0:01 – Thanks, Chris. Sorry to interrupt so many great conversations, but this is when
0:05 I've been told to speak, so you're stuck with me. Again, Jay Stanley with the ACLU.
0:10 I've been working for a long time for the ACLU. I started in 2001 and I've been
0:17 dealing with a lot of tech issues since then. Things are constantly new, so it
0:23 keeps us on our feet. And the ACLU has always been against a national identity
0:28 system. We don't like a national ID for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it does
0:33 take away your individual identity and it makes it a bureaucratic artifact and it
0:39 threatens to create a system of tracking in which government agencies and big
0:44 businesses have a unique identifier, a key that you are stuck with and you cannot get
0:48 rid of that will track you across different areas. If one company is
0:52 tracking you here, one government agency is tracking you there, and somebody else
0:55 is tracking you there and they all have their silos, that is good for privacy. A
0:59 national identity system creates a unique identifier. And we've always… So we oppose
1:04 RealID because it basically turned our driver's licenses into a de facto
1:12 distributed national identity system. Now, a lot of the bad consequences that we
1:16 feared that would come from that have not materialized. It's sort of a low-key
1:20 national identity system that we have. But a lot of that is because it's physical.
1:26 And what we worry about with a digital identity is that it will fully bring forth
1:33 the negative potential that Americans across the political spectrum have always
1:38 worried about with a national ID system. And I work on privacy issues. I have
1:43 always gotten support from the left and from the right. I think among all the
1:46 issues the ACLU works on, it really is the least partisan. And I think with the
1:50 national identity issue, in some ways it is it is the left and the right against
1:56 people who aren't really thinking about it and just marching forward. And I think
1:59 that, you know, the driver's license started as a license to drive. You need
2:02 to, it's probably in the public interest to license people who are drivers, but it
2:07 has become something much bigger than that. It's become something much more
2:09 central to our society. And as it moves online, it's going to become much, much
2:15 bigger. And that is the goal of the digital identity proponents, of course.
2:24 So, we, I was ignoring the digital identity issue for a while because it
2:28 seemed like nothing was going to happen. And then in around 2001, I wrote a big
2:32 report because it seemed like this MDL thing was really happening in the States.
2:36 We were starting to see a lot of uptake. It was like, okay, this is real again. And
2:41 we were very concerned because it was created by an international group, the
2:46 ISO, which included, as we know, some big tech companies like Apple and Google and
2:52 some government agencies like DHS and AMVA. And we don't know who else is on it.
2:59 I asked them who else was on the committee and they refused to tell me. And also you
3:03 couldn't even see the standard without paying thousands of dollars and it was
3:06 copyrighted. What kind of a way is that to make public policy? Maybe that is okay for
3:10 light bulb standards or something like that, but for something that's going to be
3:13 at the heart of the relationship between government and the governed, that was very
3:16 dubious. And in fact, the ISO standard, the MDL standard, reflects the interests
3:22 of who was at that table, which is the verifiers. We're going to do everything
3:25 possible to make sure that nobody can ever fool a verifier about their identity, but
3:28 it doesn't reflect the interests of the holders, the people who are holding the
3:32 identity, the people whose identity has been granted to them by the DMVs under
3:37 this thing. So, we did a report in 2001 called Identity Crisis. And then over
3:45 time, me and my colleague, who is our technologist and others, refined our
3:49 thinking and put out a last year a set of state legislative recommendations for
3:55 state legislators with proposed language. It's kind of a work in progress. That's a
4:00 version 1.0. We're working on a second version now. But the question, you know,
4:05 we've been hearing talk all day today. We need a privacy protecting digital identity
4:09 system. We're going to have digital identity needs to be privacy protective.
4:12 Well, when the rubber hits the road, what does that look like? What is privacy
4:15 protective? And that's what we set out to answer and put some meat on the bones
4:18 there. And so this report basically has 12 items that we think state legislature
4:23 should pass and basically say our state shall not have a digital identity system
4:27 unless it has these technological qualities and comes with these policy
4:32 envelopes and protections because you can't do everything through technology.
4:35 Although we think you should do as much as you can with technology because it's much
4:38 harder to change and to back out of. So let me just I'm going to mention quickly
4:45 we're going to run through the 12 just so you have a flavor. You can look it up if
4:48 you're interested in any of those more. I might highlight one two, which might be
4:51 interesting that people have thought about. And then I'm going to finish with a
4:54 couple thoughts and then I'll be done in the next five minutes, which is how much
5:00 time I have. So one of the big features is no phone home. If I show my driver's
5:04 license to a liquor store clerk, they look at it. End of story. Nobody's the wiser.
5:08 If it's digital, there's the capability to create a record. And in particular for the
5:13 issuer, the DMV, the government or the companies that are their contractors to
5:20 see that that I've done that and what time and at what liquor store and everywhere
5:24 else that I show my ID. Locker's offices, etc. And it needs to be built without that
5:33 feature. There should be no phone home. We can build it. The ISO standard allowed for
5:38 that. And that is something that we've been working on. We think that a key
5:43 privacy feature is verifier unlinkability. If I show my digital driver's license at
5:51 six gun shops or six liquor stores or six doctor's offices, the companies involved
5:56 should not be able to… First of all, if I, for example, if I have to prove I'm over
6:00 18 or I'm over 21, they should just get a binary which a binary bit which says, yes,
6:06 no, this person's over 21 and it's encrypted and proofed. But there shouldn't
6:11 be a unique signature or any other unique identifier that is passed over as part of
6:16 that that can later be used to correlate all your presentations. And there are
6:20 there are readily available cryptographic techniques that can make that possible.
