You've probably heard the expression "Identity is the new gold" coming out of Silicon Valley. We certainly agree with that, but for reasons that are completely different from those you hear from Silicon Valley.
Let me explain using a metaphor.
Picture the internet as a city that happens to be a tourist destination visited by cruise ships. In that city, the local pickpockets and scam artists and sellers of fake Rolexes value those cruise passengers, as they are the source of the income that they gather out on the streets of the city.
Meanwhile, the owners of local shops in that city also view people – mostly local folks – as valuable to their business. To the local merchants, people are the source of the income they earn in their indoor shops in the city.
Both the scammers and the shop owners value people as their source of income.
Of course we’re using the metaphor of the internet as a city. On the internet, people are represented by their digital identity: a username, a Passkey, a digital identity certificate, a national digital identity credential, etc.
Silibandia values you. As prey.
Members of the first group, the scammers, value identities as prey: people to be stolen from and manipulated into highly profitable echo chambers. Our name for this first group is Silibandia: Silicon Valley plus the broadband and media industries plus their feeders in the botnet, dark web, venture capital, private equity and cybersecurity industries.
Silibandia sneaks into your digital home, steals the detailed information that amounts to the digital version of you, and sell it to bot farms to manipulate your perceptions and get you to join an echo chamber where investment schemes and ridiculously overpriced diet supplements are pitched to you. (They might also sell the digital you to normal advertisers of legitimate products, but that’s much less profitable to Silibandia.)
Besides being just a horrible way to do business, the problem with that as an economic system is that it’s unsustainable. Silibandia’s level of fraud and theft and manipulation is on a path to get so bad that eventually the human-based digital environment will fall apart, leaving… what, a network of AI bots scamming each other?
Because it is unsustainable, it is about to be replaced by a sustainable model. You guessed it, it’s the model represented by that second group, those local shop owners, the providers of goods and services for whom your identity is the basis of a trust relationship rather than a mark, a chump, a victim to be stolen from.
Anonymity and Accountability - at the same time
In that newer digital world you’ll present yourself using an identity that provides both anonymity and accountability – at the same time, without compromising either.
This new form of identity works like your car’s number plate. Anyone can see your number plate, making you accountable for what happens on public roadways – right? But no one gets to know your identity unless there’s been and incident. You can have as many cars as you want, and no one gets to know they're owned by the same person.
The Number Plate credential works the same way. And unlike each additional car you buy, each additional Number Plate credential is free or inexpensive. You make yourself untrackable by using a stack of different IDs in different digital spaces.
Let’s compare the number Plate credential with the just-announced identity credential that Silibandia is planning to impose on us all.
Silibandia is assigning a number to each of us.
You are not to know your own number.
If you haven’t heard about Passkey, you will soon. Passkey isn’t so bad by itself, but now Silibandia has a nefarious plan to unite all of the big identity providers – you know, the biggest Silicon Valley companies – by assigning a number to each person on Earth. Let’s use their own words to show how much they want you involved in the new FIDO Credential Exchange Format. It's to be used by all the Silibandia companies that are promoting the use of Passkeys. If you do go to that link, scroll down and you'll see a definition of the "id" item in its Account Dictionary. To save you time, here’s a screenshot:
That's right, Silibandia is planning to generate a ID number for each person on Earth – and you are not to know your number.
How do you feel about that?
Do you agree with us that it’s... well... just horrible?
By contrast, with your Number Plate Credential, your own phone or computer generates a number called a Privacy PEN that is strictly your own secret. It never leaves your device, except when you move it to another device. You are the only person who gets to know your Privacy PEN. Silibandia never has access to your Privacy PEN. (PEN stands for Personal Endorsement Number.)
This whole system is built on an old, proven technology that was invented in the 1970s by the same British signals intelligence agency where decades earlier Alan Turing’s team had shortened World War II by cracking the German Enigma cryptographic code. In fact, you use that AC technology every day when you go to a site whose address starts with https://. Blockchain is built on this asymmetric cryptography technology.
Actually, if you want to take advantage of that untrackability feature, the accountable anonymity of the number Plate Credential, you’ll have many Privacy PENs in what’s called your credential stack. Each Privacy PEN is accompanied by a mathematically related large number, your PCN, which serves the same purpose as a username or handle.
Again, you can have as many Number Plate Credentials as you want, each with a different username-type number. That way, you can make yourself untrackable.
However, there are times that you will want to prove to someone else that you are you, and so your stack of number Plate Credentials all point to your MOI personal information vault. Your MOI (MyOwnInformation) is totally under your control. So for instance if you want to prove to someone that you are over 18, you give them permission to ask your MOI “Is this person over 18?” and your MOI will answer with a simple Yes or No – no need to disclose your birthdate.
There’s lots more to this new model that brings integrity and sustainability to the way people do things on the internet. Take a two minute flight to Authentiverse to learn how it works.
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About the Author
In 1981 Wes Kussmaul, working with friends at the MIT Joint Computer Facility, created the world’s first online encyclopedia, implemented using what he calls “the world’s worst business model.” Over the the next year the addition of social features transformed the encyclopedia into the more sustainable Delphi social network, which in 1993 was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News America Corp.
Wes is the author of four books about bringing accountability with privacy back to social networks. One of those books caught the attention of a group at the ITU, a United Nations agency, while it was building a global PKI-based source of trust that resembled what the book advocated. Wes announced its re-launch as The City of Osmio in a 2008 presentation to the United Nations World Summit on Information Society. Wes is also the creator of Stoanova, an approach to Stoicism as it applies to problem solving.
Wes is the founder of The Authenticity Institute, a provider of a PKI platform to licensed Authenticity Enterprises, which may be seen here. The outcome of the work of those Authenticity Enterprises may be seen at Authentiverse.