{"id":1209,"date":"2004-07-07T01:44:53","date_gmt":"2004-07-07T01:44:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunpig.com\/mt-entry-1209.html"},"modified":"2006-09-23T19:30:11","modified_gmt":"2006-09-23T19:30:11","slug":"establishing-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2004\/07\/07\/establishing-identity\/","title":{"rendered":"Establishing Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about <i>identity<\/i> lately.  Not in the psychological sense, but in the sense of establishing that you really are who you say you are.  No matter where I turn, I keep stumbling across the issue:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Last week I had a dream about being on the run from the law.  Fortunately, in the dream I had set up bank account under a fake ID, and I could still withdraw money without triggering any alarm bells.<\/li>\n<li>On Sunday evening I was filling out a passport application form for Fiona.  In order for the application to be processed, it will have to be countersigned by &#8220;a person of standing in the community&#8221; (e.g. an accountant, doctor, teacher, etc.) as evidence that I am Fiona&#8217;s father and not just some random dude applying for a passport on her behalf.<\/li>\n<li>I&#8217;ve been looking at the new commenting features in Movable Type 3, and trying to untangle the shambolic mess of tags, script, and settings needed to provide integration with the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.typekey.com\">TypeKey<\/a> authentication service.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I have often thought about setting up an alternate identity.  You know, just in case I might <em>really<\/em> need to go underground some day.  How about you?  How far have you gone down that road?  In the questions below I&#8217;m not talking about nicknames, married\/maiden names, names changed by deed poll, or other changes of name where your fundamental <em>identity<\/em> remains the same.<\/p>\n<h4>On-line:<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>Have you set up an email account under a different name?<\/li>\n<li>Have you corresponded with other real people through this email account?<\/li>\n<li>Have you set up a web site or a blog under that name?<\/li>\n<li>Have you posted a comment or written an article on a third-party web site under that name?<\/li>\n<li>Have you researched and fleshed out the background of this alternate identity to a greater degree than just name, gender, date of birth, and country of residence?<\/li>\n<li>Have you set up a Paypal, or other online money transfer account under this identity?<\/li>\n<li>Have you always used an internet caf&eacute;, or an anonymising proxy server for your online actions under this identity?  (So that your actions can&#8217;t be traced back to your own internet account?)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h4>Real life:<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>Have you ever rented a mailbox or a storage locker under a different name?<\/li>\n<li>Have you ever acquired <em>fake<\/em> official id documents (drivers license, passport, etc.) under your own or a different name?<\/li>\n<li>Have you ever acquired <em>real<\/em> official id documents (drivers license, passport, etc.) under a different name?<\/li>\n<li>Are you acquainted socially or professionally with anyone who knows you under a different name?<\/li>\n<li>Have you ever used these fake papers to prove your identity for some purpose?<\/li>\n<li>Have you ever acquired a credit card or a bank account under a different name?<\/li>\n<li>Have you ever paid for goods or services with funds from this card or account?<\/li>\n<li>Have you made sure that there is no link between your real home address and the address in which the alternate identity is registered?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Score one point for every &#8220;yes&#8221; you had in the On-line section, and three points for every &#8220;yes&#8221; under Real life.<\/p>\n<p>Although false identities can be used as vehicles for doing harm, neither the on-line actions I noted above, nor their real-life counterparts are <em>in themselves<\/em> harmful.  Yet the real-life actions carry so much more weight, because identity in the real world is a much more serious thing than it is on-line.  It&#8217;s serious enough that in many places, establishing an alternative identity is a criminal offense.<\/p>\n<p>People are already twigging to the fact that on-line identity can be equally important.  Microsoft&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.passport.net\/\">Passport<\/a> system was mostly intended as a single sign-in mechanism to help users log in to multiple sites without having to remember multiple user IDs and passwords.  It tackles the question of identity in a <i>de facto<\/i> kind of way:  by gradually bundling all your systems access into a single login (&#8220;passport&#8221;), this login becomes your primary on-line identity.<\/p>\n<p>Six Apart&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.typekey.com\/\">TypeKey<\/a> authentication service comes at the problem from the opposite end:  from the outset, TypeKey has been all about identity, with single sign-in thrown in almost as a fringe benefit.  It is being sold (in a &#8220;free&#8221; sense) to users as a mechanism for proving that you really <em>are<\/em> Joe Bloggs.  If you leave a comment on blog X, your TypeKey identity can prove to the blog owner (and to other readers) that you are the same Joe Bloggs who left comments on blogs Y and Z.<\/p>\n<p>However, in support of the axiom that on the internet, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.randsinrepose.com\/archives\/2004\/05\/19\/brains_in_a_bucket_on_alpha_centauri.html\">no-one knows you&#8217;re a dog<\/a>, there is no way for TypeKey to establish that the identity &#8220;Joe Bloggs&#8221; doesn&#8217;t in fact belong to the real-life &#8220;Jane Doe&#8221;.  And conversely, Jane Doe is free to set up multiple TypeKey accounts, so she can also be posting comments as &#8220;Adam Smith&#8221; and &#8220;Mary Robertson&#8221; whenever she feels like it.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.foaf-project.org\/\">FOAF<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/gmpg.org\/xfn\/\">XFN<\/a> are ways of establishing chains and webs of trust (A trusts B, B trusts C, therefore A trusts C, but possibly to a lesser degree) in a distributed manner.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.pgp.com\/\">PGP<\/a> (or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gnupg.org\/\">GnuPG<\/a>) public key signing provides a decentralized way of proving <em>an<\/em> identity, and as such is an alternative to TypeKey, but again with nothing to stop someone from having multiple identities.<\/p>\n<p>As governments become more eager to distribute services on-line, finding a way to extend each individual&#8217;s single real-life identity into the on-line space is going to become more and more important.  (Hello, biometrics.)  Identity is also inextricably tied up with <em>security<\/em>, the buzzword of the decade, and as such will also be one of the keys to rolling back the tide of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.esecurityplanet.com\/trends\/article.php\/3365341\">spam<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In real life, it is unusual and intuitively <em>suspicious<\/em> for a person to have multiple identities.  On-line, though, it is almost the norm to carry around a different persona for every occasion.  The present anonymity of the internet makes this possible.  But with an increased focus on identity and security, is this a situation that can continue?  Is anonymity a fundamental property of the virtual world, or is it just a passing phenomenon, indicative of the medium&#8217;s immaturity?  Will it eventually become taboo to represent yourself on-line as anything other than your real-life persona?  Or is the freedom to be whomever you choose something that our society is going to accept on a long-term basis?<\/p>\n<p>It keeps me up at night, wondering if now is the last time I&#8217;ll be able to feasibly establish a new identity with the low-tech tools at my disposal.  If I don&#8217;t do it now, will I regret it in twenty years&#8217; time, when the UK has turned into an oppressive totalitarian surveillance state, and my humble blogging attracts the strict attention of the net police?<\/p>\n<p>Okay&#8230;straying too far into paranoia there.  But you know what I mean.  Don&#8217;t you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about identity lately. Not in the psychological sense, but in the sense of establishing that you really are who you say you are. No matter where I turn, I keep stumbling across the issue: Last week I had a dream about being on the run from the law. Fortunately, in &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2004\/07\/07\/establishing-identity\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Establishing Identity&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,19,23,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-movable_type","category-politics_and_economics","category-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}