Tag Archive: “identity”

Identifying Voters

Posted in society by Adam

19 April 2014

Voter identification laws, as they stand, are a kludge.

Conservatives, with their majorities in a dozen states, have pushed for new voter identification laws and got them. The requirement is that an elector produce a piece of government-issued identification including a photograph of said citizen before casting their ballot.

Strange, that the majority winners of the previous election allege rampant election fraud. They either admit to illegitimate election victories (unlikely), or they believe their margins of victory were smaller than they ought to have been (equally unlikely in most cases).

Unidentified electors may cast provisional ballots, returning later (within a few days) to present their photographic identification. In some cases, if they know the poll workers, they can skirt the identification requirement by having the workers swear to their identity.

Critics claim that the requirements attempt to reduce opposition voting. That is, to derive political advantage through limiting the ability of the electorate to vote in opposition. This claim comes from the fact that their political opponents’ constituents tend to be in situations where they may not possess existing viable identification documents.

A variety of voters may be harmed by the requirements. Newlyweds and the divorced whose names have changed (more common amongst women), and do not yet match their identification, for example. Also affected are minorities and the poor, fewer of whom are licensed to drive.

The problem may not be the requirement for identification, ultimately, but the lack of access to the identification. It would seem reasonable to require that polling places be augmented with the ability to issue photographic identification that meet the new laws’ requirements. This is no different than the capacity to obtain a library card at, wait for it, a library.

But taking it a step further, we should move away from the current identification-issuance systems. Digital cameras are widely available in mobile devices, and the requirement to verify identity can be done in a variety of ways, including via notaries public, post offices, banks, and other businesses and institutions that already have need to verify identities.

Take your picture (or take 20 of them, since bytes are cheap) and send them to the registration system. Then, at your leisure, take five minutes with an identifying institution to provide them with proof of residence and they can vouch for your photograph. When we (eventually) move to cryptographic signatures, they could also digitally sign your identification.

But none of these improvements to the identification laws were considered, because the design of the laws are malignant. Unbalanced laws, that do not consider both how to accomplish their stated purpose and how to minimize harm are laws not worth the paper they’re written on.

Had they considered both sides of the issue in passage of these laws that disenfranchise, we might still have to show photographic identification at the polls, but we would have a stronger identity system for the trouble. That stronger system could bootstrap small businesses and create positive economic impacts, rather than simply allowing a doomed party to meander a few more years.

The Republican party needs to modernize their positions and, in doing so, align themselves with growing demographics. Instead they continue to try to hang on and deny the reality of voting trends.

Healthcare.gov’s Identity Problem

Posted in society by Adam

26 October 2013

Some thoughts on the broken healthcare exchange website, and how proper identity management could have saved it a lot of trouble.

Identity management poses the most important and most striking problem for the new healthcare exchange site. Identity management remains one of the great, unsolved issues of our times and uniquely displays the anti-capitalist postures of some of the biggest technology businesses that exist.

That something as basic to any and every service as identity remains a closely guarded commodity shows that many major companies do not wish to compete on an even playing field. They would rather draw straws amongst themselves for the userbase pie, based on lock-in and turf wars, than to actually free their own markets. But while that general malignance runs rampant throughout virtually every industry, why in gods’ names should it infect government projects?

Indeed, inevitably the government will create a single sign-on or other universal identity mechanism for its Internet services. But in the meantime we all suffer. Everyone includes the government, with all of the bad press the new website received post-shutdown. Finger-pointing from the contractors, calls for resignations, and general what-the-fuckery from most of the attempted users of the site.

But a rough guess would get you the answer that at least half of the problems with the site center on identity when you include:

The initial sign-up process (username, password, e-mail verification)
The identity verification process (document submission, phone verification integration)
Family member and employee identification process

The site, like any government services site, relies on identity for so much of what it does. Handing off to other databases for things like subsidy requirement verification and other eligibility requirements.

A whole swath of inefficiency in government, much less in this one site, vanishes if the government merely gets its identity house in order.

But instead the government pays a high premium to build a monstrosity. Of course, that same argument bears against the Affordable Care Act itself with equal keenness (that a simpler system like single-payer would have saved far more money and woe both in the short term and long term).

