There is a big hassle going on about the new Dutch passport. As of now, anyone wanting to acquire one needs to have his or her fingerprints taken. These prints will be centrally stored somewhere in a database and maybe retrieved again when some dodgy business of the prints owner is suspected. They will also end up in the passport itself, as a biometric security feature. The passport contains your unique civil-service number (BSN, as it is rather innocently called in the Netherlands), so in effect, this number is centrally connected to your fingerprint.
There is another thing going on in the Netherlands: the government wants to make motorists pay for their use of the road; a pay-as-you-drive scheme, as it were. They also want to be able to differentiate this levy. But in opposed to stacking more tax on fuel and at the same time abolishing road tax – which would be a great scheme to make the road users who are actually driving their cars pay for it too – we are going to do it totally different.
Besides the objective to make the car-users - and not the car owners – pay for the roads, the government is also trying to get a handle on the traffic-jam issue. And the government thinks that this can be achieved by making it attractive using cars outside rush hours, and by making it more expensive to use them during traffic peaks. Outside rush hours and off the notorious cause-ways, driving will be made cheaper. It sounds great, but there is a catch: in order to be able to manage all this, the government needs to know where every car has been, and when. So a lot of information about the whereabouts of every Dutch car is – like the fingerprint/BSN combination – going to be stored somewhere centrally too.
And this is where the fun starts: All of a sudden, the Netherlands is waking up to the fear of being under the yoke of Big Brother himself. And as is usually the case when fear becomes an advisor to the discussion: the most idiotic nonsense is flying all over the place. One conspiracy theory after the other sees the light. I must admit to one thing when I see these discussions going on: the Dutch are not particularly smart (they seem very human in that respect). And they are generally clueless as to assess their own privacy.
So what about the biometric passport discussion? Well, one can be brief on that: a fingerprint is not a fail-safe indicator for ones identity. Fingerprints can be lifted, stolen and forged, which defeats their usefulness as a bulletproof identifier. With DNA this might be somewhat different, but even here there is no guarantee. If I had a clone, my DNA would be useless as an identifier because my clone would have identical DNA. I could not be tied to a crime scene via my DNA signature for instance. I would be a forensic blind spot.
And you know what? I HAVE a clone. A natural one, made by (my) mother (nature) herself. It is my identical twin brother. Thus is demonstrated that fraud-proof biometry would have to be a combination of at least one unforgeable feature with one another. For instance, by combining the DNA signature and retina pattern.
And now, back to our cars. The discussion about the pay-as-you-drive scheme seems to focus on the issue of the “time and place information-combination” of the car. Namely, the fact that its whereabouts at any given time are recorded. And, as usual with the average motorist-commoner, he will assume that there is an unbreakable link between where his car was, and where he himself then must have been. He will take it as a fact that HIS whereabouts are recorded, as opposed to those of his cars. Such is the silliness level of the current nation-wide discussion. But alas, there is no cure for stupidity.
It gets even better though: in the entire debate a very important thing has been systematically ignored: the fact that most of us are leaving a very obvious and readily available trail, wherever we go. We do this by carrying cellphones which most of the time don’t do much else than telling the cell-antennas where they are. A cellphone is constantly handshaking with the network, to tell it where it – and therefore YOU – can be reached. So if “they” want to know where you were at a specific time, “they” will simply ask the telephone company! But any law-enforcement agency will also be aware of the soft side of this information. It will merely give them a strong indication as to where you were, because, as with your car, your telephone is not an un-removable attachment to yourself either. Anyone can take it from you. And lo and behold, I have as yet not heard anyone complain about the possibility of being traced via the cellphone. Now how is that for some interest-driven fact-perception?
Here comes the real “piece de resistance”: our High-Tech society seems to converge on High-Availability of network resources and anything we throw in there. We want to be able to access our digital personality everywhere and all the time. Our digital personality consists of our access data, like a social security number, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses. But there are also our personal files for instance. On top of that, we are also leaving an enormous digital trail with every institution we deal with on a regular basis. These are the banks, or the shops where we buy things with a credit- or debit card. We drop our name and number with insurance companies, the tax office, the community we live in and any other club we enlist with. In short, any institution where we officially identify ourselves with some (digital) marker has a record on us. And we expect more and more for our information to be available whenever and wherever we need it. What we also tend to forget is that we are leaving electronic tracks with every website we visit. The amount of recorded information per person is increasing. There is no way around it.
So where is this going exactly? Precisely: it is going towards a non-local storage – currently denominated with the very fashionable term “The Cloud” – of ones digital self. And we are all watching this happen and there is nothing we can do. The complexity of our physical environment and of our digital context as well simply dictates it.
There is no way back. But the most frightful thing is yet to come. And that is the principle of Universal Identification. More and more, the individual becomes dependent on digital information and the ability to identify himself to be granted access to this information. Civilians are becoming more mobile but at the same time he will expect to have access to any required service he might want anywhere on the planet. With this demand comes the requirement for a secure way to identify this individual. His identity will serve as the key to access any information this individual wants, or which he wants another institution to access on his behalf.
So where is the catch? Well, this is actually an easy one: If in some near or distant future the necessity of universal and global identification becomes the norm, then at some point the acquisition of biometry in some stage of an individual’s life will become normal too. This brings a very important question forward: how do we feel about giving a DNA sample to the “Global-Universal ID Database” right away at birth? Is that maybe the horror scenario of Big Brother proportions we have been dreading and we have wanted to avoid? Perhaps it is, but I predict that this is where we are going. And we will all take it for granted.
At the risk of being the only sane one left in the room, let me say that a High-Tech future is going to make human survival, with all 20 Billion of us on this planet, possible. We must face it. Nobody should be prohibited to procreate, so we will increase our numbers. And whomever does want to put a stop to our expansion as a species will have a big problem choosing the parameters. Will it be ethnicity or religion? Or a combination of both, like some misguided Teutonic Chauvinists tried in the second world war? The naked truth is that we will be with many more in the future and we will need to manage that; not only the people, but also the information they actively or passively generate. I predict – but admittedly, that is no rocket-science – that this will be done with highly centralised, efficient and comprehensive Civil Information Systems. Are you scared yet?
So, to be honest, do I care about my “data” being registered? No, I don’t. I can only hope that society will be smart enough to enforce its proper use and to sanction its abuse. That is how we can all make a difference; by voting for the appropriate laws and regulations, and by keeping the access to personal data in check. There is nothing else to it.
