Web Passports?

Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and development officer, proposed that we may need to institute Internet driver’s licenses for people and applications. The idea is that we can track people who are doing bad things, and potentially take their license to use the Internet away.

- Barbara Kiviat, Driver’s licenses for the Internet

What Mundie is proposing is to impose authentication. He draws an analogy to automobile use. If you want to drive a car, you have to have a license (not to mention an inspection, insurance, etc.). If you do something bad with that car, like break a law, there is the chance that you will lose your license and be prevented from driving in the future. In other words, there is a legal and social process for imposing discipline. Mundie imagines three tiers of Internet ID: one for people, one for machines and one for programs (which often act as proxies for the other two).

Now, there are, of course, a number of obstacles to making such a scheme be reality. Even here in the mountains of Switzerland I can hear the worldwide scream go up: “But we’re entitled to anonymity on the Internet!” Really? Are you? Why do you think that?

Mundie pointed out that in the physical world we are implicitly comfortable with the notion that there are certain places we’re not allowed to go without identifying ourselves. Are you allowed to walk down the street with no one knowing who you are? Absolutely. Are you allowed to walk into a bank vault and still not give your name? Hardly.

Being an American, Mundie thinks of driver’s licenses as our state-issued documents, and which allow us to drive cars. But the more apt analogy may be passports, which are issued by nations, and which we already use to cross sovereign borders.

But the dark side of a scheme like this might be worse than the ills that it seeks to cure.

In the name of getting malefactors off the web, and maybe fined or imprisioned — spammers, phishers, and Nigerian princes — we would be putting into the hands of — who exactly — the ability to monitor what we do and where we go on the web. And basic access would require us to petition a government, or a government licensed company, for a passport. Which obviously could be denied.

This is another situation where we would be concentrating power in the hands of the government in an area where we aren’t even sure what our rights are.

Would we have the right of free assembly? Free speech? The right to wag our fingers at the government?

Despite the fact that I believe we are moving into the decade of publicy — when privacy will be overshadowed by growing openness and transparency — anonymity remains absolutely essential to a free society when our livelihoods can be denied by companies or organizations who may deem our passions and pleasures unwholesome or illegitimate, and who may retaliate by firing us, outing us, or blacklisting us.

Living life openly on the web — publicy — is a choice, and must remain one a choice, freely accepted by individuals. If we are required to live online with no possible privacy then we will make the web a prison, or a police state. Publicy compelled is not freedom or openness, but instead, the worst sort of oppression and tyranny.