at home. You’d have to have an identity validation device. It will include a video camera and a bunch of biometric sensors. You use the device to measure who you are. Since all transactions will also be recorded, I can’t imagine many thieves even wanting themselves measured so closely.
Our phones can do face and fingerprint identification, and it would probably be easy to add voice and eye print recognition. But phones compare input from sensors to previously stored recorded data on the phone. That’s not good enough. The recorded data of your physical identity needs to be in a national identity bank that’s guarded better than banks for money.
The national identity bank needs to be able to take control of remote sensors and verify live input against your recorded identity in the identity bank. If thieves somehow stole recordings of all your biometrics they could pretend to be you, so the key is to create identity recognition machines that can’t input recorded data and prove the data its sending back to the national identity bank is from live sensors.
Think of it this way. The old saying, “Seeing is proof.” That essentially meant you had to see with your own sensors (eyes) to believe. The identity bank will have billions of eyes that work in real time.
Of course, if such an identity system were created it would solve all kinds of problems, but it would also create others. For spending money, voting, buying airline tickets, going through customs, or doing anything where identity is crucial it would be a plus. But for people who want to stay anonymous, or not be tracked, or fool the system, or be somewhere illegally, it will be a negative. In a police state, with universal security cameras and AIs, such a national identity bank will be absolute power that corrupts absolutely.
But aren’t we moving towards such a system anyway? We’re required to get RealID driver licenses. Security cameras are becoming as universal as cockroaches. As we add more biometric sensors to our devices, merchants are bound to start using them. Banks and credit card companies are going to get tired of being responsible for refunding stolen money. They will demand more identity recognition tools. If banks and credit card companies didn’t refund stolen money and we had to cover our own losses, we’d start demanding them too.
I’m not sure we can avoid this future because most people will want it. My guess, is most people favor security over privacy.
JWH
Auxiliary Memory 
“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” I always think.
I do agree, biometric data will inevitably become standard for ID’ing and, who knows, maybe one day, a government will reproduce a clone from our individual genome stored on their data bank and grow a citizen more its liking? What would Phil Dick make of it? Whether fortunately or unfortunately, nothing is ever completely safe and we don’t control life, nor should we presume that we deserve to. If we could, how unreal and boring it would be.
RE national data base of identifiers:
The data base couldn’t be for only the U.S., do it right and include every human on every square inch of earth. Google has already taken lots of 360-degree video both here and in foreign countries for their Maps.
They blur out peoples’ faces, but we all know they still have the un-blurred video. Not to mention clear views of our homes. Invasion of privacy for convenience sake! Not only do we not mind, we enjoy and appreciate it! Did you know you can view your house over the years? Invasion of privacy is fun!