With so much of technosocialist society depending on one’s online identity, what is the best way to ensure that it’s not possible for criminals to steal the identities of upstanding citizens and make purchases through the market or do other things that would hurt their standing in the community? There are a number of ways, some more high tech than others. The option that most people will probably think of first is some form of biometric scanning. Through the use of fingerprint or retinal scanners, it would be possible to confirm someone’s identity. But, while quite difficult, fooling biometric systems is possible. And with the importance that would attach to biometric scanning if it became a more routine part of society, criminal gangs would rapidly improve the techniques until biometric scanning became more or less useless.
Then there’s another popular idea, implanted RFID tags. A citizen could simply have a tiny chip implanted in their skin that would enable a computer to verify identity by reading a code broadcast by the chip. Again, seems quite handy, but it still runs the risk of counterfiting by crime rings. All it would take to discover that code would be to set up your own RFID scanner somewhere those tags would be likely to pass close, and you could easily get the code of anyone who walked by.
The example that I like to look at here is the Blizzard Authenticator. It’s a small plastic device that does one thing: when you press the button, it displays six digits. It was developed for the popular computer game, World of Warcraft. When a player wishes to log into their account, they simply enter their account name, their password, and that six digit code from the Authenticator. The code changes based on the date and time, but the algorythm on every authenticator is slightly different, and no one except the Blizzard Authentication Server knows what that algorythm is. But that server can check the code you’ve entered against the code that your particular authenticator ought to have generated at that date and time, and only lets you log in if the two match. The key fact about the Blizzard Authenticator is that there has never been a confirmed case of an account with an attached Authenticator being hacked. And while it may come as a surprise to non-gamers, Warcraft accounts are targeting by exactly the sort of organized criminal hacking rings that we are discussing here. They have withstood considerably more attempts at hacking than most biometric systems are subject to in their lives, and they’ve come out of it with a perfect record.
Something as simple as the current Blizzard Authenticator would probably do a very good job at protecting the security of citizens’ Profiles in a technosocialist society. But they can be lost, broken, or stolen, and so if I had a magic wand, I would actually create a device that combined all three ideas into a single security technology that would be extremely difficult to hack. Basically, it would be an implantable RFID chip whose broadcast code was determined by an algorythm that took into account both the date and time and the DNA of the person into whom it was implanted to come up with one-time-use codes. I am not a biotech researcher, and I have no idea how difficult to achieve this would be, but it would be incredibly cool.
Once we’re able to have a guarantee of an identity that cannot be stolen, there are all sorts of interesting technological features we can include in the society. Imagine door handles with built-in RFID readers that would only let people authorized to enter that room open the door. Not only would this eliminate the problem of people losing their keys, it would significantly help even the playing field for law enforcement in a society with no actual law enforcement organizations. If someone was granted a restraining order that required them to stay 500 yards away from someone else, the door system could automatically prevent the offender from going through doors less than 500 yards away from the victim. Computers could automatically sense the RFID chip of the person using them and pull all of their data and settings from the cloud so that they could use any computer as if it was their home computer.