In their new book, Personal Identification: Modern Development and Security Implications (Second Edition), co-authors David J. Haas and Brian Zimmer offer a comprehensive look at the evolution of personal identification in the U.S., including a century of increasing demand for “trusted and secure” IDs such as passports and state-issued driver’s licenses. The authors also review the factors that have necessitated personal ID documents aligned with modern mobile populations and electronic communications, as well as concerns over national security. Here we feature an excerpt from the book.
How Social Changes Created the Need for Personal ID Documents
The need for identification documents today is real, and the personal numbers assigned to us are a natural development of modern governments, modern commercial innovations, and computerization of the business world. In other words, if personal IDs and the documents developed to display them had not occurred naturally, they surely would have been forced upon us by our modern society.
The four societal changes that have occurred over the past 100 years that created the need for personal identification are the development of large and mobile populations over the past century, the development of “impersonal” electronic communications at a distance, the passage of government laws with “age” and “group” criteria, the distribution of services and money by government agencies based on a person’s identity criteria and recent terrorism events.
The general worldwide population did not possess or carry any identification papers before the 20th century. Several patents issued before 1900 describe means of making simple paper documents, passes, and tickets more secure, particularly to prevent them from being transferred or used by other people (the traditional #1 issue with ID). These patented ideas incorporate devices to help link the owner of the document (ticket) to the document itself so that the official, clerk, or agent approving the use of the document can ensure that the person holding the document is the actual owner. Some of the early documents incorporate a physical description of the person so that the official can observe the person’s hair color or height: a visual confirmation that the person is the one described on the document itself.
Then, after the invention of suitable photographic film, photographs were incorporated into these patented innovations so that the official could visually compare the person’s face with the actual image on the document. Whereas patents may have incorporated good ideas, they were impractical because the technology of the time did not permit them to produce such documents easily or economically, and maybe more important, instantly.
It appears that attempts to make identification documents on safety papers never succeeded during the early 20th century. This is not an unusual phenomenon because it is a well-known fact that security and safety almost always fall victim to cost–benefit analysis in the decision-making process. Only when security and safety are mandatory are they always executed. Employee ID cards, government ID cards, and police badges all lacked tamper resistance and serious security features during these early years. Whereas counterfeiting techniques were perfected a century ago, tamper-resistant and tamper-indicating technologies did not become effective until the plastic lamination processes were introduced after 1940. Money and financial documents typically have more inherent value than identification documents, so more sophisticated printing techniques could be justified. The invention of security printing and safety paper was the initial technology for producing truly secure documents.
Before 1900, people knew that identity documents were subject to alteration and that they were being used by non-owners. Even though several patents describing how to make these monthly train tickets secure from abuse were issued, the railroads never introduced them (Railroad Historians, Personal communication). There were many patents filed to enable the addition of people’s images to checks and other financial documents, yet these do not appear to have been commercialized. In a risk analysis of the businesses affected by this fraud, their decision is usually to accept the loss simply as a business expense instead of solving the problem with more secure documents.
Even after fingerprints were accepted around the world as a unique biometric for individual identification circa 1900, introducing documents with people’s fingerprints for establishing a unique biometric of the person never happened. The use of an identification document or ticket must permit the “accepting” official to readily link the document to the individual. This examination process can only take a few seconds and be reliably used by the average agent. For publicly used identification documents, fingerprints are not practical as a human-recognizable biometric. Thus, even though fingerprints became the first practical biometric for positive identification purposes, their application to personal identification documents for positive linkage was impractical.
In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, the British government required that all domestic and foreign Passports have the individual’s photograph attached to protect Great Britain from foreign agents. There was no lamination process at this time, so photographs were simply glued on and embossed on the passport page. This was satisfactory for passports, but the procedure did not transfer well to other publicly held identification documents. The British officials were aware that the only biometric suitable for human recognition was a person’s photograph. So even with the inconvenience and expense required to have appropriate photographs taken, the war’s need made it mandatory for this security process. Passport design and contents were specified by the individual’s particular country, so passports created before World War I could contain a variety of data. Once the British had established specific passport components, a standardization process began, which evolved after the war in 1921 to the League of Nations Committee on Passports, thus creating the uniform passport we have today.
Without a suitable technology available to efficiently add photographs to identification documents, there was no change in the per-sonal identification documents for the public until the 1950s, when photo ID technology caught up to the public need. Even though many biometric identifiers had been discovered early in the 20th century, none proved more useful for public documents other than the photograph. Examples of this are the fingerprint dating from 1900 and the retina of the eye dating from 1934.
Beginning with the Social Security Card in 1935, the US federal and State governments began issuing the public documents that could serve for trusted identification. However, even if consideration had been given to adding a person’s photograph to these documents, the logistics and cost of obtaining and applying these photographs were impractical. It appears that no serious consideration was even given to making these early government-issued documents secure. Such examples include the Social Security Card, the draft card, and the military ID card. Before 1940, only the passport retained the aura of a “secure” government-issued document.
From our research, we have drawn the conclusion that several “social pressures” created sufficient demand by the public and specific interested groups (stakeholders) to add photographs and security-features to some document, and the document of choice was obvious to knowledgeable people of the time – the State-issued Driver’s License.
A photo identification document for the public came together during the 1950s when the AAMVA took the responsibility of proposing that photographs be incorporated into the driver’s license issuing process. Social pressures, technical developments, and an enlightened independent agency paved the way for photo driver’s licenses. There was no acknowledged initiative by the AAMVA of providing each US citizen with a positive form of identification. This was a failure on the part of Congress for not creating a means of ensuring that the driver’s license was also qualified to be a trusted identification document.
Politically, issuing a positive form of ID such as a driver’s license by the States was not equivalent to issuing the dreaded national identity card. Each State would be responsible for their own citizens. Secondly, the citizens voluntarily presented themselves to the MVA during the application process, so the agency would be sure that the photograph on the license was the actual person who passed the test. Thirdly, by 1958, technical advances in security printing, instant photography, and card lamination had advanced to the point where durable, tamper-resistant documents could be produced. Fourthly, because of the high-volume production of photo ID badges during World War II, photographic processes, magazine cameras, and even Polaroid instant photography were now available. Thus, photo driver’s licenses required only the initiative on the part of the State legislatures to add photographs to their driver’s licenses.
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