WEBVTT

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So I thought I'd talk about identity.

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That's sort of
an interesting enough topic to me.

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And the reason was,
because when I was asked to do this,

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I'd just read, in one of the papers,
I can't remember,

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something from someone
at Facebook saying, well,

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"we need to make everybody
use their real names"

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and then that's basically
all the problems solved.

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And that's so wrong,

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that's such a fundamentally,
reactionary view of identity,

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and it's going to get us
into all sorts of trouble.

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And so what I thought I'd do

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is I'll explain four
sort of problems about it,

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and then I'll suggest a solution,

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which hopefully
you might find interesting.

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So just to frame the problem,

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what does authenticity mean?

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That's me,
that's a camera phone picture of me

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looking at a painting.

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[What's the Problem?]

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That's a painting that was painted

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by a very famous forger,

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and because I'm not very good
at presentations,

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I already can't remember the name
that I wrote on my card.

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And he was incarcerated in,
I think, Wakefield Prison

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for forging masterpieces by,
I think, French Impressionists.

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And he's so good at it,
that when he was in prison,

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everybody in prison,
the governor and whatever,

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wanted him to paint masterpieces
to put on the walls,

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because they were so good.

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And so that's a masterpiece,

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which is a fake of a masterpiece,

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and bonded into the canvas is a chip
which identifies that as a real fake,

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if you see what I mean.

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(Laughter)

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So when we're talking about authenticity,

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it's a little more fractal than it appears
and that's a good example to show it.

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I tried to pick four problems
that will frame the issue properly.

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So the first problem, I thought,

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chip and PIN, right?

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I'm guessing everyone's got
a chip and PIN card, right?

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So why is that a good example?

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That's the example of how
legacy thinking about identity

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subverts the security
of a well-constructed system.

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That chip and PIN card
that's in your pocket

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has a little chip on it
that cost millions of pounds to develop,

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is extremely secure,

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you can put scanning
electron microscopes on it,

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you can try and grind it down,
blah blah blah.

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Those chips have never been broken,
whatever you read in the paper.

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And for a joke,
we take that super-secure chip

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and we bond it to a trivially
counterfeitable magnetic stripe

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and for very lazy criminals,
we still emboss the card.

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So if you're a criminal in a hurry
and you need to copy someone's card,

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you can just stick a piece of paper on it
and rub a pencil over it

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just to sort of speed things up.

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And even more amusingly,
and on my debit card too,

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we print the name and the SALT code
and everything else on the front too.

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Why?

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There is no earthly reason why your name
is printed on a chip and PIN card.

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And if you think about it,

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it's even more insidious and perverse
than it seems at first.

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Because the only people that benefit

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from having the name
on the card are criminals.

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You know what your name is, right?

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(Laughter)

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And when you go into
a shop and buy something,

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it's a PIN, he doesn't care
what the name is.

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The only place where you ever have
to write your name on the back

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is in America at the moment.

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And whenever I go to America,

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and I have to pay with a mag stripe
on the back of the card,

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I always sign it Carlos Tethers anyway,
just as a security mechanism,

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because if a transaction
ever gets disputed,

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and it comes back and it says Dave Birch,
I know it must have been a criminal,

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because I would never sign it Dave Birch.

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(Laughter)

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So if you drop your card in the street,

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it means a criminal
can pick it up and read it.

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They know the name,
from it they can find the address,

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and then they can
go off and buy stuff online.

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Why do we put the name on the card?

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Because we think identity
is something to do with names,

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and because we're rooted
in the idea of the identity card,

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which obsesses us.

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And I know it crashed and burned
a couple of years ago,

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but if you're someone in politics
or the home office or whatever,

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and you think about identity,

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you can only think of identity in terms
of cards with names on them.

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And that's very subversive
in a modern world.

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So the second example I thought I'd use

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is chatrooms.

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[Chatrooms and Children]

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I'm very proud of that picture,
that's my son

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playing in his band with his friends
for the first-ever gig,

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I believe you call it, where he got paid.

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(Laughter)

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And I love that picture.

