IP: Do you know where you live? Straw Poll

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Peter Bachman <peterb () cequs com>
Organization: Cequs Inc.
Reply-To: peterb () cequs com
Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2002 08:57:13 -0400
To: farber () cis upenn edu
Subject: Do you know where you live? Straw Poll

Dave,

Since I'm one of the authors of the proposals that has been circulated
in Congress regarding national collective identity, global identity, and
specifically refactoring INS identity relating to student visas after
Atta got his student visa approved, I wanted to get some feedback from
ip'ers on some fundamental questions that underly some of the
social-technical interface surrounding identity. I'm also working on
European post-national identity issues (which are much harder) so I
wanted to see if we had some consensus on some of the basics here.

1. If you live in the U.S. do you consider yourself to be a citizen?
What governmental unit do you associate yourself with? Township, city,
county, state, borough, U.S. federal?

2. If you live here, or are visiting and don't consider yourself to be a
citizen, how would you want to be identified?

3. Who do you consider should not have access to your identity information?

4. Would you prefer that you controlled that access, or that someone
else did that for you?

3. For those who consider themselves to be citizens, and are living
here, you are now faced with a hypothetical situation.


You have entered the "identity protection program" and have to build a
new identity. No one is after you, you have no debt.

Remarkably (and this is hypothetical mind you) you are no longer
required to have any identification whatsoever, no SSN, no drivers
license, in fact you can choose to remain anonymous if that's your
choice. In fact, you can keep your old name if you want, or not. Your
choice.

You are even allowed to make up an identifier but with one restriction,
it must be unique, and you have to maintain reasonable security to make
sure no one else uses it. Certain hardware choices are available to you
that have  been tested by security evaluators and earned an approval
rating, so you are not concerned about the actual hardware. If you
choose to keep your identifiers in software, you must accept similar
restrictions on using approved software.

All relevant systems can be rekeyed to accept your unique identifier,
this means you can still write checks, charge things, and open accounts
at banks. Your kids can go to school, in fact there are no restrictions
on what will accept your unique id, although you can't keep the same id
valid if you choose to change it later, nor can you let anyone else use
it. If someone else becomes "you" then you are also liable. You must put
  up with some systems that have not been updated, and "convince" them
to use your new identity, by refusing to supply your old identifiers,
execept for your name.

All your community responsibilities still exist, taxes, etc.

Since the choice is now up to you, what would you choose to identify
yourself? Would you want to be "from" somewhere, a locality, or state,
or just the U.S.? Would you choose to be indentified by a URI? A domain
name? Email address? Would you want to identified through an
organization to which you belong, a company, a college, perhaps?

I will summarize  your comments and replies into a presentation and talk
that I'm giving on Identity Management.

replies to peterb () cequs com

thanks,

-pb



------
8XK Pittsburgh PA, 1916 Dr. Frank Conrad
http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/milestones_photos/kdka.html

Peter Bachman
Cequs Inc.
peterb () cequs com



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