Identity

As a German policeman once said, you are who your papers say you are. Take away those papers and you have no identity. This page will shortly look at passports, national identity cards and private cards. It will also cover fingerprinting, bertillonage, DNA registers and tattooing.

     issues

For an introduction to changing practices and issues see the outstanding set of essays in Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices since the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 01) edited by Jane Caplan & John Torpey.

     passports

John Torpey's The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship & the State (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 00) is essential reading.

     national registration schemes

The 11 September 2001 events revived enthusiasm in the US for a national ID card, with Oracle's Larry Ellison for example offering his support. We'll shortly be providing information about the Australia Card, smart-card national registration schemes in Europe and pre-digital registration schemes.

Joseph Eaton's Card-Carrying Americans - Privacy, Security, and the National ID Card Debate (Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield 96) calls for a national ID card scheme in the US to restrict illegal immigration and fraud.

     fingerprints

At the turn of last century in an excess of enthusiasm Argentina started to compile a national fingerprint register of all citizens. There have been few other overt national registers; most countries have followed the US approach of tacit registers based on criminal records and prints supplied for job applications or security clearances. Simon Cole's Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting & Criminal Identification (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 01) offers a serviceable introduction to dactyloscopy.

     bertillonage

Anthropometry or bertillonage (after its founder Alphonse Bertillon) - supposedly unique identification of criminals and worthies through detailed measurement of body features - is of interest as an early competitor to fingerprinting.

Bertillon based his scheme on the claim that the size of adult bones does not change throughout life and can be readily measured to create a unique identifier searched through a card system. Data included the height, length and breadth of the head, the length of different fingers and the length of forearms. Measurements were supplemented by photographs and, in some countries, by fingerprints (which were believed to be less reliable). Bertillon estimated that the odds of duplicate records were 286,435,456 to 1 if 14 such traits were used. Enthusiasm for the scheme evaporated in 1903, when identical measurements were obtained from two individuals at Fort Leavenworth prison in the US.

There's a useful and entertaining introduction in Caplan & Torpey (01).

     chips, tattooing and rectification

Many Australian cats and dogs feature an identification chip inserted under their skin, a development that's become more popular with declining costs and reconciliation of competing incompatible registers. Proposals to so identify kids or adults with radio-frequency identification chips (RFID) such as VeriChip resurface periodically, most recently after the 11 September 2001 hijackings. We'll be citing particular proposals and responses in the near future.

For tattooing see Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 00), edited by Jane Caplan. For graphic examples of the rectification of history - being airbrushed out of existence - see David King's The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs & Art In Stalin’s Russia (New York: Holt 97).

     DNA registers

For use and abuse of genetic material as a unique personal identifier see Who Owns Information? From Privacy to Public Access by Anne Wells Branscomb (New York: Basic Books 94), Genetic Information: Acquisition, Access and Control (New York: Kluwer 99) edited by Alison Thompson & Ruth Chadwick and Stored Tissue Samples: Ethical, Legal & Public Policy Implications (Iowa City: Iowa University Press 98) edited by Robert Weir. There's a useful discussion in Caplan & Torpey's Documenting Individual Identity, noted above, and in Genetic Secrets: Protecting Privacy & Confidentiality in the Genetic Era (New Haven: Yale Uni Press 97) edited by Mark Rothstein.

The Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) and Australian Health Ethics Committee (AHEC) 2001 community consultation paper on Protection of Human Genetic Information is here. Other documents of particular value are David Crosby's Protection of Genetic Information: An International Comparison (London: Human Genetics Commission 00), the 1999 Model Forensic Procedures Bill: DNA Database Provisions Discussion Paper from the Standing Committee of Attorneys-General in Australia. The Centre for Genetics & the Law (CGL) in Hobart has a project to map Australian and overseas legislation.

     other biometrics

Four methods of biometric authentication have gained some degree of commercial acceptance. They are fingerprint (noted above), voice, iris and face recognition.

Other proposals include recognition of retina patterns, blood chemistry and antibody signatures, ear structure, heart rhythm, thermal imaging of the face and hand, gait (walking style), typing/writing style, the pattern of subcutaneous bloodvessels and even body odour.

We've discussed particular technologies in more detail on the following page. There are few published overviews of significance; most of the literature is narrowly technical and devoted to specialities such as retina scanning or armpit sniffing. Two recommended introductions are Biometrics: Advanced Identify Verification: The Complete Guide by Julian Ashbourn (Berlin: Springer Verlag 00) and Biometrics: Personal Identification in Networked Society (New York: Kluwer 99) edited by Anil Jain, Ruud Bolle & Sharath Pankanti. For privacy aspects see the Ontario Privacy Commissioner's 1999 discussion paper Consumer Biometric Applications.

Vendors and industry bodies abound: useful starting points are the US Biometric Consortium (BC), the UK Association for Biometrics (AFB) and the International Biometric Industry Association (IBIA).





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