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I like the picture of him
getting into medical school a lot better,

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(Laughter)

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I like that picture for the moment.

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Why do I use that picture?

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Because that was very interesting,
watching that experience as an old person.

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So him and his friends,

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they get together, they booked a room,
like a church hall,

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and they got all their friends
who had bands,

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and they got them together,
and they do it all on Facebook,

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and then they sell tickets,
and the first band on the -

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I was going to say "menu,"

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that's probably the wrong word for it,
isn't it?

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The first band on the list of bands

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that appears at some
public music performance of some kind

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gets the sales from the first 20 tickets,

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then the next band gets the next 20,

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and so on.

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They were at the bottom of the menu,

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they were like fifth,
I thought they had no chance.

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He actually got 20 quid.
Fantastic, right?

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But my point is,
that all worked perfectly,

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except on the web.

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So they're sitting on Facebook,

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and they're sending these messages
and arranging things

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and they don't know who anybody is, right?

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That's the big problem
we're trying to solve.

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If only they were using the real names.

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Then you wouldn't be worried
about them on the internet.

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And so when he says to me,

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"oh, I want to go to a chatroom
to talk about guitars" or something,

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I'm like, "oh, well,
I don't want you to go into a chatroom

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to talk about guitars, because
they might not all be your friends,

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and some of the people
that are in the chatroom

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might be perverts and teachers
and vicars."

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(Laughter)

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I mean, they generally are,
when you look in the paper, right?

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So I want to know who
all the people in the chatroom are.

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So okay, you can go in the chatroom,

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but only if everybody in the chatroom
is using their real names,

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and they submit full copies
of their police report.

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But of course, if anybody in the chatroom
asked for his real name, I'd say no.

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You can't give them your real name.

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Because what happens
if they turn out to be perverts,

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and teachers and whatever.

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So you have this odd sort of paradox

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where I'm happy for him
to go into this space

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if I know who everybody else is,

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but I don't want anybody else
to know who he is.

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And so you get this sort of logjam
around identity

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where you want full disclosure
from everybody else,

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but not from yourself.

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And there's no progress, we get stuck.

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And so the chatroom thing
doesn't work properly,

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and it's a very bad way
of thinking about identity.

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So on my RSS feed,
I saw this thing about -

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I just said something bad
about my RSS feed, didn't I?

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I should stop saying it like that.

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For some random reason,
I can't imagine,

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something about cheerleaders
turned up in my inbox.

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I read this story about cheerleaders,
and it's a fascinating story.

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This happened a couple of years ago
in the U.S.

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There were some cheerleaders
in a team at a high school

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in the U.S., and they said mean things

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about their cheerleading coach,

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as I'm sure kids do
about all of their teachers

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all of the time,

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and somehow the cheerleading coach
found out about this.

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She was very upset.

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And so she went to one of the girls,
and said,

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"you have to give me
your Facebook password."

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I read this all the time,
where even at some universities

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and places of education,

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kids are forced to hand over
their Facebook passwords.

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You've got to give them
your Facebook password.

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She was a kid!

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What she should have said is,
"my lawyer will be calling you

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first thing in the morning.

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It's an outrageous imposition
on my 4th Amendment right to privacy,

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and you're going to be sued
for all the money you've got."

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She should have said that.

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But she's a kid,
so she hands over the password.

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The teacher can't log into Facebook,

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because the school
has blocked access to Facebook.

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So the teacher can't log into Facebook
until she gets home.

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So the girl tells her friends,
guess what happened?

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The teacher logged in, she knows.

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So the girls just all logged into Facebook
on their phones,

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and deleted their profiles.

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So when the teacher logged in,
there was nothing there.

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My point is, those identities,
they don't think about them the same way.

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Identity is, especially
when you're a teenager, a fluid thing.

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You have lots of identities.

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And you can have an identity,
you don't like it,

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because it's subverted in some way,
or it's insecure, or it's inappropriate,

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you just delete it and get another one.

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The idea that you have an identity
that's given to you by someone,

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the government or whatever,

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and you have to stick with that identity
and use it in all places,

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that's absolutely wrong.

