 Now I'm proud to present to you Christoph Engmann, who works at the University of Weimar and is working on the state identity management as far as I understood it, and please welcome him. Well, thank you for the introduction and thank you to the Kauß Computer Club for the invitation. I'm happy that so many people found their way here for my talk. I will try to talk mostly freely because as an academic I'm usually reading stuff and bore people to death, and I try not to do that tonight. So can everybody understand me? And I have to move this way and that way. That's like human Tetris. Okay, here. Okay, well, so I'm just a little more about my person. So I don't work on state identity systems. I actually would refuse to do so. What I do is I look into the history of state identity systems. And what I'm going to present today is sort of a rough short overview over 500 years of writing people and giving people identities by proto-states and by nation states as we know them today. And the whole goal of this endeavor is to give some context, some historical background to some of the events we witness today, which I'm going to talk about later in the talk. So first, of course, this notion what is in the name is kind of a lame Shakespearean überstrapazierte Floskel, taken from the drama of Romeo and Juliet. Yet what I want to show is, you know, romantic attentions are pretty moot. Naming is a rather unromantic thing. So let me first start with the question, who in this room has no name? So everybody has a name. Does anybody know anybody who has no name? So obviously having a name is something that everybody has and that we take as normal. And it's actually a fact that in our world everybody has to have a name and I'm going to give some background on that in the course of the talk. So it's quite astonishing that we now live in a world where every human being and not only human being, also animals and things, sort of have names. I mean with things and animals it's different because usually there's no documentation for their names except for cattle, where there's actually quite sophisticated systems to track cattle through its life course from birth to the slaughterhouse. Of course these are not really names but numbers, but still they are identifiable. For humans, people have to have names and that is legal names. A name that is documented in some sort of paper certificate and tied to certain rights and obligations that we sometimes enjoy and sometimes dread. So certain, the rights for example would be the rights of the protection by the state or some sort of welfare entitlements like free healthcare or not free healthcare probably universal healthcare or schooling or so forth and obligations could be the draft or being denied to leave a country. All these rights and obligations are allocated by using those addresses we call names. So what I want to do today is to trace the genealogy, sort of the history of this astonishing situation that everybody has a name in its historical developments and of course I already started saying that this is sort of like a very rough and short look into the history of it, it's of course far more complex than reality. And as the title of my talk implies we start 500 years ago in the 1500s and so why in the 1500s? Two events in this timeframe, late 15th century, early 16th century brought the very rough beginnings of what we now have as naming systems into existence and that is namely the reformation on the one hand and on the other hand the discovery of what then was called Neva España or Las Indias or what we now call America. For most part of the Middle Ages and the times before the Roman Empire in Greece is different only nobles and clerics and some sort of official persons like lawyers and so forth had fixed and written down names and of course their privileges were tied to these names and the documents that proved them. If you couldn't present a certain sort of letter that showed your night as appointed by the king so and so you of course weren't this night, right? So losing this letter actually would have given you big problems. So quite literally your name was your status. For ordinary people this didn't apply. Of course they had names but naming practices basically differed widely in Europe and if you can speak of Europe or Germany or even territories in this historical context. So people had names but there were no real laws regulating what names they needed or had to have and what they did with that. They actually were free to choose their name and to change the name over the life course and obviously as far as we can tell quite frequently did so. Also it was quite common that ordinary people just had a single name so they had a first name and that's it and probably were addressed by the first name and the village or town or whatever of the origin. As I said from the 1500s on this starts to change and profoundly so. After the Reformation, that is 40 years after the Reformation in 1545 the Pope, the Catholic Church leader summoned theologists and priests and wischops in Trient. The Reformation had spread over wide parts of Europe and after almost a thousand years of a monopoly in metaphysical and religious relations so to say the Catholic Church had suffered pretty severe blows and a considerable loss of influence and among the measures to control and contain the spread of Protestantism the Council of Trient which was as you see almost 20 years long and had 25 different meetings in the course of these years the Council of Trient required the priests that the sacrament of baptism was now just not just only a writing event so to say a writing event in the soul of the newborn Church Father Augustine had described baptism as such that applying water and the rights of baptism would mark the soul of the newborn with an indelible mark by God which then for its whole life would mark it as a Christian. So this sort of metaphysical writing event now was to become a real writing event as the priests were now required to actually write down in church books whom they baptized essentially meaning that the Catholic Church started to try