A couple weeks ago, I posted the following question on the Internet Identity Workshop email list (a group maintained by the Identity Gang), What is human subject digital identity without any government-issued identity credential, or government certified identity attribute?
I got a first answer that expresses the reflex of skepticism and suspicion toward government authority, probably more common in North America, especially in the US where such thing as national identity was (and to some, still is) a total nonsense a few years ago – “My identity, my me-ness has little to do with any government entity.” Assuredly! But I’m not quite sure that my “me-ness” is what is recorded in the computing devices and networked databases.
But he was absolutely right, Dave; identity is not defined by governments. I was born in Africa, and like everyone else’s, my parents gave me my names (in some cases in fact the whole community or clan does this.) Then, because we already were in the modern ages, they had to go to the city hall to declare my names, my date of birth, and their own names and other attributes asserting them as my parents, in order to establish my “certificate of birth” (needless to say, it is an administrative procedure we inherited from the European modern state through colonization.) From then on, most of my dealings with any authority, whether state/administrative, education or economic/commercial, will ultimately rely on the assertions made on that piece of paper.
All what we know of my father’s date of birth was the year, which was an estimate or a determination several years after the fact, just as for most Africans of his generation, let alone the older ones. Depending on the circumstances, this could be done quite (or nearly) accurately by cross-referencing with other known events at the time of birth. Ironically you may say, many members of the first governments in the then newly independent nations were in the same case, and of course they had an identity – the most “official” one, even. Their parents in the villages, who had no clue what a modern state was, had of course an identity (often more based on *relations*, trust and reputation, rather than on isolated atoms of information centrally recorded). The nation-state and other forms of modern state are historical and even cultural advent, originating from and institutionalized by the Westphalia treaty as it’s generally called (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia). In all likelihood, the current political system will not be there forever, while identity will, though its forms and expressions have also evolved in the past and still will.
The question is, *in the period we are living in*, what are our chances to walk in a bank for the first time and do business solely based on the identity assertions we make without that official backup? Or on those made by our parents, aunts, uncles or other close friends we bring along with us, either in the physical or in the digital world? What are our chances to complete a commercial transaction online without using a payment instrument that was initially based on that government backup? Granted, there are other situations, e.g. social networking, where we might not need that backup (but then we may have other or more problems to solve, as a consequence.)
Why the government-issued identity is so widely used at least as reference, if not as the ultimate authoritative identity (including in cultures & areas where individuals widely share a common suspicion towards governments)? It occurs to me that this is because identity is more about trust than anything else, and governments are the first or earliest institutional witnesses, the first real third party that knows things about us. Outside our private circles, they have the longest memory about us. Besides, they are the guardians of certain collective rules, those that we have collectively come to devote the maximum resources for enforcement – indicating somehow their importance to the collective. Acting as rule makers and enforcers on our behalf (no matter how contending we might individually be in that regard), they are better placed, and we rely on them, to tell if the person we are dealing with has (critically) broken any of those rules so that we can determine to what extent we can trust her.
The governments could cease to have that role of reference when instituted third parties would come to be as early witnesses of our public life as the governments – or earlier enough witnesses for what the relying party is concerned with about us.
