The Privacy Battle REAL ID and the Threat of a National ID System Benjamin P Grubin Harvard Business School CS199r Privacy and Technology Michael Smith and Jim Waldo Spring 2007 Final Project Table of Contents 1 INTRODUCTION 1 2 THE REAL ID ACT OF 2005 7 2 1 REAL ID REQUIREMENTS 7 2 1 1 Scope of the REAL ID 8 2 1 2 Supporting Documentation 9 2 1 3 Physical Format 10 2 1 4 Data Format 11 2 2 3 4 THE UNFUNDED MANDATE 12 THE NATIONAL ID DEBATE 13 3 1 PRIVACY CONCERNS 14 3 2 NATIONAL SECURITY CONCERNS 18 CONCLUSION 21 The Privacy Battle 1 Benjamin P Grubin Introduction And the Lord said Behold the people is one and they have all one language And now nothing will be restrained from them which they imagined to do GENESIS 11 There are distinct advantages to a common means of identification First and foremost that we may recognize each other for who we truly are without question or reservation and in doing so form an implicit bond of trust that we may seek out the individual before us in the future This bond of trust is a great enabler not only of productive social interaction but also of a strong and sustainable transaction economy Throughout history a community imbued with a sense of shared responsibility has led to a stronger society and a stronger nation It is only when we know each other that we can feel responsible for one other In the ancient world the social fabric was knit from small closely coupled groups sharing a geographic area By and large all members of a group knew all other members at a physical level any member could identify another by sight voice and mannerism In such an environment there can be little question of a person s identity and the group could immediately recognize the comings and goings of individuals When groups like this expanded to numbers and areas beyond which an individual could be expected to keep track the practice of 1 The Privacy Battle Benjamin P Grubin marking or adorning oneself with a recognizable symbol grew to meet the challenge of maintaining the group This practice has endured to the modern age where societies have grown to such extent that it is impossible for any individual to recognize more than a tiny minority of its members To service our need for identity and belonging nearly every adult human on the planet possesses some form of identification By and large this identification is issued by a state or nation to which we belong Each state beyond being united under a single recognizable symbol issues its own unique documentation to each member that allows the state its citizens and often the citizens of other states to recognize the holder of the documentation To satisfy our need for a connection to a person s physical appearance most documents of this ilk contain a photograph and some rudimentary description of their physical attributes Identification documents are more than just a means of conveniently transmitting your identification in a standard format it is a guarantee of sorts that the state from which the documentation was issued has verified your identity This foundation of trust is what allows the social fabric to grow beyond the personally recognizable without this trust it would be difficult if not impossible to maintain a cohesive social structure Without trust in identity contracts would be meaningless and the ability to conduct an arms length transaction destroyed It should be clear then the benefit strong identification provides 2 The Privacy Battle Benjamin P Grubin Go to let us go down and there confound their language that they may not understand one another s speech So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth and they left off to build the city Therefore is the name of it called Babel GENESIS 11 The strength of a means of identification is directly proportional to the trust in the issuing authority and the ease with which the document can be authenticated There are many ways to build the underlying trust Most commonly the criteria under which such identification documents may be issued is published and widely disseminated If the criteria are sufficient to assure the target audience for the identity documents that only the true individual could obtain such documents then trust in the documentation can be established In most cases this is relatively easy to achieve The more difficult aspect of producing strong identification documents is assuring their authenticity First a document must be recognized as an official issuance of a trustworthy state Second a document must be sufficiently difficult to duplicate or craft Third a document must make it easy to verify that the trustworthy state issued the document to the individual holding it On all three of these counts we must recognize some level of failure in the current system In the United States identification documents take all manner of shape and form Rarely are documents issued in one part of the union readily recognizable in 3 The Privacy Battle Benjamin P Grubin others Whether different size shape or construction sufficient differences exist that no individual can be expected to recognize the identification from any state different than his own There is one exception to this the United States passport Issued by the federal government the U S passport has a single form a unique and recognizable construction and sufficiently strict criteria for obtaining it that one can reasonably be assured that the bearer pictured within is him or herself In other states and countries this is generally true but in the U S and many others citizens are not required to hold a passport And if one does have a passport one is not required to carry it unless crossing international boundaries But again is it reasonable to expect that a citizen of the U S is capable of recognizing and authenticating an Estonian passport Of course not Thus the pattern is repeated on an international scale The world we live in today is one of many different states and nationalities each with their own forms of identification There is no question this confounds the process of identifying the individual The question that remains is whether there is any underlying benefit to this system in allowing the individual to remain unidentified The question that remains is whether there is value in privacy and whether the present weak forms of identification meaningfully support this end Invisible to the average American the battle is being waged in the halls of power in Washington DC