to register and count their flock to register and count who was Catholic and who was not. This event more or less marks the invention of organized birth registry in Europe. From now on all Catholic born individuals should have been written down in the church books. Of course reality looked much different. Priests didn't comply with this rule and church books were only kept very inconsistently and the practices different widely from area to area in Europe. Yet the process of birth registry as a bureaucratic measure was established and that the church sort of maintained some sort of apparatus for this would prove as important much later on in history. What we also have here is the first occurrence of a practice of fixation of a name to an individual in the sense of the fixation in the sense of writing it down. The Catholic Church which was the first and also the oldest bureaucracy in Europe had already a thousand years of continuous operation behind it in 1500 and started to apply its bureaucratic know-how to the problem of generating Christian identities. The name of course was given in the name of God and fixated where the double writing event of baptism in the soul and on the paper. And so now you might ask what about the Protestants and the Jews and other people in Europe. They of course weren't registered. The Protestant Church which was not such a monolithic entity as the Catholic Church and still isn't a monolithic entity didn't register newborns or baptisms and for Jewish people if it was different altogether. The second big event of the 1500s was the discovery so this is Columbus Landing in San Salvador of America by Christopher Columbus and this provided a big challenge to the established system of ruling a territory as it existed in the medieval ages. That was kings used to move around over their country, over their territories and establish sort of their power, their rule by making themselves present. There's a whole, there's a big ceremonial aspect to that how the king would present himself, what sort of representatives would be surrounded by him and what distance and so forth. Most people in Germany in school have been treated by the stories of Karl the Great and how Karl der Große, how he traveled his territories and this was exactly this models of ruling by presence. Of course this proved to be difficult to establish on the other side of the Atlantic. It's just too dangerous to put the king, the Spanish king in this case, on a ship that would spend three to four weeks on a very dangerous trip over the ocean have him do his tour so to say in the new territories which still were quite uncharted and only little colonized or inhabited. So the Spanish king or the Spanish crown had to invent some way of making the king present on the other side of the Atlantic. And what we have in this period of roughly 50, 60 years in the second half of the 16th century is sort of the innovation of the bureaucratic operating system as we know it today. That is the presence of the power on paper. What Philip II who was then king in mid 16th century of Spanish invented was a system with the help of the Catholic Church in that case actually with the help of the Inquisition that required two things, many more things, but two things that are important in this context. First, that everything on the other side of the Atlantic was to be written down. They actually had this idea of what they called the interior noticia de la Cosa so every, quite literally everything happening in the new territories was to be documented, put on a ship back to Sevilla where Philip II reigned and they're somehow processed and used for ruling these distant territories. Philip II spent so much time studying papers that he was called the paper king which was quite unusual for this time to have an actually literate king who was interested in this weird thing, paper. And paper on another note was at that point only 200 years old or 150 years old in Europe. Crusaders had brought it from the Islamic countries from their conquests and within a hundred years paper had pushed away parchment and parchment which were very expensive, very rare writing matters where such a system where you write down everything actually would be unattainable on because first of all it was too expensive and second you couldn't just cross out things that were wrong and this is actually what started, a practice that was started in this context so I'm going to show that soon. So, give me a second. So the second part, the second important thing that Philip II required was that every person that was going to be a citizen of the new territories of Nueva España had to be registered and these were quite normal people. I mean there was this vast amount of land to be settled and the Spanish crown tried to claim this territory by sending lots of people over there but at the same time they wanted to make sure they can control who's actually going on ships and is actually going to become a citizen on the other side of the Atlantic. So for the first time in history ordinary people had to appear in front except for courts but here in this case had to appear in front of secretaries of writers and had to tell their lives in order a decision could be made if they were worthy of becoming settlers in the new territories and one reason this measure was undertaken was that they wanted to sort out men running away from the women this is sort of the biggest topic in the contemporary documents. So the innovation that we have here and here's also the cancellation visible is and that is a difference to what the Catholic Church did with the birth registries is actual registers. So people get asked then they get a permission some sort of certificate that they can enter a ship which is then seven times actually checked before they go out on the Atlantic and then checked again when they arrive on the other side of the Atlantic but every one of these certificates would be registered in such a book and this sort of very simple measure of actually making a document of a document of writing down what sort of files of certificates of letters you hand out was