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Identification and security

In recent years there has been an increased use of identification checks as a security measure. Airlines always demand photo IDs, and hotels increasingly do so. They are often required for admittance into government buildings, and sometimes even hospitals. Everywhere, it seems, someone is checking IDs. The ostensible reason is that ID checks make us all safer, but that is just not so. In most cases, identification has very little to do with security.

Let us debunk the myths one by one. First, verifying that someone has a photo ID is a completely useless security measure. All the 9/11 terrorists had photo IDs. Some of the IDs were real. Some were fake. Some were real IDs in fake names, bought from a crooked DMV employee in Virginia. Fake driver's licenses for all 50 states, good enough to fool anyone who is not paying close attention, are available on the Internet. Or if you do not want to buy IDs online, just ask any teenager where to get a fake ID.

Harder-to-forge IDs only help marginally, because the problem is not making sure the ID is valid. This is the second myth of ID checks: that identification combined with profiling can be an indicator of intention.

Our goal is to somehow identify the few bad guys scattered in the sea of good guys. In an ideal world, what we would want is some kind of ID that denotes intention. We would want all terrorists to carry a card that says 'evildoer' and everyone else to carry a card that said 'honest person who will not try to hijack or blow up anything'. Then, security would be easy. We would just look at people's IDs and, if they were evildoers, we would not let them on the aeroplane or into the building.

This is, of course, ridiculous, so we rely on identity as a substitute. In theory, if we know who you are, and if we have enough information about you, we can somehow predict whether you are likely to be an evildoer. This is the basis behind CAPPS-2, the government's new airline passenger profiling system. People are divided into two categories based on various criteria: the traveller's address, credit history, and police and tax records; flight origin and destination; whether the ticket was purchased by cash, cheque, or credit card; whether the ticket is one way or round trip; whether the traveller is alone or with a larger party; how frequently the traveller flies; and how long before departure the ticket was purchased.

Profiling - a flawed premise?

Profiling has two very dangerous failure modes. The first one is obvious. The intent of profiling is to divide people into two categories: people who may be evildoers and need to be screened more carefully, and people who are less likely to be evildoers and can be screened less carefully. But any such system will create a third, and very dangerous, category: evildoers who do not fit the profile.

Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, DC sniper John Allen Muhammed, and many of the 9/11 terrorists had no previous links to terrorism. The Unabomber taught mathematics at Berkeley. The Palestinians have demonstrated that they can recruit suicide bombers with no previous record of anti-Israeli activities. Even the 9/11 hijackers went out of their way to establish a normal-looking profile; frequent-flier numbers, a history of first-class travel, etc. Evildoers can also engage in identity theft, and steal the identity and profile of an honest person. Profiling can actually result in less security by giving certain people an easy way to skirt security.

False positives in profiling!

There is another, even more dangerous, failure mode for these systems: honest people who fit the evildoer profile. Because actual evildoers are so rare, almost everyone who fits the profile will turn out to be a false alarm. This not only wastes investigative resources that might be better spent elsewhere, but it causes grave harm to those innocents who fit the profile. Whether it is something as simple as 'driving while black' or 'flying while Arab', or something more complicated like taking scuba lessons or protesting the current administration, profiling harms society because it causes us all to live in fear ... not from the evildoers, but from the police.

Security is a trade-off

Security is a trade-off; we have to weigh the security we get against the price we pay for it. Better trade-offs are to spend money on intelligence and analysis, investigation, and making ourselves less of a pariah on the world stage. And to spend money on the other, non-terrorist, security issues that affect far more Americans every year.

Identification and profiling do not provide very good security, and they do so at an enormous cost. Dropping ID checks completely, and engaging in random screening where appropriate, is a far better security trade-off. People who know they are being watched, and that their innocent actions can result in police scrutiny, are people who become scared to step out of line. They know that they can be put on a 'bad list' at any time. People living in this kind of society are not free, despite any illusionary security they receive. It is contrary to all the ideals that went into founding the United States.

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