What else could have eased the creation of the site? Some say that management of such a large-scale project requires a so-called quarterback. Others say you want a catcher. Some say you really need a good goalie, or a head chef, or even a Benevolent Dictator for Life (BDFL).

Nah. New projects suffer the most pain from the code they use for the first time. Like a new idea, fresh in your mind, or a fresh stone broken off a larger stone. Still sharp, cuts your hand, not yet smoothed by time and trial. Full of mealy worms wriggling waiting to grow into full-fledged bugs.

A QB will screw up a new play the first time through just like the rest of us. The most-needed piece of kit in software? Reuse. Use something that already gets used a ton, that does not have bugs because it gets used all the time.

The site broke because too much of the code and the way the code got used had not been proven. The databases had not been proven for their loads.

Testing a new project does help you sand the code smooth, but building from smooth code to begin with sounds smarter.

Identity and Group Conflict

Posted in society by Adam

2 June 2012

An attempt to look at identity and group behaviors.

First a note on the progress of my browser problems. The first problem was solved by a sweep through my profile directory, cleaning out the cruft that had accumulated over the years. The second problem, of Firebug not working, turned out to be due to a problem with the way the package was being built (an untracked upstream build change that needed to be accounted for in the package). The maintainer is aware of that now, so it should be fixed in future builds.

Today’s post is about what I consider a major problem for mankind. Who are you? Occasionally a stranger will ask you that, and it’s not like there’s a good answer. You can give your name, but that hardly gets to the heart of the matter.

Humans have a tendency to want to know who they are, mainly because it makes the whole thought process easier. In some things it is essential: it is not recommended to try to play chess if you do not know which side you are playing. Your opponent may get angry if you move her pieces.

People like having identities. They adopt a role. If you are the bully, you know how to behave. You know how people will react. You remove uncertainty.

There are group identities, which are common. People see themselves as soldiers in the fight for their group. People can do all sorts of bad and good things just because they see themselves as aiding their team.

People can commit bank fraud, taking a false loan, because they see themselves as saving their company that’s underwater. They don’t see it as fraud, because that’s not the identity they hold.

Group identities are especially problematic. In interactions with other groups result in anxiety, and adopting a harmful situational role is possible:

In the case of stereotype threat, the individual may adopt a very restricted behavior, trying to avoid confirming group stereotypes. Or they may, in the face of such stress, adopt a facade of apparent strength (eg, bullying) in order to protect their true identity. In the latter case, they need not worry about reputation or identity damage, because they can write off any bad reactions to the fact they were adopting a role, playing a part.

Stereotype threat is a factor of intergroup anxiety. One can see some of the difficulties in group interactions in situations where a lone member of one group interacts with a second, only later to be joined by more members of their group of origin. Their demeanor changes when comrades arrive. If conflict had already been suggested, it may be escalated.

One large problem, setting aside the direct conflicts and harms caused by the adopted identities, is that the adoption becomes ingrained by conflict. It’s the age-old investment trap. If you’ve taken blows for being of some identity, you have all the more reason to hold to it; you’ve paid for it, might as well wear it.

But the larger problem is the inability for people to cooperate in the face of these identities. They are overly focused on preexisting identities, unable to make decisions that benefit themselves the most because they are too worried over group dynamics. If your team is winning, it’s less likely you’ll agree to postpone or cancel the game due to inclement weather.

You often see splintered groups insulate themselves in various ways, including jargon/accent/language changes. These changes are natural reactions to the separation from a larger group: let’s stop using the inherited terminology and adopt our own as part of our group identity. You also see this in couples showing affection for one another, people showing affection for their children, and even showing affection for their pets.

More importantly, the splinter group often adopts the same kinds of tactics they splintered away from, such as stereotypes and epithets for the other group’s membership.

The worst case is where we as society have created group identities of whole cloth and then are unhappy with the results. The major examples of this are the so-called ruling class of politicians, the identity of police and prison guards, the other side of that coin in the prison populations, and other similar groups with authority or power.

When we go out of our way to create these groups of people, we mustn’t be surprised at the results. They are indeed a detriment.

Solving these issues is a different matter entirely, and it remains an open problem for further thought.