There’s not much insight in reiterating that computer programming and technical-system design are forms of engineering. But this type of engineering sometimes has very significant implications. Much as designing bridges keeps cars and human bodies out of rivers, designing and constructing certain technical systems prevents future civic collapse. So I can readily endorse identification policy recommendations coming from a source some might find unusual: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Information is power. It creates countless angles and opportunities. In the wrong hands, personal information creates opportunities for advantage, manipulation, and control. To keep power distributed, we must keep central authorities from hoarding personal information.
I had our very special, liberty-protective system of government in mind when I wrote my book on identification and identification policy in 2006. Identity Crisis: How Identification Is Overused and Misunderstood offers some broad policy recommendations captured by the final chapter titles: “Use Identification Less,” “Use Authorization Instead,” and “Use Diverse Identification Systems.”
Though we identify each other seamlessly and with near perfection in person, it is not necessary or advisable to conduct mass identification of people without good reason.
More often than many realize, identification is not required for transacting and interacting. Rather, interactions turn on some characteristic or fact about a person. It may be the fact of having paid, being a certain age, having a creditable financial history, being a safe driver, and so on. Authorization based on characteristics can do much of what identification does without the privacy and power costs.
I argued for diverse and competitive identification and credentialing systems because a market for identity and credentialing services seems most likely to deliver high-quality services at a low cost.
But identification remains dominated by state governments and heavily regulated by the federal government through the pernicious REAL ID Act.
You might be surprised to know that the ACLU—not always the object of adoration among my AEI colleagues—is doing some good civic engineering.
A recent ACLU campaign opposes digital identity systems that “phone home”—that is, systems that call on a centralized issuer to confirm that an ID is legitimate. There are reasons for phoning home, such as proving the authenticity of a proffered ID, but the privacy costs are too great. Systems designed to phone home would create a central repository of information about people’s ID use and thus their whereabouts and activities.
As the ACLU statement says:
We, the undersigned, believe that identity systems must be built without the technological ability for authorities to track when or where identity is used. Such tracking can occur when either the identity verifier or user’s application interacts with or “phones home” to the identity issuer or another third party. Identity systems that phone home facilitate centralized tracking and control, privacy invasions, and other potential abuses. If this capability exists within a digital identity system, even inactively, it will eventually be used.
The anti–phone home effort is part of a suite of policies for digital ID that the ACLU’s Jay Stanley issued last year. Along with no phone home, they include points such as:
- No Police Officer Access to Phones. Proving identity to police with a digital ID should not give them access to other content on the device used for the purpose.
- Granular Control Over Data Released. Digital IDs can share information selectively, so they could facilitate authorization, as discussed above, when identity is not needed.
- Open and Private Wallets, Transparent Source Code, and a Standardized Provisioning Process. To know how digital infrastructure actually works, it must be open to examination, not closed and proprietary (a point I have made in the past with respect to any US central bank digital currency).
- No Remote Government “Kill Switch” to Disable People’s IDs. Giving the government power to cancel people’s proof of identity would be a colossal transfer of power.
A few of the ACLU’s other recommendations are not my cup of tea. But overall, this work is valuable civic engineering. In a time when partisan and ideological difference is the easiest tool to find in one’s tool belt, it’s a pleasure to prioritize the craft of designing our free future society together.
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