David Birch: A new way to stop identity theft

So I thought I'd talk about identity.

That's sort of an interesting enough topic to me.

And the reason was, because when I was asked to do this,

I'd just read in one of the papers, I can't remember,

something from someone at Facebook saying,

"Well, we need to make everybody use their real names,

and then that's basically all the problems solved."

And that's so wrong,

that's such a fundamentally reactionary view of identity,

and it's going to get us into all sorts of trouble.

And so what I thought I'd do is,

I'll explain four sort of problems about it,

and then I'll suggest a solution,

which, hopefully, you might find interesting.

So just to frame the problem:

What does "authenticity" mean?

That's me,

that's a camera phone picture of me looking at a painting.

[What's the Problem?]

That's a painting that was painted by a very famous forger,

and because I'm not very good at presentations,

I already can't remember the name that I wrote on my card.

And he was incarcerated in, I think, Wakefield Prison,

for forging masterpieces by, I think, French Impressionists.

And he's so good at it that when he was in prison,

everybody in prison, the governor and whatever,

wanted him to paint masterpieces to put on the walls

because they were so good.

And so that's a masterpiece, which is a fake of a masterpiece,

and bonded into the canvas is a chip which identifies that as a real fake,

if you see what I mean.

(Laughter)

So when we're talking about authenticity,

it's a little more fractal than it appears,

and that's a good example to show it.

I tried to pick four problems that will frame the issue properly.

So the first problem, I thought, chip and PIN, right?

[Banks and legacies bringing down the system from within]

[Offline solutions do not work online]

Everyone's got a chip and PIN card, right?

So why is that a good example?

That's the example of how legacy thinking about identity

subverts the security of a well-constructed system.

That chip-and-PIN card that's in your pocket

has a little chip on it that cost millions of pounds to develop,

is extremely secure,

you can put scanning electron microscopes on it,

you can try and grind it down, blah blah blah.

Those chips have never been broken, whatever you read in the paper.

And for a joke, we take that supersecure chip,

and we bond it to a trivially counterfeitable magnetic stripe.

And for very lazy criminals, we still emboss the card.

So if you're a criminal in a hurry and you need to copy someone's card,

you can just stick a piece of paper on it and rub a pencil over it

just to speed things up.

And even more amusingly, and on my debit card, too,

we print the name and the sort code and everything else on the front.

Why?

There is no earthly reason why your name is printed on a chip-and-PIN card.

And if you think about it,

it's even more insidious and perverse than it seems at first.

Because the only people that benefit from having the name on the card

are criminals.

You know what your name is, right?

(Laughter)

And when you go into a shop and buy something,

it's a PIN -- he doesn't care what the name is.

The only place you ever have to write your name on the back

is in America.

Whenever I go to America,

and I have to pay with a magstripe on the back of the card,

I always sign it "Carlos Tethers" anyway, just as a security mechanism,

because if a transaction ever gets disputed,

and it comes back and it says "Dave Birch,"

I know it must have been a criminal,

because I would never sign it "Dave Birch."

(Laughter)

So if you drop your card in the street,

it means a criminal can pick it up and read it.

They know the name, from the name, they can find the address,

and then they can go off and buy stuff online.

Why do we put the name on the card?

Because we think identity is something to do with names,

and because we're rooted in the idea of the identity card,

which obsesses us.

And I know it crashed and burned a couple of years ago,

but if you're someone in politics or the Home Office or whatever,

and you think about identity,

you can only think of identity in terms of cards with names on.

And that's very subversive in a modern world.

So the second example I thought I'd use

is chat rooms.

[Chatrooms and Children]

I'm very proud of that picture.

That's my son playing in his band with his friends

for the first-ever gig, I believe you call it, where he got paid.

(Laughter)

And I love that picture.

I'll like the picture of him getting into medical school a lot better,

(Laughter)

I like that one for the moment.

Why do I use that picture?

Because that was very interesting, watching that experience as an old person.

