“The U.S. passport is the gold standard for identification. It certifies an individual’s identity and U.S. citizenship, and allows the passport holder to travel in and out of the United States and to foreign countries, obtain further identification documents, and set up bank accounts,” [Md. Sen. Benjamin] Cardin said. “We simply cannot issue U.S. passports in this country on the basis of fraudulent documents. There is too much at stake.”
Identity management is about people and trust.
Because the U.S. government, and the society from which its power is derived, is among the most trusted in the world, the identity documents that it issues are accepted with near universality.
The integrity of the process and the people involved in it is what confers legitimacy upon the document and its bearer and makes modern globalized travel (among other things) possible. This integrity of person and process, however, also raises the incentives to obtain a fraudulent U.S. passport precisely because it is so trusted.
In the linked article, the reason given for the State Department's issuance of five passports requested with fraudulent information is essentially that the system in place is under stress due to the volume of identifications that it is requested to make with absolute certainty. Because the errors by the Bureau of Consular Affairs stem from over-stressing the passport issuing apparatus rather than corruption, it makes sense to try to improve how passports are issued rather than who issues them.
Technology can really help with this sort of challenge. Giving better tools to those trying to do the right thing makes the world a better place. Giving better tools to those who aren't trying to do the right thing can have the opposite effect.
Technology can really help with this sort of challenge. Giving better tools to those trying to do the right thing makes the world a better place. Giving better tools to those who aren't trying to do the right thing can have the opposite effect.
In so many of the articles I read about new identity management technologies there seems to be an unstated premise that we in the industry are attempting to develop autonomous systems in order to control the behavior of ordinary people.
What is closer to the truth is that we are trying to help ordinary people make better decisions about who they can trust.
A lot about what makes living in the information age a wonderful thing is that we have the power to forge relationships (commercial, financial, romantic, etc.) with a quantity of individuals that is orders of magnitude larger than anything humans have ever experienced. This fact has forced people to come up with new tools to assess who is and who is not trustworthy.
Granted, these tools aren't always technological. The use of branding to confer trust is a very old technique indeed and it's actually pretty close to what the Senator is talking about in the quote above. The U.S. brand confers the trust that the identity document is accurate and authentic, but the U.S. can and does use technology in maintaining the value of its brand. If the brand wasn't worth protecting, no amount of technology could confer trust.
The linked article is worth reading in its entirety.
A lot about what makes living in the information age a wonderful thing is that we have the power to forge relationships (commercial, financial, romantic, etc.) with a quantity of individuals that is orders of magnitude larger than anything humans have ever experienced. This fact has forced people to come up with new tools to assess who is and who is not trustworthy.
Granted, these tools aren't always technological. The use of branding to confer trust is a very old technique indeed and it's actually pretty close to what the Senator is talking about in the quote above. The U.S. brand confers the trust that the identity document is accurate and authentic, but the U.S. can and does use technology in maintaining the value of its brand. If the brand wasn't worth protecting, no amount of technology could confer trust.
The linked article is worth reading in its entirety.
