To summarize: there is a trade-off between amount of fraud and ease of doing business. Zero fraud means doing legitimate business becomes too cumbersome.
Seems like the same point we have with security in computer systems and ease of use.
Seems like the same point we have with security in computer systems and ease of use.
For example, the USA's lack of a national ID (and the resulting adoption of realldy ba substitues like SSNs, driver's licenses and "two photo IDs") has made a plethora of fraud techniques ridiculously easy. In many other countries, "identity theft" so rare there is not even an established term for it.
Passkeys will hopefully turn into a similar case regarding computer security.
(For what it's worth, I actually liked the national identity card, and didn't hear too much about identity theft - I'm just curious).
For most ID-requiring processes people undergo training to identify these security features, to the level of fraud that it's worth detecting for said process.
When the post office asks for your ID to retrieve a package, they won't check much, but I don't think it's unusual for banks to pass your card through the RFID reader and have a high res picture of your face on screen even if only to recognize you properly (btw you have apps to read such data).
The certificates themselves in the DNI are used only occasionally, but it's mostly your decision: you can stick to using the certificates and not activate other means and then you can't access a bunch of things unless you use the certificates.
But still, this is mostly for the public administrations. Private entities, such as banks or whatever, don't really make use of it and build their own systems (most of the time quite stupid ones [0]).
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[0] Fortunately they changed it, but for about a year or so my bank decided that instead of sending a 4-digit code through SMS -which you then typed to verify whatever transaction you were doing- it was "more secure" to just show 5, 10, or 20 4-digit codes on the transaction site and then send you a single number through SMS, say "7", to select the code from the list.
And somehow this was applauded and got them some newspaper headlines as the bank investing the most in advanced security in the country or some shit like that.
Having a better national ID than SSNs would have effectively no negative impact while being a huge benefit for security and fraud prevention. It would also, if implemented well, be hugely beneficial for privacy. For instance things like Signal could move from requiring phone numbers to a ZKP using a national ID.
There's tons of issues like this, where there's a clear technical right answer, but the only people who are foaming at the mouth over it are on the crazy side, so it doesn't happen.
The way you can tell this article is crazy is by noticing lines like this:
> When a police officer or security guard scans your ID card with his pocket bar-code reader, for example, will a permanent record be created of that check, including the time and your location?
This is already what happens. The police officer logs your interaction alongside your drivers license (or non-driver ID) number. Transposing a nationally-unified ID scheme for the current state-based scheme doesn't increase the amount of logging, it substitutes one log for another.
Error-prone-ness is a feature for people who want the state to be less powerful.
Personally I think that for purely practical reasons national ids are good infrastructure.
I don't think in 2023 a "weak" national identity system offers much protection against an adversarial government.
Right now the way we verify identity is "dumb" in the sense that we prove identity using document ids or photos. This is "too strong" - to prove I am over 18 or just "the account holder" I must present valuable document IDs or scans which disclose other things about me such as my exact date of birth or my legal name. It is also "too weak" in that any verifier who receives these things can present them to someone else and impersonate me.
Today, every entity we deal with who verifies our identity can also impersonate us. There are billions of ID scans absolutely everywhere, in realtor's offices and lawyer's cabinets, at car rental agencies, etc ad nauseum.
A good "digital id" scheme allows for cryptographic proofs of identity which are non-transferable between verifiers. It allows things like proving that I am John Smith who is over 18 and holds a driver's license in a way that does not allow the verifier to then present those to someone else and impersonate me. It can allow for proofs of uniqueness, e.g. I can prove that I'm a person you've seen before with id xxxyyy in your database without disclosing my name (if the verifier chooses not to collect that). It can allow "blinding", e.g. I can hand over a token to someone who doesn't need to "see" my actual identity details unless they initiate legal process (say car rental scenario) and then I can be notified if that happens.
It is likely that a lot of verifiers might choose to "over collect" (say, request up-front proof of my legal name when strictly speaking they don't need that to rent me a car) but this can at least be discouraged by measures like tuning service charges so that more invasive verifications cost them more and ensuring that verifiers are subject to different regulation tiers based on the scope of data they collect. Even if the entity loses my PII e.g. my name, DOB, phone number, the systems are designed to not allow anyone accessing that information to impersonate me.
Strictly speaking digital id schemes / properties are orthogonal to "national ids". There are centralised, de-centralised and more or less anarchic (p2p) "versions" of digital identity. However, a government operated scheme at the national level could reduce a lot of commercial capture and the kind of "waste" that happens when you need to stitch together many disparate data sources.
This is especially true given that for many applications, I can already use my passport as an ID.
An attacker who pops my bank’s network doesn’t need to look for ID photocopies: my identifying info is in the database in an already parsed format.
You can get ID scanners for nightclubs which check dates, parse dozens of different designs of ID correctly, detect some types of fake IDs, and record banned patrons. That's a thing you can get in Europe as well as America.
But only in America are they allowed to save the patron's address and use it for marketing purposes.
That is a huge advantadge if the federal governments ever gets taken over by totalitarians. Surely at least some states will refuse to authenticate their ID cards when requested by the feds, some may even issue fake IDs to resistance members. If the feds have a centralized database with updated information on residences etc, they can quietly disappear people.
Not to mention before this there was almost no way to get a new drivers license number, so if it got stolen good luck, a new license is issued under the same number.
As two amusing anecdotes:
A while back, I went to buy some beer in a state other than where I lived. I was asked for my ID, and provided my drivers license. The employee pulled out this comically thick three ring binder, flipped to the page for my state, and had to read through a list of compiled identifying factors for a legitimate ID from my state.
Even further back, I worked at a company where a small slice of my job was verifying ID for new signups flagged as high-risk. Except... we were an online business. Our users were global. So if somebody happened to upload a passport or US DL, I could at least eyeball it. But if somebody uploaded an ID issued by basically any other country on Earth... I guess that's what IDs from The Confederacy of Independent Systems look like? The only surefire way to get rejected was either not uploading anything, or the many, many bots that uploaded random pictures of flowers or trains or random nonsense.
The issue here is the license number is the one used for most verification, and that one is static. The card number changes every time the card is re-issued.
Examples of them are here: https://www.mygovid.gov.au/verifying-your-drivers-licence
A funny anecdote along the same lines:
A friend of mine recently moved from WA to NSW. If you move state, you have to apply for a new license within three to six months depending on the state. So he got a NSW license, it's a trivial process to convert your license thankfully.
He came back to WA to visit for a while, and tried to go clubbing. One bouncer read the post code from the address (like a ZIP code, only 4 digits instead) as his birth year because he had no clue what he was looking at... NSW post codes start at 2000, so you can see how this mistake could come up. WA post codes start with 6000 so there's no possible confusion there, until we reach the year 6000 at least!
Of course, the Date of Birth is still clearly labeled on every states driver licenses so this bouncer may also have been a bit daft.
This is literally the core gameplay of Papers, Please, a game designed to make you feel bad. (A great game, I hasten to add, and surprisingly enjoyable -- though allowing yourself to enjoy it means turning off empathy more consciously than in anything I've played before.)
US federal government provides passports with passport numbers. All the infrastructure is already in place, it’s just a question of political will to implement an API to use this for identity verification.