Who Knows
In the U.S. I could often get by just showing a set of credit cards to claim my identity to some officious bureaucrat, although I doubt that’d work now, especially flying, when the airlines were already getting pretty severe about photo ID before anyone flew a plane into a building, but here I’ve got to make up what’s known as 100 points of identification. Right now, no one can present 100 points with a single piece of ID unless you’re under 18. A passport is only 70 points, as is a birth certificate (although, and rightly so, a birth certificate isn’t properly identification at all, but only, as I was once told when attempting to renew a U.S. passport, proof I was born in the country, but that’s a separate story), a driver’s license is 40. Once you get to the credit cards and so forth, you’re working with 25 points apiece. While proposals are floating around for a National ID Card (interest in which was renewed following the London bombings last July, and which continues despite the recent finding that they’d have been entirely useless in preventing the attacks, something any reasonably intelligent person would already know), the points are part of the requirements of the Privacy Laws, legislation that keeps my details from being spread around too liberally, but which also cause some troublesome interference both in extraordinary circumstances and the quotidian. So while employers must exercise great care in what data they collect and store, let alone give out, and airlines couldn’t help the government figure out who any Australians were potentially caught up in the Boxing Day Tsunami, they also make sure I’ve got to front up to a teller at the bank in order to transact anything beyond the simplest on-line transaction or send original documents through the post for authentication. Such laws are even more robust elsewhere, and what Dracula’s proposing seems meant to bring Australia up the scale as well, while allowing particular loopholes for the government. In other words, more complexity for me, less for them.