historically a quite new innovation had been introduced by Frederick II in the 14th century or 15th century in Sicily but was not widely in use and Philip II required that every one of the certificates had to be written down and so these entries read names I actually can't read this I took this from this book which I highly recommend they the names and then description of their lives and whenever somebody actually left they would cross out these are these lines here the entry and that again is something that you rarely did on parchment or parchment you just didn't cross out stuff because this writing method was just too valuable to overwrite stuff with paper you suddenly have the possibility to throw away data or to erase data and this is what in a way is happening here it's made invalid there's another process another documentation progress that now can start after this has been crossed out okay so this is very roughly and very briefly the story of two things that happened in the 16th century where some on the one hand the Catholic Church on the other hand some proto state like the Spanish state started large scale attempts to register individuals and to fix their names because this system also implied that once you were written down and had the certificate that this name was your name and you were to be identified under this name for the rest of your life at least in the context of the Spanish bureaucracy of that time so the 17th century was mostly a lost century in Europe the 30 year war basically destroyed much of the existing structures but with the end of the 30 year war in 1648 and the what is it called in English the Westphalian peace probably a Westphalian treaty we see the emergence of what we now call statehood of modern statehood and the slow development of organized bureaucracies that could actually cope with the bureaucracy of the church and birth registration in this time still remains a very spotty practice solely practiced by the church but in France there is a development that these ecclesial birth registries become important in court cases so if you appeared in front of court you had to show your birth certificate but that a priest had actually written down your baptism also what starts to appear is or more widely used is family names is what we now deem as normal the fact that we don't only have this given name but a family name these family names were used in legal contracts for commodity exchange and things like that but again there's no uniform or standardized way of using the last name things really start to change only late much later almost 100 years later in the 18th century and that is under the enlightenment rule of some kings in Europe namely for example Joseph II of Austria who was the first who required that priest made a copy of the baptism record and supplied this copy to the state so this was the first sort of secularization of birth registration this was in 1780 so 200 more than 200 years after the council of Trient and oh wait I forgot one little bit which is funny trust centers 1560 let me just jump back to Philip II because this registrar I showed in the picture before were actually stored in this building the Casa de la Contratation in Sevilla and all these papers I talked about that were created and compiled in the new territories also were sent to this building where all the clerks would process these papers so one could say it's sort of a trust center because if you were written down in this and there was a register entry even if you have lost your certificate you actually existed so this is the at least for the Spanish crown this was the Westphalian peace and this is Joseph II so Joseph II was the first to secularize the church practice of birth registration and made it a requirement for every priest to make a copy and actually enforced this quite strongly he also introduced something else which we don't think about anymore today and this is house numbers birth registration as well as house numbering in Austria and in many other territories that would later apply these measures too was of course part of the draft of finding out how many men suitable for military service a given territory had and if you register births you can see how many men are born and then it's easy to calculate how many soldiers you will have 16 or 18 or how many years you want to let them live without serving the military you have later on house numbers which is another addressing scheme which is sort of not a name but important to actually be able to find people in a given territory we're not introduced to deliver mail right it's not a postal invention it's an invention in the context of military service in the draft so but the real event in this years that led to the eventual total secularization of birth registration occurred of course in 1789 in the French Revolution the French constitution as ratified by the French national convent in 1791 contains the passage the legislative authority will establish for all inhabitants without distinction the manner in which birth marriages and deaths will be certified and it will designate the public officials who will receive and maintain these files so this is the first such law in Europe and it's quite clearly that the French revolutionaries or the new French nation deems birth registration as one of its tasks and also an important task so if we designate the public officials of course also means that priests were not the secretaries or the individuals writing down births anymore what we here see is some sort of bam to our secretaries of the state who start to administer life events like birth, marriage, later unemployment and these kinds of things also it's important to note that it says without distinction again remember naming systems I mean this is the end of feudal times naming and fixed names and documented names were still an important element of feudal rule and a privilege of the nobles so this is actually quite revolutionary that the French revolutionaries say without distinction everybody is going to be registered and is going to get some sort of certificate that shows who he is so