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Why would you want to really know
who someone was on Facebook,

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unless you wanted to abuse them
and harass them in some way?

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And it just doesn't work properly.

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And my fourth example
is there are some cases

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where you really want to be -

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In case you're wondering,
that's me at the G20 protest.

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I wasn't actually at the G20 protest,
but I had a meeting at a bank

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on the day of the G20 protest,
and I got an email from the bank

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saying please don't wear a suit,
because it'll inflame the protestors.

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I look pretty good in a suit, frankly,

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so you can see why it would drive them
into an anti-capitalist frenzy. (Laughter)

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So I thought, well, look.

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If I don't want to inflame the protestors,

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the obvious thing to do
is go dressed as a protestor.

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So I went dressed completely in black,

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you know, with a black balaclava,
I had black gloves on,

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but I've taken them off
to sign the visitor's book.

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I'm wearing black trousers, black boots,

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I'm dressed completely in black.

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I go into the bank at 10 o'clock,
go, "Hi, I'm Dave Birch,

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I've got a 3 o'clock
with so and so there."

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Sure. They sign me in.
There's my visitor's badge.

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(Laughter)

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So this nonsense

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about you've got to have real names
on Facebook and whatever,

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that gets you that kind of security.

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That gets you security theater,
where there's no actual security,

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but people are sort of playing parts
in a play about security.

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And as long as everybody learns
their lines,

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everyone's happy.

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But it's not real security.

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Especially because I hate banks
more than the G20 protestors do,

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because I work for them.

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I know that things are actually worse
than these guys think.

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(Laughter)

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But suppose I worked
next to somebody in a bank

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who was doing something.

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Those people
who take the money from banks...

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traders - that's who I was thinking of.

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Suppose I was sitting
next to a rogue trader,

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and I want to report it
to the boss of the bank.

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So I log on
to do a little bit of whistleblowing.

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I send a message,
this guy's a rogue trader.

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That message is meaningless

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if you don't know
that I'm a trader at the bank.

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If that message just comes from anybody,

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it has zero information value.

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There's no point in sending that message.

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But if I have to prove who I am,

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I'll never send that message.

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It's just like the nurse in the hospital
reporting the drunk surgeon.

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That message will only happen
if I'm anonymous.

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So the system has to have ways
of providing anonymity there,

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otherwise we don't get
where we want to get to.

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So four issues.
So what are we going to do about it?

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Well, what we tend to do about it

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is we think about Orwell space.

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And we try to make electronic versions

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of the identity card
that we got rid of in 1953.

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So we think if we had a card,

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call it a Facebook login,

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which proves who you are,

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and I make you carry it all the time,
that solves the problem.

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And of course, for all those reasons
I've just outlined,

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it doesn't, and it might, actually,
make some problems worse.

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The more times you're forced
to use your real identity,

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certainly in transactional terms,

00:11:05.898 --> 00:11:08.808
the more likely that identity
is to get stolen and subverted.

00:11:08.808 --> 00:11:11.034
The goal is to stop people
from using identity

00:11:11.034 --> 00:11:13.101
in transactions which don't need identity,

00:11:13.101 --> 00:11:15.220
which is actually almost all transactions.

00:11:15.220 --> 00:11:17.217
Almost all of the transactions you do

00:11:17.217 --> 00:11:18.575
are not, who are you?

00:11:18.575 --> 00:11:20.709
They're, are you allowed to drive the car,

00:11:20.709 --> 00:11:24.057
are you allowed in the building,
are you over 18, etcetera, etcetera.

00:11:25.162 --> 00:11:27.060
So my suggestion - I, like James,

00:11:27.060 --> 00:11:29.980
think that there should be
a resurgence of interest in R & D.

00:11:29.980 --> 00:11:31.746
I think this is a solvable problem.

00:11:31.746 --> 00:11:33.346
It's something we can do about.

00:11:33.346 --> 00:11:35.983
Naturally, in these circumstances,
I turn to Doctor Who.

