Digital Identity Forum

The DNS of the industrial bourgeoisie

[Dave Birch] I have a vague memory -- which five minutes googling cannot substantiate and I'm too lazy to go and find the book in the other room -- that somewhere in the Gulag Archipeligo by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn there is mention of Stalin's desire to have a more revolutionary telephone system where all calls had to go through a central exchange and be encrypted so that Stalin could listen to everyone else's calls but his would be encrypted to remain secret. The prisoners with relevant skills were supposed to be designing this while in the gulag. It never worked, of course, and the Soviet Union had appalling telecommunications infrastructure as a consequence because the communications revolution was halted by the dictatorship of the proletariat: there's some deep incompatibility between innovation and centralisation. I couldn't help thinking of this when I read about the calls by Eugene Kaspersky to have a more Stalinist internet:

The CEO of Russia's No. 1 anti-virus package has said that the internet's biggest security vulnerability is anonymity, calling for mandatory internet passports that would work much like driver licenses do in the offline world.

[From Security boss calls for end to net anonymity • The Register]

What he means by this is that he wants a technologically complicated and expensive solution to be implemented so that ordinary people are inconvenienced to the maximum while criminals can roam free (which is what would happen). Creating such an asymmetric solution is not the way forwards: for one thing, who would decide what to censor?

A little local controversy involving the Church of Scientology and its critics could lead to curbs on the right to anonymity of anyone using the web.

[From Scientology seeks to squash anonymity • The Register]

We already have experience of this "solution" in the UK. Laws giving a wide variety of bodies the ability to monitor CCTV, the internet, phone calls and everything else which were supposed to save us from international terrorism are used by local councils to stop people from trying to get their children into better schools and to check that people are recycling enough of their rubbish. I'm sorry, but creating a world in which anyone can read anyone else's e-mail, track anyone else's web browsing, see what anyone is reading is not the way stop Russian virus writers from taking over everyone's PCs. We need an identity infrastructure.

The right to moan

[Dave Birch] I've been following a few discussions about online anonymity, triggered by a couple of stories about bloggers identities being disclosed for one reason or another. One of them was the ridiculous story about an outraged model.

Of course, pretty much no one would have seen such a blog if Cohen hadn't gone legal about it, claiming (with no proof) that she was losing jobs because of it (which seems difficult to believe).

[From Outed Blogger Plans To Sue Google; Skank Model Mess Gets Messier | Techdirt]

This what they call on the interweb the "Streisand effect", but of course in these knowing post-modern times it could all be a clever publicity stunt and the model is not being stupid by cynically wasting taxpayers money to attract attention. Anyway, the point is that this story got yet another discussion about internet anonymity going. The general tone of the discussions in the media appears to be the usual unthinking "if you've got nothing to hide...".

I take a different view. Most people do not have anonymity, it's a myth. If I log on to The Guardian's "Comment is Free" and post something about the destruction of the public finances under the name "General Wolfe of Quebec", I am not really acting anonymously because it is trivial (as the recent headline stories have proved) to determine the IP address that the post came from and then go to the ISP to get the account. So although the Internet seems anonymous to people who don't understand it (eg, models, politicians), it isn't. And it's not obvious whether that is good or bad. If you're trying to track down someone posting child pornography (the usual short-circuit for the argument) then it's bad, but if you're trying to complain about the treatment of political prisoners in your country, then it's good. And what's more, whether your blogging is anonymous or not depends on the technology, not on the constitution or the judiciary.

As Ben Laurie has so clearly pointed out, unless the connection layer is anonymous, nothing else matters.

[From Digital Identity Forum: Internet]

I think that at a minimum bloggers should have conditional anonymity: that is, they should be able to use a pseudonym that is only connected to them on the production of a court order. This cannot be achieved by depending on the service providers: even if they operate with good will,

Computer scientists have recently undermined our faith in the privacy-protecting power of anonymization, the name for techniques for protecting the privacy of individuals in large databases by deleting information like names and social security numbers. These scientists have demonstrated they can often 'reidentify' or 'deanonymize' individuals hidden in anonymized data with astonishing ease.

[From SSRN-Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization by Paul Ohm]

What this, I think, implies is that there will be blogging platforms that spring up in the US to operate under the provisions of protected free speech legislation and beyond the vagaries of UK libel laws and, over time, the most interesting and valuable blogs will migrate in that direction. Those platforms will provide authenticated pseudonymous identities (using, as I repeatedly wish for, 2FA OpenID or something similar) that are contingent on cryptography. How is the nurse going to blow the whistle on a drunk surgeon without pseudonymity?

Paradigms and pseudonyms

[Dave Birch] I enjoyed listening to Roger Clarke at the 2nd interdisciplinary workshop on Identity in the Information Society at the LSE because I had read his work (particularly on PKI) over many years and wanted to see how his thinking had evolved. Roger made a number of excellent points, one of them being that the barriers that we need to overcome (if we are going to do anything practical about identity management) is that the models that we technologists are using, the implicit mental models of the decision-markers and the reality of the situation are all different (I'm paraphrasing greatly, obviously). Having had the chance to think about this some more, I think that I agree with his diagnosis but disagree with the treatment.

So far as the treatment goes, Roger proposed a way to deal with this some time ago and explained this in his presentation. His model is to have get around the problem of the mappings -- that is, the mappings between real and virtual entities and their attributes -- by separating out elements of the mapping, distinguishing between identity and entity, between identification and entification.

If I've understood what Roger meant, then I think I don't quite agree with him, because I think replacing the N:N mappings between real and virtual identities by 1:N mappings to digital identities is a simpler way to model the complexity of the boundary between real and virtual in the identity space. So I don't think about identity and entity but about the real and digital identities and stuff, and some of that stuff happens to be people, if you see what I mean.