liberty, egalité, fraternité implied that everybody was treated equal and not at least bureaucratically so originally the civil status laws in France required that any birth was to be registered within 24 hours which of course proved to be impractical but the important point here is that if you will entering the territory from within by birth becomes an event that states start to take great interest in and start to regulate in which they make into some sort of an entry into the writing system of the state into the documentary regime that a state has also this means that and there's actually a lot more like legal detail to this which I don't show here that the French state now deemed this name that was given in this writing event to be fixed to the individual for over the lifetime and actually brought forward a law that made it near impossible to change the name once it was written down in this manner this is true to this day France has some of the toughest laws when it comes to name changes equally difficult in Germany or in Switzerland if you try to change your name you're in trouble well yeah marriage is okay that's a good point excuse me just for this cream could you repeat the question even with marriage was the question so what about the the laws for there's another question excuse me okay could you say that again okay for marriage you can keep your name of both name or take your husband or wife name because it's working but it's a recent change in I mean Germany and Switzerland as far as I know have changed these laws quite recently to recently is like the last 10 or 15 years so what happens if you marry somebody do you keep your last name do you choose altogether the new name what happens in the case of divorce can you get your old name back and these kinds of things I mean it's all shows this is a heavy regulated area and the origins of this regulation lie in these kinds of events in the French Revolution and the quote Seville brought forward by Napoleon a few years later so let me get back again to this fixed name what we also have here is sort of the legalization in the sense of the creation of the legal requirement of what we now deem as normal names and this is patrilinear given name last name formats patrilinear means your last name comes down from your father and all naming systems that nation states use work by this format and we expect usually expected to be this way recently there have been changes to this and in some in some countries you actually allowed to keep your mother's name and so forth when you're registered when your birth is registered so at the same time this guy Jeremy Bentham lamented that there's a problem with all these naming regimes starting to emerge in modern nation states and that is it is to be regretted that the proper names of individuals are upon irregular footing those distinctions invented in the infancy of society and infancy of society is probably what he thinks of the 16th or 17th century to provide for the ones of Hamlet only imperfectly accomplished the object in a great nation Bentham instead called for a new nomenclature so arranged that in a whole nation every individual should have a proper name which should belong to him alone so too many John Smith make it pretty difficult to identify an individual and Bentham's idea was to introduce a new nomenclature a new system a three-part name consisting of the first and the last name and a word composed from the date of birth and the location of birth Bentham also tackled another problem that would occupy many identity experts if you want to call them that way throughout the 19th century the problem that people can actually still change their names even though they have written down names that is you could just move to another city and use a different name and probably get away with it even if there's a bureaucratic regime in place that should prevent that so Bentham had observed that British sailors would tattoo their names in well-formed and indelible characters to their wrist so that their bodies may be known in case of shipwreck such writing in the body as an identification practice was actually pretty common in Europe but not to record names via tattoos or other means instead creating marks in the body by cutting or branding or by other measures with both the practice of positive and negative stigmatization positive in certain religious contexts like the Crusades who were brandings to show that they actually were members belonged to or actually what do you say that actually were part of the Crusades and the negative stigmatization of course is criminal identification or identification of heretics for example thieves had their ears slit which we still know what term Schlitz or in German arsonists were branded in certain parts of the body and so forth so this is basically writing in the body as a social stigmatization, a social signaling system such writing in the body in a sense a crude and brutal signal system vanished during the first half of the 19th century and what instead emerged is something that we still do today when we try to create an identity and that is reading the body the emerging science of criminology in the discursive context of Darwinist theories of hereditary criminal behavior and colonialism were the context of these discourses of reading the body so we're now in the second half of the 19th century almost 400 years after the discovery of America and after the Reformation modern nation states in the West had by then established themselves and within 40 years after the French Revolution all European countries had implemented similar birth registration laws like in France that is in the sense that every birth has to be registered by some official and that people were not allowed anymore to change their names with the exception of England, in England it was still legal until I think 1899 or something like that that you could change your name by just announcing it publicly for example you would put an ad in a paper and say I'm not John Smith anymore I'm Adam Smith or something and that would be a legal name change every other country in Europe