00:11:35.983 --> 00:11:37.833
Because in this,

00:11:37.833 --> 00:11:39.782
as in so many other walks of life,

00:11:39.782 --> 00:11:42.690
Doctor Who has already shown us
the answer.

00:11:42.690 --> 00:11:43.695
So I should say,

00:11:43.695 --> 00:11:46.026
for some of our foreign visitors,

00:11:46.026 --> 00:11:49.880
Doctor Who is the greatest
living scientist in England,

00:11:49.880 --> 00:11:51.457
(Laughter)

00:11:51.457 --> 00:11:54.257
and a beacon of truth and enlightenment
to all of us.

00:11:54.257 --> 00:11:58.099
And this is Doctor Who
with his psychic paper.

00:11:58.099 --> 00:12:00.927
Come on, you guys must have seen
Doctor Who's psychic paper.

00:12:00.927 --> 00:12:02.497
You're not nerds if you say yes.

00:12:02.497 --> 00:12:04.633
Who's seen Doctor Who's psychic paper?

00:12:04.633 --> 00:12:07.863
Oh right, you were in the library
the whole time studying I guess.

00:12:07.863 --> 00:12:09.713
Is that what you're going to tell us?

00:12:09.713 --> 00:12:11.025
Doctor Who's psychic paper

00:12:11.025 --> 00:12:12.905
is when you hold up the psychic paper,

00:12:12.905 --> 00:12:14.293
the person, in their brain,

00:12:14.293 --> 00:12:16.402
sees the thing that they need to see.

00:12:16.402 --> 00:12:18.761
So I want to show you a British passport,

00:12:18.761 --> 00:12:21.425
I hold up the psychic paper,
you see a British passport.

00:12:21.425 --> 00:12:23.063
I want to get into a party,

00:12:23.063 --> 00:12:24.670
I hold up the psychic paper,

00:12:24.670 --> 00:12:26.154
I show you a party invitation.

00:12:26.154 --> 00:12:28.198
You see what you want to see.

00:12:28.198 --> 00:12:31.417
So what I'm saying is we need
to make an electronic version of that,

00:12:31.417 --> 00:12:33.610
but with one tiny, tiny change,

00:12:33.610 --> 00:12:36.134
which is that it'll only show you
the British passport

00:12:36.134 --> 00:12:37.422
if I've actually got one.

00:12:37.422 --> 00:12:40.504
It'll only show you the party invitation
if I actually have one.

00:12:40.504 --> 00:12:43.515
It will only show you that I'm over 18
if I actually am.

00:12:43.515 --> 00:12:45.386
But nothing else.

00:12:45.386 --> 00:12:49.866
So you're the bouncer at the pub,
you need to know that I'm over 18,

00:12:49.866 --> 00:12:51.987
instead of showing you my driving license,

00:12:51.987 --> 00:12:54.026
which shows you I know how to drive,

00:12:54.026 --> 00:12:56.762
what my name is, my address,
all these kind of things,

00:12:56.762 --> 00:12:58.201
I show you my psychic paper,

00:12:58.201 --> 00:13:01.367
and all it tells you
is am I over 18 or not.

00:13:01.367 --> 00:13:02.803
Right.

00:13:02.803 --> 00:13:04.141
Is that just a pipe dream?

00:13:04.141 --> 00:13:06.954
Of course not, otherwise
I wouldn't be here talking to you.

00:13:06.954 --> 00:13:09.088
So in order to build that
and make it work,

00:13:09.088 --> 00:13:11.889
I'm only going to name these things,
I'll not go into them,

00:13:11.889 --> 00:13:12.866
we need a plan,

00:13:12.866 --> 00:13:14.585
which is we're going to build this

00:13:14.585 --> 00:13:16.601
as an infrastructure for everybody to use,

00:13:16.601 --> 00:13:18.233
to solve all of these problems.

00:13:18.233 --> 00:13:20.041
We're going to make a utility,

00:13:20.041 --> 00:13:21.589
the utility has to be universal,

00:13:21.589 --> 00:13:22.952
you can use it everywhere,

00:13:22.952 --> 00:13:26.233
I'm just giving you little flashes
of the technology as we go along.