6:25 And that needs to be a part of a privacy protecting digital identity system. New
6:30 Jersey, which may have outside of Utah the best digital driver's license law, has
6:37 this. They say their law says, which was just passed a couple months ago, the
6:40 system shall ensure that a digital driver's license or non-digital license
6:44 includes techniques and methodologies that ensure that multiple presentations of non
6:49 -unique data by a the holder cannot be linked together by one or more verifiers.
6:55 The selective disclosure we think needs to be mandated that basically you should have
7:00 the right to disclose the minimum amount of data that is necessary for the
7:03 transaction. You are over 21, you are not. You are a resident of the city without
7:08 sharing your address. Whatever the use case may be, people should… relying
7:14 parties, verifiers shouldn't get any more than they need for that transaction.
7:17 Here's an interesting one and I talked about this in one of breakouts, there
7:20 shouldn't be a government's kill switch for your identity. And I think that's
7:23 where the philosophical approach of the government endorses your identity and
7:27 doesn't create or bestow upon you your identity. But in bureaucratic sense,
7:32 that's what is happening in some senses. And there is a real potential that the
7:37 government is going to have a significant power that it has never had before. Three
7:42 steps. Step one, create a digital identity system. Step two, allow a bunch of
7:47 dependencies to be built on that. And some of our proposals are trying to avoid this
7:51 so that your digital identity doesn't become the key to actually doing your
7:55 ability to do anything in life, which is a real threat. Make it so you can't live
8:00 without the digital identity system. And then because some governor doesn't like
8:03 your politics or whatever, pull the rug out from those people, revoke their
8:07 digital ID and make them an unperson and unable to do many things in society. And
8:12 that is a power a government has never had before. But with a central digital
8:17 identity becomes a very real possibility and danger. We think that there should be
8:23 verifier accountability. You have to verify yourself to whoever wants you to
8:29 prove something about yourself. You should have a verified identity of who that is
8:35 and make sure that you actually are identifying yourself to who you think
8:38 you're identifying yourself with. That hasn't really been implemented. We call
8:42 for an open wallet ecosystem so that people have a choice of wallets. We think
8:45 that like forcing people to run government code on their personal phones is bad idea.
8:49 It should not be government code. If it is, it should certainly be open source.
8:55 But it's better to have the free market provide lots of different wallets provided
8:59 that they meet security standards so that people can pick whose wallet they want to
9:02 put it in whether it's Google's or Samsung's or Apple's or maybe you know
9:06 Mozilla's or a privacy protecting group that you have more trust in or what have
9:10 you. And we call for and one of our biggest things is restrictions on ID
9:16 demands. The real threat here is that once this infrastructure is created, it makes
9:21 it really frictionless to present your ID. When you go into websites, unless they
9:26 really need you to approve ID, they do not ask you to approve your ID. They're not
9:29 going to like make you get a camera and go in different angles and show your ID. It's
9:33 too big an ask. They'll scare away customers and they know that. But if they
9:37 can send you a pop-up says click here to send us your digital driver's license,
9:40 they will. They'll have a bunch of incentives to do it for advertising and to
9:43 make sure you know who you are as cookies go away potentially. for security and
9:49 forensics. And so the real danger is that we wake up one day, say, oh, you want to
9:52 watch this YouTube video? Well, just click here to send us your digital driver's
9:55 license. You click no. Sorry, we can't. It could be used for surveillance pricing
10:01 where companies set their prices for you based on who you are and everything they
10:05 know about you rather than offering the same price to everybody else. And there's
10:08 a lot of abuses there. So let me just… I'm running out of time rapidly. Let me just
10:14 finish up by saying that that the really important thing here is that legislators
10:20 decide. We have our 12 things that we think are important parts of privacy.
10:24 Maybe some people disagree with we're going to have disagreements over some of
10:26 those and the details and they're complex. But I think we should all agree that it
10:31 should be part of the political process. It should be legislators who are making
10:35 these value judgments. We obviously don't want legislators getting the nuts and
10:38 bolts of technology, but this should be back in the hands of the legislature. It
10:42 should not be in the hands of secret international committee, China and Russia.
10:46 or I'm part of the overseeing committee of the smaller committee. It should not be
10:50 technologists in the DMV who are just been told to implement it or get to make the
10:53 decisions in the dark of night. It should not be unaccountable private organizations
10:57 like AMVA. No shade on AMVA, but they came out of the old world where it's about
11:02 licensing digital driver's licenses. And this is much, much bigger than that. I'm
11:05 sorry, licensing your ability to drive. This is much bigger than that. And it's,
11:09 it can't be left to a private organization that asserts copyrights in its policy
11:14 documents. It won't let people publish them. let alone not being subject to the
11:18 privacy action FOIA and so forth, checks and balances on government. And it should
11:21 not be the TSA. The TSA right now, because of RealID, has the power to shape what our
11:28 digital identity system looks like. It should be legislators and the political
11:33 community. And one of the things that's really fantastic about SEDI, and I think
11:38 that there's a bunch of traps and there are questions and I don't know what it'll
11:43 look like as it evolves and what the ACLU you will think of it, but I think it's
11:46 fantastic that these decisions have moved from people who are not involved and are
11:51 not going to be affected to the political level, which is where it belongs. Thank
11:55 you.