made it pretty hard next to impossible to change your name once it was registered in that sense so still criminals so at least many people thought were those people who changed their names because that was one way of getting away away from the police or getting away from being caught so the second half of the 19th century saw the emergence of the variety of technologies that tried to make the body into a resource to read out so to say the body to make the body a resource for identification practices the first and most widely used, the first successful most widely used system was the anthropometry invented by the French police clerk Alphonse Bertillon Identity administration in police departments in this time was so to say close to inexistent Bertillon had worked at the Paris police prefecture and found himself confronted with a collection of close to 100,000 files of criminals that lacked the most basic sorting scheme and identification was done via description and names and a typical card in this collection would read something like short, fair-skinned, big nose sometimes photographs were attached but in any case there were no real standards for describing individuals and also not how to photograph individuals so there was no pot shot as we know it today that you have to stand in a certain way in a certain light and you know your profile and so forth so re-identification was basically at the convenience of the policeman processing the individual in question Bertillon whose father had been a famous anthropologist started to tackle the problem of re-identification and we're not talking about ordinary people here this is in the context of processing criminals this is the context of police work we're identifying what the discourse of the time called recidivists so people who had already done criminal things and then were caught again which was also viewed as cost by biological causes in that time so to re-identify these individuals Bertillon developed a system and you see a picture depicting this here which consisted in measuring the body of adults it didn't work with children of course because children grow so the body changes too much his reasoning was that the body was a source for identification and certain bodily features differ enough from person to person to be used for identification and that with adults certain parts of the body don't change over time so he created a system of 11 measurements including the circumference and length of the head the length of the left foot this is what you see here the length of the left underarm the span of a person which is measured in this picture and these measurements had to be undertaken meticulously by trained persons so slight variations in how the foot would sit on this podis and so forth would actually change the measurement and provide problems later on when identifying or re-identifying an individual but the real invention is not this measurement regime that Bertillon came up with the problem still was that this would create heaps of data that in some way needed to be classified and then be searchable and sorted and his anthropometric system served this problem by using another fairly new medium and that is index cards index cards were originally introduced in the context of libraries and actually there were the backsides of playing cards because these were the only cards that would be readily available of the size cheap and in a standardised manner so index cards helped to sort things, books and other things and Bertillon applied index cards to sort people from the measurements taken from the individual Bertillon would create a code so the measurements are written down in the top and lower lines and that would also always be a photograph applied to the card so it was not only these measurements that were used for identification purposes but also the photograph from the measurements taken, Bertillon would create a code sort of an abridged version this means circumference, right, what was it again right toe of one centimetre and so forth so this is basically an abridged version of code and the index cards were then divided in a big sorting cabinet first by sex and then sub-classified simply alphabetically with the first letter of this code by doing this, Bertillon could split up 120,000 index cards into groups of 12 and these would be in little drawers and little compartments and once a measurement was taken and coded in this manner one could actually very quickly browse so to say to the compartment in question and find out if this individual had been measured, had undergone a Bertillonage before so what this basically is, it's a search engine for people and it worked marvelously and revolutionized identification techniques in the 1880s and 1890s of course it had its problems, I'm going to say a little bit about that soon basically the discourse that brought the breakthrough and this is not unimportant for our contemporary debates for Bertillon system was not criminals but anarchists the system was used to identify some prominent anarchists in the 1880s and 1890s and thus gained widespread popularity so around 1900s anthropometrics were at their peak but it was already, began already to be challenged by a system that is still in use today and that is fingerprinting or ductiloscopy the original fingerprinting is a long and complicated story and as always with scientific discoveries and cultural practices there are many heroic stories of inventing and fingerprinting of course is ripe with it but the truth is that fingerprinting wasn't really invented but emerged in many different places in the last decades of the 19th century the important point for today is that the first widely used fingerprinting system emerged in colonial contexts in the words of colonial clerks in the 1880s Indians look be vitally homogenous so they couldn't tell the people they were to rule apart and they also couldn't tell their names apart they spoke a different language they look different and this became important not least in the context of dispersing pensions because many Indians in India were employed by the British government or