So him and his friends,

they get together, they booked a room, like a church hall,

and they got all their friends who had bands, got them together,

and they do it all on Facebook,

and then they sell tickets, and the first band on the --

I was going to say "menu," that's probably the wrong word for it, isn't it?

The first band on the list of bands

that appears at some public music performance of some kind

gets the sales from the first 20 tickets,

then the next band gets the next 20,

and so on.

They were at the bottom of the menu, like, fifth,

I thought they had no chance.

He actually got 20 quid. Fantastic, right?

But my point is, that all worked perfectly,

except on the web.

So they're sitting on Facebook,

and they're sending these messages and arranging things,

and they don't know who anybody is, right?

That's the problem we're trying to solve.

If only they were using real names,

then you wouldn't be worried about them on the internet.

So when he says to me,

"Oh, I want to go to a chat room to talk about guitars" or something,

I'm like, "Oh, well, I don't want you to go into a chat room

to talk about guitars,

because they might not all be your friends,

and some of the people that are in the chat room

might be, you know, perverts and teachers and vicars --"

(Laughter)

I mean, they generally are, when you look in the paper, right?

"So I want to know who all the people in the chat room are.

So, OK, you can go in the chat room,

but only if everybody in the chat room is using their real names,

and they submit full copies of their police report."

(Laughter)

But of course, if anybody in the chat room asked for his real name,

I'd say, "No. You can't give them your real name,

because what happens if they turn out to be perverts

and teachers and whatever?"

So you have this odd sort of paradox

where I'm happy for him to go into this space

if I know who everybody else is,

but I don't want anybody else to know who he is.

And so you get this sort of logjam around identity,

where you want full disclosure from everybody else,

but not from yourself.

And there's no progress, we get stuck.

So the chat room thing doesn't work properly,

and it's a very bad way of thinking about identity.

Cheerleading ... so, on my RSS feed, I saw this thing about --

I just said something bad about my RSS feed, didn't I?

I should stop saying it like that.

For some random reason I can't imagine,

something about cheerleaders turned up in my in-box.

And I read this story about cheerleaders, and it's a fascinating story.

This happened a couple of years ago in the US.

There were some cheerleaders in a team at a high school in the US,

and they said mean things about their cheerleading coach,

as I'm sure kids do about all of their teachers all of the time,

and somehow, the cheerleading coach found out about this.

She was very upset.

So she went to one of the girls and said,

"You have to give me your Facebook password."

I read this all the time,

where even at some universities and places of education,

kids are forced to hand over their Facebook passwords.

So you have to give them your Facebook password.

So the kid -- she was a kid! -- what she should have said is,

"My lawyer will be calling you first thing in the morning.

It's an outrageous imposition on my Fourth Amendment right to privacy.

You'll be sued for all the money you've got!"

That's what she should have said.

But she's a kid, so she hands over the password.

The teacher can't log in,

because the school has blocked access to Facebook.

So the teacher can't log into Facebook till she gets home.

So the girl tells her friends,

"Guess what happened? The teacher logged in. She knows."

So the girls all logged into Facebook and deleted their profiles.

So when the teacher logged in, there was nothing there.

My point is: those identities, they don't think about them the same way.

Identity is -- especially when you're a teenager -- a fluid thing.

You have lots of identities, you experiment with them.

And if you have an identity you don't like because it's subverted in some way

or it's insecure or it's inappropriate,

you just delete it and get another one.

The idea that you have an identity that's given to you by someone,

the government or whatever,

and you have to stick with that identity and use it in all places

is absolutely wrong.

Why would you want to really know who someone was on Facebook,

unless you wanted to abuse them and harass them in some way?

It just doesn't work properly.

And my fourth example is,

there are some cases where you really want to be --

in case you're wondering, that's me at the G20 protest.

I wasn't actually at the G20 protest,

but I had a meeting at a bank on the day of the G20 protest.

