David Kreps Blog

Trip Downunder Sept 07 - Entry 1: The Licence Saga

Here's the first entry for my downunder trip for September 2007. I have flown from Manchester to London, then London to Sydney, where I met up with Sean Bridges, a friend of 20 yrs standing, known to the world as Bikeboy - one of the best street performers in the world. In a quirk of fate he was returning from a month's tour of Canada, with a few days stopover in the UK to see his son, and landed 7mins after me in Sydney! (George Bush arrived on Airforce One a couple of hours later!) Sean has just bought a new house and is yet to move in so, after meeting up with his Australian girlfriend Brianna we went to the Bondi Beach steak restaurant (Sean's favourite eatery) and then stayed at cheap hotel together. The following day (yesterday) was a tour of Sydney courtesy of Sean and finally checking in to Wake-Up, Sydney's best backpacker hostel, full of young people and activity and fun, while Sean drove off to Adelaide for his next gig.

At Wake-Up I spent what time I was able to, online, liaising with my lodger at home trying to correct the one big mistake of my pre-planning : I have forgotten to bring my driving licence! The card is something I used to always keep in my wallet. However my house was burgled at the beginning of August (hence the decision to bring forward my house-moving plans) and amongst the items stolen was my wallet. So everything of value has ended up in a cashbox since - including my new replacement driving licence. I am reminded of a journey to Spain in 2004 with my former business partner, who on that occasion was the one to forget his driving licence. I only had mine, I confess, because I always used to keep it in my wallet! Now I am victim of the same mistake. So my lodger has smashed his way into the cashbox for me, and scanned the card and paper licence and uploaded them via ftp to a temporary folder from where I have downloaded them, all in the hope that I can convince AVIS to let me hire a car tomorrow morning. He has also taken them down into Manchester's Trafford Business Park and put them in a FedEx envelope that will arrive at my hotel on Monday next week. So if AVIS are not happy, at least I will be able to hire the car on Monday, and will have to get the coach up to the Bay of Islands for the weekend. Oh what fun. It is all part of the strange ID game that today's increasingly small world presents us with. Papers! Papers! One must have one's papers! -

There are in fact a good number of reasons why this sort of thing should become more and more biometric - it is after all ME who has a licence to drive, and I should not have my holiday ruined because I do not have a piece of paper with me to prove it! Biometric identity management can indeed become increasingly non-invasive, picking up on one's movements without the need for lengthy queues at passport control. A simple sub-cutaneous RFID tag could carry particular details for credit and access and licensing without the need for cumbersome paperwork. On the other hand, what a nightmarish scenario of ubiquitous computing surveillance of our every move? Big Brother would indeed then be watching us - all the time. The trade-off between the convenience and invasion of the world-travelling public for the purpose of security continues to be a thorny issue. Yet somehow the idea that it is the paperwork that travels and gains access seems contrary to the real issue - the paperwork is there to identify the individual. Identity fraud is a massively growing problem the world over, and Identity Management a growing arena of academic interest in the Information Systems field - I have a Masters student writing his dissertation on the subject at the moment, in fact - an Armenian, no less.

The lesson for now, I guess, is that we are still very heavily dependent upon our paperwork, and the need to keep it with us!

identity

 

 

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