had served in the army and then were eligible for pensions and apparently there was a lot of pension fraud at least that is what British officials report and stemming from the fact that they couldn't distinguish one person from the other when it came to the office this presented some name and said it's eligible he or she is eligible he actually is eligible for pensions so this is one too far in order to prevent fraud the British officials started to experiment with Bertillon's system but found it not applicable at the end please? okay let's do it quickly they started to experiment with anthropometric systems and found it inapplicable to colonial subjects and this is when actually the invention of when they started to experiment with fingerprints and again the problem here was that a classification system is needed it had been discovered quite early that fingerprints actually are individual and don't change over the lifetime still it's quite difficult to create some sort of system that allows it like Bertillon's system did to easily search a lot of prints and again the solution was to translate the visual to sort of code and this basically is world's loops world's loops what was that why are we no longer here okay so this pattern is a loop and here are 10 fingers that have world's loops the problem is these prints are not distributed evenly so about 90% of the people have these worlds so you create a lot of mismatches very easily more complicated systems invented later this is the Henry system which was still in use until a few years ago divided the fingers in even and uneven fingers and further sub-qualified the patterns that appeared on the fingers again the point here is that these systems translated the body into information and made identification at a distance possible because such a code could be transmitted with the media of the time that is the postal system and the telegraph to basically any given place in the world and it would be possible to identify an individual by reading out the fingerprints of the classification system that would render the optical into this code and this is basically what we still do today when we biometrically identify individuals we use the body as a resource to generate some sort of code which allows us then to see if this individual already has been registered of course some people had the brilliant idea that names have this property of not being attached to a body and that people could change names however sophisticated the bureaucratic regime of writing down names is so why not use these codes as names themselves and this of course was something that some people in the early 20th century debated this is Juan Vucatich an Argentinian doctoroscopist who invented his own system similar to the one I just showed and he had the idea that fingerprints would allow to track the origin and civil evolution of each person that is birth, marriage, death sexual sentences and so forth so remember what the what the passage from the French constitution said it's the same life events in that context it was the birth registration that would allow to administer these things to administrate these things here it's the fingerprint here the body becomes the means to address an individual in a bureaucratic context and Vucatich Pupil Alamandos brought this to the logical conclusion and had this idea that we could have a number starting with epsilon because epsilon is an Indian word for legal tie generated from the fingerprints and that this number would be the individual himself it would be the civil person of every man and by this the person would be known given rights and held responsible for his actions and he called for an universal right for identification so he had the idea that this is actually something akin to human rights the possibility to be identified and thus be treated according to one's actions okay so since we are out of time let me just jump over what comes now this is the situation 1900 the 20th century you have two wars you have displaced people in Europe you have the introduction of the passport system which actually was not in place before World War I what we now know that we have this passport and that it's a necessary to travel actually is a historically relatively young phenomenon 80, 90 years old and again all identification systems and this is in the context of the passport served the contradictory desires of government to both control movement and to encourage international mobility so on the one hand you are you should travel on the other hand many nation states don't want you to travel and if you have a passport a German passport, a US passport you're actually pretty mobile you can go to pretty much any of the 190 or so countries in the world if you have an Afghani passport or passport from some country from sub-Saharan you can't go anywhere so this document controls your movement quite quite well so let me come to the conclusion ID cards I jump over this can talk about that later after the talk so coming to an end this is a name first we saw in the genealogy that naming identity regimes emerged in economic, military colonial, social welfare I haven't talked about this this is ID cards ID cards are common in countries that have welfare that have established welfare systems because it's an easy tool to actually identify you as a citizen or and with this as eligible for welfare services like universal healthcare education and so forth countries that don't have big welfare systems like Great Britain or the US don't have ID cards Great Britain had ID cards but abandoned after World War II and migratory contexts secondly names are not a matter of choice they are mandatory in any modern nation state and this is historically a quite new development only about 150 years old that most countries have implemented these laws thirdly the reference of the law is the body this whole lengthy presentation on biometrics was to make the point that the problem for all this identity regimes is the gap between the body and the document every identity regime that nation states try to establish attempt to close this gap if you have a