PKI, pseudonyms

Carsten Sorensen, LSE

[Dave Birch] Carsten Sorensen in an expert on Iemerging working practices and organisational forms fuelled by innovative information and communication technology. His currently studying the organisational use of mobile services and initiated the mobility@lse research network in mobile interaction aiming at drawing together academics and practitioners. In this podcast, he talks about some of the key trends in mobility, particularly in terms of corporate structures, and the demands that they place on identity infrastructure and management.

Listen here in either [Podcast MPEG4] or [Sound-only MP3] format.

Ben Whitaker, Masabi

[Dave Birch] Ben Whitaker is the COO at Masabi. He designed Masabi's award-winning EncryptME product, holds six patents in mobile security and was instrumental in designing the UK's new train ticketing standard for mobiles. Prior to founding Masabi Ben worked at IBM and Raytheon (Encrypted Radar Systems) and has an MEng from Cambridge University. In this podcast, Ben talks about bar code ticketing for mobiles, and what it might mean for identity systems.
Listen here in either [Podcast MPEG4] or [Sound-only MP3] format.

Steve Sawyer, Quova

[Dave Birch] Steve Sawyer is Vice President of Business Development Worldwide for Quova and oversees major projects involving Quova’s EMEA customers and partners including major broadcasters such as BBC, Sky TV, Channel 4 and RAINet who use Quova’s IP geolocation data to manage digital content distribution; ClearSale, ClickandBuy, GlobalCollect, and WiredMinds who use IP geolocation to help detect identify theft and card-not-present fraud; and RealMedia 24/7, SMART AdServer, and The Yoox Group, who use Quova’s data to localise their Web content and advertising; Gaming operators including Wagerworks and Ladbrokes who utilise the data to restrict illegal online bettors. In this podcast he explains how the IP geolocation technology works and where it might go in the future.
Listen here in either [Podcast MPEG4] or [Sound-only MP3] format.

Dean Bubley, Disruptive Analysis

[Dave Birch] Dean Bubley is the Founder of Disruptive Analysis, an independent technology industry analyst and consulting firm. An analyst with over 16 years’ experience, he primarily specialises in mobile, wireless, networking and telecoms fields. In this podcast, he talks about the mobile Internet might evolve and how the mobile phone with NFC might work as a transactional device as in Japan. Is the mobile phone going to be more important as an ID card than as a credit card?
Listen here in either [Podcast MPEG4] or [Sound-only MP3] format.

Tomi Ahonen

[Dave Birch] Tomi Ahonen is an author and independent consultant, well-known as a speaker in the converging areas of mobile telecoms, internet, media, advertising, credit and banking, and virtual reality, based in Hong Kong. A firm believer in digital communities and social networking, Tomi lectures on all of these topics at Oxford University for which he has developed the short courses for 3G services, 3G business, and mobile-TV. In this podcast [available in podcast MP4 or audio-only MP3 formats], he explains why the mobile is so distinct a channel and talks about digital footprints and co-created identity.

Ben Laurie, Google

[Dave Birch] Ben Laurie is a founding director of The Apache Software Foundation, a core team member of OpenSSL, a member of the Shmoo Group, a director of the Open Rights Group, Director of Security at The Bunker Secure Hosting, Trustee and Founder-member of FreeBMD and Advisory Board member of WikiLeaks.org. He is currently working with Google in London on various projects, including their Caja Javascript sanitizer project. In this podcast, he talks about the "red pill / blue pill" model for internet security, the potential role of the mobile phone and the prospects for a couple of current identity management initiatives.

I'm sure banks have a strategy for this kind of thing

[Dave Birch] Some time ago, I pointed out that sensible retailers would use ID cards to cut payment schemes out of the transaction loop, by using ID cards as payment tokens and using the ACH network rather than Visa or MasterCard. I've just written another piece on this for Electronic Finance & Payments Law & Policy.

As I have long been advising our clients in the payment space, there will be inevitable implications for retail payments businesses once a national ID card is in place.

[From Digital Identity Forum: Paying for identity]

Retailers want business change, not just lower fees. Now, a barrier to their competing with existing card schemes themselves has been the cost of issuing and managing secure smart cards or other tokens. But if the government is going to do it for them, then they may as well exploit it. I can easily imagine taking my ID card and a blank cheque down to Tesco, putting them both into a machine and punching in my PIN. Then, next time I go shopping, I punch my PIN into the keypad at the checkout lane, wave my ID card over a reader and then go on my way. This kind of the service has already begun to spring up in the U.S.A., in response to the issuing of “Real ID”drivers’ licences which have machine readable magnetic stripes that can be read at POS terminals. A company called National Payment Card (NPC) has begun to exploit the opportunity, by getting customers to register their bank details and a PIN against their licence. This means that customers can then pay for fuel by swiping their licenses at petrol stations and entering a PIN. A similar national scheme has just launched in Malaysia, where one of the leading banks has begun installing kiosks where customers can use their bank chip card and the MyKad ID card (without biometric authentication) together to link the ID card with the bank account automatically:

Consumers will have to open either a savings or a current account with EON Bank, which is the only bank providing payment transactions through the MyKad at the moment.

[From Buy fuel with your MyKad]

The scheme is targeting the fuel sector in the first instance and has signed up all Caltex and BHP filling stations, so that customers can fill up and they pay at the pump with their ID card. Since the margins on fuel are thin, the sector has every incentive to cut payment schemes out of the loop and move to direct bank transfer via ACH. I wonder if they even bother to authorise the transactions: after all, if you try to cheat them by presenting the ID card when you have no money in the bank, they have your ID details and I imagine you'll be hotlisted pretty quickly.