And I got an email from the bank, saying,

"Please don't wear a suit, because it'll inflame the protesters."

I look pretty good in a suit, frankly,

so you can see why it would drive them into an anticapitalist frenzy.

(Laughter)

So I thought, "Well, if I don't want to inflame the protesters,

the obvious thing to do is go dressed as a protester."

So I went dressed completely in black, you know, black balaclava ...

I had black gloves on but took them off to sign the visitors' book.

(Laughter)

I'm wearing black trousers and boots, I'm dressed completely in black.

I go into the bank at 10am and go, "Hi, I'm Dave Birch,

I've got a 3 o'clock with so-and-so."

"Sure!" And they sign me in. There's my visitor's badge.

(Laughter)

So this nonsense about "you've got to have real names on Facebook" and whatever,

that gets you that kind of security.

That gets you "security theater,"

where there's no actual security,

but people are sort of playing parts in a play about security,

and as long as everybody learns their lines,

everyone's happy.

But it's not real security, right?

Especially because I hate banks more than the G20 protesters do,

because I work for them.

I know that things are actually worse than these guys think.

(Laughter)

But suppose I worked next to somebody in a bank

who was doing something --

you know, they were like people who take the money from banks and don't ...

you know, they take the money ...

Oh -- "traders." That's the word I was thinking of.

Suppose I was sitting next to a rogue trader,

and I want to report it to the boss of the bank.

So I log on to do a little whistleblowing.

I send a message, "This guy's a rogue trader."

That message is meaningless

if you don't know that I'm a trader at the bank.

If that message just comes from anybody,

it has zero information value.

There's no point in sending that message.

You have to know that I'm ...

But if I have to prove who I am,

I'll never send that message.

It's just like the nurse in the hospital reporting the drunk surgeon.

That message will only happen if I'm anonymous.

So the system has to have ways of providing anonymity in it,

otherwise, we don't get where we want to get to.

So, four issues.

So what are we going to do about it?

Well, what we tend to do about it

is we think about Orwell-space.

And we try to make electronic versions of the identity card

that we got rid of in 1953.

So we think if we had a card --

call it a Facebook login --

which proves who you are,

and I make you carry it all the time,

that solves the problem.

And of course, for all those reasons I've just outlined, it doesn't,

and it might make some problems worse.

The more times you're forced to use your real identity,

certainly in transactional terms,

the more likely that identity is to get stolen and subverted.

The goal is to stop people from using identity

in transactions which don't need identity,

which is actually almost all transactions.

Almost all of the transactions you do are not "Who are you?"

They're "Are you allowed to drive the car?"

"Are you allowed in the building?" "Are you over 18?"

etcetera, etcetera.

So my suggestion -- I, like James,

think that there should be a resurgence of interest in R and D.

I think this is a solvable problem.

It's something we can do about.

Naturally, in these circumstances, I turn to Doctor Who.

Because in this --

(Laughter)

as in so many other walks of life,

Doctor Who has already shown us the answer.

So I should say, for some of our foreign visitors:

Doctor Who is the greatest living scientist in England --

(Laughter)

and a beacon of truth and enlightenment to all of us.

And this is Doctor Who with his "psychic paper."

Come on, you guys must have seen Doctor Who's "psychic paper."

You're not nerds if you say yes.

Who's seen Doctor Who's psychic paper?

Oh right, you were in the library the whole time studying, I guess.

Is that what you're going to tell us?

Doctor Who's psychic paper is:

when you hold up the psychic paper,

the person, in their brain,

sees the thing that they need to see.

So I want to show you a British passport,

I hold up the psychic paper,

you see a British passport.

I want to get into a party,

I hold up the psychic paper,

I show you a party invitation.

You see what you want to see.

So what I'm saying is, we need to make an electronic version of that,

but with one tiny, tiny change,

which is that it'll only show you the British passport

if I've actually got one.

It'll only show you the party invitation if I actually have one.

It will only show you that I'm over 18 if I actually am over 18.