00:13:26.233 --> 00:13:27.490
That's a Japanese ATM,

00:13:27.490 --> 00:13:30.378
the fingerprint template
is stored inside the mobile phone.

00:13:30.378 --> 00:13:32.285
So when you want to draw money out,

00:13:32.285 --> 00:13:35.142
you put the mobile phone on the ATM,
and touch your finger,

00:13:35.142 --> 00:13:37.247
your fingerprint goes through
to the phone,

00:13:37.247 --> 00:13:38.967
the phone says yes, that's whoever,

00:13:38.967 --> 00:13:40.934
and the ATM then gives you some money.

00:13:40.934 --> 00:13:43.321
It has to be a utility
that you can use everywhere.

00:13:43.321 --> 00:13:45.047
It has to be absolutely convenient,

00:13:45.047 --> 00:13:47.884
that's me going into the pub.

00:13:47.884 --> 00:13:50.677
All the device on the door of the pub
is allowed is,

00:13:50.677 --> 00:13:54.350
is this person over 18
and not barred from the pub?

00:13:54.350 --> 00:13:57.602
And so the idea is,
you touch your ID card to the door,

00:13:57.602 --> 00:13:59.789
and if I am allowed in,
it shows my picture,

00:13:59.789 --> 00:14:01.820
if I'm not allowed in,
it shows a red cross.

00:14:01.820 --> 00:14:03.758
It doesn't disclose any other information.


00:14:03.758 --> 00:14:06.802
It has to have no special gadgets.
That can only mean one thing,

00:14:06.802 --> 00:14:09.967
following on from Ross's statement,
which I agree with completely.

00:14:09.967 --> 00:14:12.853
If it means no special gadgets,
it has to run on a mobile phone.

00:14:12.853 --> 00:14:16.193
That's the only choice we have,
we have to make it work on mobile phones.

00:14:16.193 --> 00:14:18.527
There are 6.6 billion
mobile phone subscriptions.

00:14:18.527 --> 00:14:22.063
My favorite statistic of all time,
only 4 billion toothbrushes in the world.

00:14:22.071 --> 00:14:23.587
That means something,

00:14:23.587 --> 00:14:24.944
I don't know what.
(Laughter)

00:14:24.944 --> 00:14:26.927
I rely on our futurologists to tell me.

00:14:26.927 --> 00:14:28.977
It has to be a utility
which is extensible.

00:14:28.977 --> 00:14:31.569
So it has to be something
that anybody could build on.

00:14:31.569 --> 00:14:33.960
Anybody should be able
to use this infrastructure,

00:14:33.960 --> 00:14:36.234
you don't need permissions,
licenses, whatever,

00:14:36.234 --> 00:14:39.021
anyone should be able
to write some code to do this.

00:14:40.886 --> 00:14:42.151
You know what symmetry is,

00:14:42.151 --> 00:14:44.498
so you don't need a picture of it.

00:14:44.498 --> 00:14:46.148
This is how we're going to do it.

00:14:46.148 --> 00:14:48.812
We're going to do it using phones,
using mobile proximity.

00:14:48.812 --> 00:14:51.514
I'm going to suggest to you
the technology to implement

00:14:51.514 --> 00:14:53.596
Doctor Who's psychic paper
is already here,

00:14:53.596 --> 00:14:56.647
and if any of you have got one of the new
Barclay's debit cards

00:14:56.647 --> 00:14:58.478
with the contactless interface on it,

00:14:58.478 --> 00:15:00.218
you've already got that technology.

00:15:00.218 --> 00:15:02.013
If you've ever been up to the big city,

00:15:02.013 --> 00:15:03.605
and used an Oyster card at all,

00:15:03.605 --> 00:15:04.799
does that ring any bells to anybody?

00:15:04.799 --> 00:15:06.355
The technology already exists.