name that is on a paper it's still not in your body so you can easily change it the anthropometric system the ductiloscopy and modern systems basically create names from the body by reading out the body that could serve as an address for administrative purposes so and this is because the rule of law needs if you trace a chain of events to be able to trace any chain of events back to an individual's body who did what when where this is what any lawyer or any judge will want to know at a certain point and if something happens that's not written down beforehand there's a whole regime of measures to actually write it down after the fact that is forensics and you all enjoy that in CSI every evening to have an event that was not written down and then the whole regime or forensics is applied and sort of puts it onto paper what happened somewhere okay so identity is duplication also jumped over that all the systems basically create identity by duplicating you have a registry and then you have a certificate the identity is actually the relation between the registry and the certificate without such duplication nobody can prove the validity of this documents identity regimes at least nation states monopolize these registers so identity systems change as media change again now we have a new medium in which we interact which is the internet and we have a change of identity systems again something probably for the discussion or for later on last at least what I want to say is to govern is to address right so any system that wants to govern needs to establish addresses this is what we see today India creates a biometric system for all its citizens and it does so to provide welfare at least that's what they say right the german attempt to create digital addresses is well known it's electronic personnel wise which of course doesn't work so far right initiate the debate how trusted identities in cyberspace look like this is happening right now we don't know what the american system will look like but basically to govern is to address means the american government has to figure out how to address this people and digital sphere coming to my conclusion what I wanted to show is that in the name there's always somebody else usually it's some sort of state entity it used to be the church right or god the question and this national initiative for secure trusted identities actually brings this question to the american public is can we choose who the somebody else is today and this is what hackers and activists and politicians and everybody else can play a role in how are we going to be addressed how will our names look like how are we to be found and find others in the context of the digital medium thank you thank you for your great talk since the time has run quite long I'd say we can have two questions are there any ideas or concepts that would elaborate on how the system of names could be transcended not in a way as to automatically close the gap you have described by say automatic identification but by questioning the very need of unique names and maybe go into concepts like arbitrary pseudonymity absolutely I mean establishing some sort of address if it's called a name or whatever does not mean that anonymous speech or pseudonymous speech needs to go away I mean the simplest way to introduce a digital identification system is a real name policy just translate the real name into cyberspace and attach it to every act you do in that space and it raises privacy questions and issues and as far as I can see at least in the western countries what this American discussion does and also what is done in the context of the gesundheitskarte and other means of using digital signature which is sort of like the legal name in cyberspace in Germany is that they actually pretty privacy aware try to establish procedures that would allow you to be on the one hand addressable but on the other hand speak anonymously or pseudonymously the discussion is actually quite advanced in that context these people are not simply trying to to establish real name politics in the cyberspace is that another question do you actually have something to say regarding your eyes all the work of Tim Berners-Lee on naming test of independent invention or something how that affects the current debate because we actually can choose who this somebody else is if we own a namespace like for example a domain name on the internet well of course there's like many many naming naming systems for addressing in different contexts the context I'm trying to talk about here to show some background information is how people are identified and addressed and historically people are identified and addressed by names and later on this relation between the name and the body becomes a problem and it's basically a problem since the last 150 years and attempts have been made to fix it like fingerprinting and other means of biometrics identifying things like digital objects or URIs or even real objects can be done in many different ways the question is will nation states start to regulate this too and if you look at certain projects that for example the Bundesdruckerei does in at least does research on you see that they actually thinking about how you could identify things in digital processes in the context of such federal identification systems which again they do because of copyright issues patent laws and these kinds of things once you're in the digital realm it doesn't matter what the data references if it's a person or a thing, cryptographically it's just a string of characters but what matters is do people transact with people or with things with digital events and so forth and do these transactions with some sort of legal entitlements economic value and so forth where some sort of regulatory need arises regulatory need for example like taxation customs copyright control probably even criminal issues so I fully expect a certain point that this whole internet of things and how things are addressed digitally will sort of merge with this discussion to a certain extent and that is a completely different thing and would be worthy looking into