How to Give the Government New Power to “Un-Person” Someone, in Three Easy Steps

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The big push for state digital driver's licenses that we’ve been warning about is effectively a movement to increase the power of big companies and government to control individuals. One feature of the licenses most states are adopting that may prove to be particularly dangerous is revocation — how and when people’s IDs can be canceled.

Want to give the government powers that are brand new in human history? Just follow these three easy steps:

1. Build A Digital Driver’s License With Centralized Revocation Capability
   First, build a new digital identity system, such as digital driver’s licenses, that comes to serve as the proof of identity (and age, and residency, and other characteristics) for the vast majority of the population in the vast majority of use cases. Include provisions that allow the issuer (the government) to reach into people’s wallets and revoke those identities.
2. Allow Those Ids To Be Used For Everything So People Can’t Function Without Them
   Having created this infrastructure, do nothing to stop every store, business, and web site from exploiting it to demand that people present these IDs in order to access goods and services. As long as you don’t create protections for individuals (such as those that some states have erected around the scanning of barcodes on physical licenses), the rest will take care of itself. Your new ID system will make it frictionless to present an ID, which will make it easy for every business to demand your ID (imagine popups: “click here to share your ID”). They will have strong incentives to do so. They’ll want to make sure they’re certain who you are so they can sell you personalized ads, and sell your data, and maybe charge you different prices based on your identity. They’ll want to make sure you’re of age, identify you in case you later engage in wrongdoing, and make sure you haven’t been kicked off their site before. In no time, it will be impossible to do anything without presenting an ID — and before long, physical IDs may be treated as a second class after-thought as digital IDs become de facto mandatory.
3. Let Government Officials Yank People’s Ids Out Of Their Wallets
   Once this tower of dependencies is built on top of the identity system, now you have the power to revoke people’s IDs, cutting off in a single stroke their ability to access their accounts, visit much of the Internet, access government services, start a new job, obtain healthcare, and who knows what else. In short, kneecap their ability to function effectively in society in a way that evokes the concept of civil death, or George Orwell’s coining of the term “unperson” in 1984, meaning someone who is expunged and erased from any form of recognition by the state. (The above photo comes from an example under Stalin.)

Simply put, ubiquitous ID requirements plus centralized control is a terrible combination. People could be un-personed because of simple errors, because they have unfairly been accused of wrongdoing, or out of abusive targeting for political reasons. Lest anyone doubt that a political leader would actually take advantage of such an ability, let’s recall that in April the Trump Administration moved 6,000 immigrants who legally possessed social security numbers into the SSA’s “dead file,” cutting off their ability to work, receive benefits, use banks, and carry out other parts of normal life.

The transition from physical to digital
It has long been the case, of course, that the authorities can cancel physical licenses. But that now has limited effects on people’s lives. One reason is that the number of things for which a driver’s licenses is required, while on the rise, is still relatively limited — especially compared to the ubiquitous online and offline demands we fear will emerge if digital IDs are standardized without protections against excessive demands.

Another reason that revocation of physical IDs hasn’t been as much of an issue is that the government cannot reach into someone’s physical wallet and pluck out a revoked physical card. The holder can generally keep it and use it for age verification and identity proofing even if their driving privileges have been revoked. But with digital licenses, state governments can create a system that allows them to do just that: reach into your digital wallet in your phone and remotely deactivate your ID. It may be a gray area whether you can use an expired or revoked driving license for identification purposes — as long as the ID is genuine, there seems little reason not to permit that — but as a practical matter most parties checking your ID (other than police officers) have just never had a way of knowing whether your driver’s license has been revoked.

Why take away people’s ability to identity themselves online or prove their age or residency just because someone’s driving authorization has expired or been revoked? Our dates of birth, for example, never change, and other fields such as name and gender change only rarely if ever, and there’s little urgency in patrolling the freshness of those fields. This is reflected in the fact that most states only require people to update their physical driver’s licenses every 6-8 years. Arizona license holders can go decades without renewal, which is only required when one reaches age 65.

Prioritizing the interests of ID verifiers over ID holders
Many architects of emerging digital IDs, however, very much want to prioiritize revocation and, at the cost of giving officials the power to un-person someone, leverage the transition to digital to increase centralized control over people’s IDs. The standard for digital IDs now being adopted by many states was created by a secret committee at the International Standards Organization (ISO), and the standard’s treatment of revocation is a symptom of its lopsided construction: it goes to great lengths to make sure that no identity holder anywhere, at any time, can possibly get away with faking their identity, but is comparatively unconcerned about protecting the interests of those who hold these digital identities. The international ISO committee was made up of big tech companies such as Google and Apple, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and foreign governments — including, we may surmise, some with a less than healthy respect for individual rights, such as perhaps China and Russia. (The ISO refuses to say exactly who was on the secret drafting committee so as far as I’m concerned it’s fair to assume those countries were participants until the ISO deigns to show us otherwise.) In addition, the text of the ISO standard is a copyrighted, non-public text that costs thousands of dollars to even read.

No privacy, civil rights, civil liberties, labor, refugee, human rights, or other public interest advocates that we know of participated in the drafting of this standard. And it shows.

And so, the ISO standard and most of the states implementing it make no provision to prevent unnecessary revocations. Among states that have or are creating digital driver’s licenses, I’m aware of a handful — New Jersey, Illinois, and Utah — that have placed at least some statutory limits on the government’s revocation ability.

States must close the door to this potential form of abuse
Our recommendations to state legislatures are to limit the risks to individuals by requiring that any digital ID system make it technically impossible for an ID issuer to proactively disable people’s IDs. We don’t think legislatures that adopt a digital ID should incorporate remote revocation capabilities. Nor do we think ID holders should be forced to connect to the DMV or other issuer, except when they, acting on their own initiative, want to log in for a specific task such as an update or renewal. In the case of those whose driving privileges have been taken away, states should be banned from revoking any functions of a person’s IDs other than their driving permission. The state can require that people get an update when, for example, their address changes, as they do now — but such requirements don’t need to be enforced any differently than they are with physical licenses: it is up to the holder of the license to initiate the change. There should also be statutory limits on revocation of state-issued IDs as well as strong due-process protections.

No state should create a digital ID without at a minimum rethinking revocation and providing both legal and technological protections against this avenue of abuse. And more broadly, the states need to stop rushing into adoption of digital driver’s licenses without considering the very negative consequences they are likely to have.