But nothing else.

So you're the bouncer at the pub, you need to know that I'm over 18.

Instead of showing you my driving license,

which shows you I know how to drive,

what my name is, my address, all these kind of things,

I show you my psychic paper,

and all it tells you is, am I over 18 or not.

Right.

Is that just a pipe dream?

Of course not, otherwise I wouldn't be here talking.

So, in order to build that and make it work,

I'm only going to name these things, I'll not go into them:

we need a plan,

which is, we're going to build this as an infrastructure

for everybody to use to solve all of these problems.

We're going to make a utility.

The utility has to be universal, you can use it everywhere.

I'm just giving you little flashes of the technology as we go along.

That's a Japanese ATM,

the fingerprint template is stored inside the mobile phone.

So when you want to draw money out,

you put the phone on the ATM and touch your finger,

your fingerprint goes through to the phone,

the phone says, "Yes, that's whoever,"

and the ATM then gives you some money.

It has to be a utility that you can use everywhere.

It has to be absolutely convenient.

That's me going into the pub.

All the device on the door of the pub is allowed is:

Is this person over 18 and not barred from the pub?

And so the idea is, you touch your ID card to the door,

and if I'm allowed in, it shows my picture,

if I'm not, it shows a red cross.

It doesn't disclose any other information.

It has to have no special gadgets.

That can only mean one thing, following on from Ross's statement,

which I agree with completely: if it means no special gadgets,

it has to run on a mobile phone.

That's the only choice we have, to make it work on mobile phones.

There are 6.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions.

My favorite statistic of all time: only 4 billion toothbrushes in the world.

That means something. I don't know what.

(Laughter)

I rely on our futurologists to tell me.

It has to be a utility which is extensible.

So it has to be something that anybody could build on.

Anybody should be able to use this infrastructure;

you don't need permissions, licenses, whatever.

Anyone should be able to write some code to do this.

Well, you know what symmetry is, so you don't need a picture of it.

This is how we're going to do it.

We're going to do it using phones and mobile proximity.

I'm going to suggest to you

the technology to implement Doctor Who's psychic paper is already here,

and if any of you have got one of the new Barclay's debit cards

with the contactless interface on it,

you've already got that technology.

Have you ever been up to the big city and used an Oyster card?

Does that ring a bell?

The technology already exists.

The first phones that have the technology built in --

the Google Nexus, the S II, the Samsung Wave 578 --

the first phones that have the technology built into them are already in the shops.

So the idea that the gasman can turn up at my mum's door,

and he can show my mum his phone,

and she can tap it with her phone,

and it'll come up with green if he really is from British Gas

and allowed in,

and will come up with red if he isn't, end of story.

We have the technology to do that.

And what's more,

although some of those things sound a bit counterintuitive,

like proving I'm over 18 without proving who I am,

the cryptography to do that not only exists,

it's extremely well-known and well-understood.

Digital signatures, the blinding of public key certificates --

these technologies have been around for a while,

we've just had no way of packaging them up.

So the technology already exists.

We know it works.

There are a few examples of the technology being used

in experimental places.

That's London Fashion Week,

where we built a system with O2.

That's for the Wireless Festival in Hyde Park.

You can see the person's walking in with their VIP band,

it's being checked by the Nokia phone that's reading the band.

I'm only putting those up to show you these things are prosaic,

this stuff works in these environments.

They don't need to be special.

So finally, I know that you can do this,

because if you saw the Easter special of Doctor Who,

where he went to Mars in a bus --

I should say, again, for our foreign students:

that doesn't happen in every episode.

This was a very special case.

So in the episode where he goes to Mars in a London bus --

I can't show you the clip,

due to the outrageous restrictions of Queen Anne-style copyright

by the BBC --

but in the episode where he goes to Mars in a London bus,

Doctor Who is clearly shown getting onto the bus

with the Oyster card reader

using his psychic paper.

Which proves that psychic paper has an NFC interface.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)