The Concepts of Identity and Trust in Modern Society

David Heath
Wednesday, 28 January 2009 02:27

Your IT - Home IT

From these examples, you can see that there are degrees of accountability, acceptability, reliance and strength in your varied identities.

To quote privacy researcher Roger Clarke: "Identity authentication is the process whereby a degree of confidence is established about the truth of an assertion by an entity that they have a particular identity, or are properly signified by a particular identifier." In other words, authentication is the process of binding an identity to an entity - hence ID-entity. Clearly, this is of minimal importance in our newspaper kiosk identity, but particularly crucial if we're standing in front of the immigration official attempting to enter Australia.

Interestingly, supposedly self-securing documents (such as a passport) have no concept of authentication – they step directly from Identity to Authorisation.

The link between who we are and our identity is tenuous at best; just about the only formalised "identity" we have is nothing more than a paper trail. Although credit databases are powerful tools, they are still not who we are.

Mind you, even an excellent paper trail can prove nothing - Timothy McVeigh, for example, was generally perceived as a fine, upstanding citizen. Also, the opposite - the absence of a paper trail - is no more (or less) useful. Knowing nothing about an identity is not the same as rejecting it.

Some identity documents, driver's licences for instance, are easy to fake (or acquire), yet are treated like gold. There were numerous reports in the media that at least two of the 9/11 terrorists held valid (although in false names) Virginia licences. What does that tell us about the reliability of identity documents?

There is a huge effort expended on designing and implementing a self-protecting identity token (driver's licence, passport etc) and far too little effort on the validity of the actual identity, or on checking the legitimacy of the token. I recall reading press reports in 2004 showing just how seriously the Australian government takes passport control - in the previous year, over 3000 people complained of errors in the passport they were issued - including one Caucasian woman who found the photo of an Asian man in hers.