00:15:06.355 --> 00:15:08.745
The first phones
that have the technology built in,

00:15:08.745 --> 00:15:10.984
the Google Nexus, the S2,
the Samsung Wifi 7.9,

00:15:10.984 --> 00:15:13.695
the first phones that have
the technology built into them

00:15:13.695 --> 00:15:15.021
are already in the shops.

00:15:15.021 --> 00:15:16.403
So the idea that the gas man

00:15:16.403 --> 00:15:17.895
can turn up at my mom's door

00:15:17.895 --> 00:15:20.097
and he can show my mom his phone,

00:15:20.097 --> 00:15:21.762
and she can tap it with her phone,

00:15:21.762 --> 00:15:24.819
and it will come up with green
if he really is from British Gas

00:15:24.819 --> 00:15:25.841
and allowed in,

00:15:25.841 --> 00:15:28.074
and it'll come up with red if he isn't.

00:15:28.074 --> 00:15:29.741
We have the technology to do that.

00:15:29.741 --> 00:15:30.886
And what's more,

00:15:30.886 --> 00:15:33.821
although some of those things
sounded a bit counter-intuitive,

00:15:33.821 --> 00:15:36.219
like proving I'm over 18
without proving who I am,

00:15:36.219 --> 00:15:38.414
the cryptography to do that
not only exists,

00:15:38.414 --> 00:15:40.623
it's extremely well-known
and well-understood.

00:15:40.623 --> 00:15:43.508
Digital signatures, the blinding
of public key certificates,

00:15:43.508 --> 00:15:45.802
these technologies have been around
for a while,

00:15:45.802 --> 00:15:47.901
we've just had no way
of packaging them up.

00:15:47.901 --> 00:15:49.541
So the technology already exists.

00:15:49.541 --> 00:15:52.384
We know it works.

00:15:52.384 --> 00:15:54.907
There are a few examples
of the technology being used

00:15:54.907 --> 00:15:55.997
in experimental places.

00:15:55.997 --> 00:15:57.325
That's London Fashion Week,

00:15:57.325 --> 00:15:59.199
where we built a system with O2,

00:15:59.199 --> 00:16:01.966
that's for the Wireless Festival
in Hyde Park,

00:16:01.966 --> 00:16:03.089
you can see the persons

00:16:03.089 --> 00:16:05.760
walking in with their VIP band,
it's just being checked

00:16:05.760 --> 00:16:07.794
by the Nokia phone
that's reading the band.

00:16:07.794 --> 00:16:10.762
I'm only putting those up to show you
these things are prosaic,

00:16:10.762 --> 00:16:12.670
this stuff works in these environments.

00:16:12.670 --> 00:16:14.421
They don't need to be special.

00:16:14.421 --> 00:16:18.274
So finally, I know that you can do this,

00:16:19.499 --> 00:16:22.403
because if you saw
the episode of Doctor Who,

00:16:22.403 --> 00:16:24.303
the Easter special of Doctor Who,

00:16:24.303 --> 00:16:27.646
where he went to Mars in a bus,

00:16:27.646 --> 00:16:29.801
I should say again
for our foreign students,

00:16:29.801 --> 00:16:31.534
that doesn't happen every episode.

00:16:31.534 --> 00:16:33.025
This was a very special case.

00:16:33.025 --> 00:16:35.786
So in the episode where he goes
to Mars in a London bus,

00:16:35.786 --> 00:16:37.299
I can't show you the clip,

00:16:37.299 --> 00:16:40.398
due to the outrageous restrictions
of Queen Anne-style copyright

00:16:40.398 --> 00:16:41.999
by the BBC,

00:16:41.999 --> 00:16:44.833
but in the episode where he goes
to Mars in a London bus,

00:16:44.833 --> 00:16:49.089
Doctor Who is clearly shown
getting on to the bus

00:16:49.089 --> 00:16:50.389
with the Oyster card reader

00:16:50.389 --> 00:16:51.957
using his psychic paper.

00:16:51.957 --> 00:16:54.049
Which proves that psychic paper

00:16:54.049 --> 00:16:55.764
has an MSE interface.

00:16:55.764 --> 00:16:57.774
Thank you very much.
(Applause)