Identifying the English

A History of Personal Identification 1500 to the Present

Edward Higgs

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441138019
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

Personal identification is very much a live political issue in Britain and this book looks at why this is the case, and why, paradoxically, the theft of identity has become ever more common as the means of identification have multiplied. Identifying the English looks not only at how criminals have been identified - branding, fingerprinting, DNA - but also at the identification of the individual with seals and signatures, of the citizen by means of passports and ID cards, and of the corpse. Beginning his history in the medieval period, Edward Higgs reveals how it was not the Industrial Revolution that brought the most radical changes in identification techniques, as many have assumed, but rather the changing nature of the State and commerce, and their relationship with citizens and customers. In the twentieth century the very different historical techniques have converged on the holding of information on databases, and increasingly on biometrics, and the multiplication of these external databases outside the control of individuals has continued to undermine personal identity security.

1

Introduction

IDENTIFYING THE ENGLISH

In October 2007 a junior official at the United Kingdom’s HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) sent the National Audit Office two compact discs via the courier company TNT. These contained the personal details necessary for the payment of child benefit to 25 million individuals. Items of information included names and dates of birth of citizens, and those of their children, their addresses, their National Insurance numbers and, where relevant, the details of the bank or building society accounts into which the child benefit was to be paid. In doing this the HMRC official ignored security procedures, and the two discs disappeared in transit never to be seen again. It was alleged at the time that this information might be worth £1.5 billion to criminals who could use it to impersonate millions of people, and so ‘steal’ their identities. Such personal details could be used to access bank accounts to remove money; to set up other accounts under assumed names; to buy goods on credit using another person’s credit ratings, and so on. The following month this debacle led to the resignation of the chairman of the HMRC, a public apology to the individuals concerned by the British Prime Minister, and a significant decline in support for his government. Surprisingly little criticism was made of the courier company, perhaps reflecting the pro-business zeitgeist of the age.¹ Over the following months the list of public sector bodies that admitted to losing people’s personal details expanded to include the Royal Air Force, Royal Navy, Ministry of Defence, Home Office, the police, NHS Trusts, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), the Department for Work and Pensions, and local councils. Those affected include patients, taxpayers, welfare recipients, applicants for driving tests, students, teachers, job applicants, farm workers, prison staff and service personnel. The HMRC episode was thus anything but an isolated incident.²

I was subsequently invited to be interviewed on the issues raised by these events by the BBC Radio Four programme Broadcasting House, where I had to confess that the previous day he had himself been the victim of identity theft. When I used my debit card and PIN number to withdraw cash from an ATM (automatic teller machine) in Oxford, I discovered that my current account was unexpectedly overdrawn. Using the bank’s internet site, which required the inputting of a user ID number, a password and items from a set of ‘memorable information’, I discovered that the day before 250 euros had been withdrawn from my account by someone using an ATM in Germany. I rang the bank’s Fraud and Dispute Operations, identifying myself through my address and other personal details, and arranged to have the stolen sum reimbursed and the fraud investigated. Surprisingly the bank refused to tell me the results of this investigation ‘because of the Data Protection Act’, an obvious misapplication of that piece of UK legislation. This sorry tale exemplifies a curious paradox at the heart of personal identification in developed Western societies. On one hand, there are more and more means for people to prove who they are, and, on the other, personal identities have never seemed less secure, or been the focus of so much public anxiety.

In Western countries individuals are registered and recorded from birth to death, and at various points in-between. States and private organizations hold vast databases of information on identifiable persons, and have done so for most of the past century.³ Citizens and consumers possess wallets that literally bulge with means of identification in the form of credit cards, drivers’ licences, membership cards, and the like. These contain means of personal identification in the form of signatures, photographs, microchips that can be used in conjunction with PIN codes, and so on. According to APACS, the trade body for payment services, in 2006 there were 142.8 million payment cards in use in the United Kingdom – 69.5 million credit cards, 4.9 million charge cards and 68.3 million debit cards. These were held by 31.4 million people, just under two-thirds of the adult population, with an average of 2.4 credit cards and 1.6 debit cards per person.⁴ In my case, there would appear to have been at least one other counterfeit card in the possession of someone in Germany. In addition, since the 1960s a whole new range of techniques has been developed to identify people from the measurement and analysis of parts of their bodies (biometrics) – retinal and iris scans, facial and hand geometry, voice recognition, and DNA profiles.

At the same time, however, identity fraud is said to cost the United Kingdom £1.7 billion (up from £1.3 billion in 2000–01), and to affect perhaps 100,000 people, per annum.⁵ The ‘criminalization’ of the internet, as organized crime has taken advantage of the ad hoc and vulnerable nature of online identification systems, is said to be a fundamental threat to its credibility.⁶ Official attempts to pin down the personal identity of individuals, both within the boundaries of states and when they move across them, have also become increasingly frantic and controversial. In Britain this can be seen in the fraught debates over the introduction of identity cards, and of the expansion of the fingerprint and DNA databases held by the police. In the wake of bombings by Islamic fundamentalists in New York, London and Madrid, the fingerprinting of travellers at airports has caused increasing unease. Such concerns reflect the manner in which everyone has now become a suspect, and the threats that intimate identification through the body presents to privacy and a sense of personal integrity. Perhaps inevitably debates often revolve around the spectre of the Big Brother State in George Orwell’s novel 1984. These concerns have led to the creation of a number of protest groups, such as NO2ID, which seek to prevent the spread of identification cards and of the ‘database state’ in general.⁷

One of the aims of the present historical study is to help to resolve this apparent contradiction between the expanded means of identification, and its apparent fragility, by showing how these two phenomena are actually intimately connected. The book will also examine the extent to which anonymity is actually preferable to identification, or even possible. It is certainly true that internal passports and identity cards were used by both Stalin and Hitler to create their own forms of totalitarianism. To be purged or sent to the death camps people had to be known and identified.⁸ However, States have also used forms of identification to ensure that citizens are eligible for rights to benefits and to the vote without fear of impersonation, while private individuals have used seals and signatures for centuries to lay claim to real and personal estate.⁹ The right to identification can thus be a right to be recognized. This can be seen in some contemporary developing nations where those who are not registered at birth lack access to basic social services and property rights, and where displaced persons without papers cannot move, work or, even, marry.¹⁰ Although Orwell’s 1984 described the dangers of total surveillance, it also showed how in a totalitarian society one has no identity, and can simply become a ‘non-person’ to whom all reference has been expunged.

TOWARDS A HISTORY OF PERSONAL IDENTIFICATION

Academic historians are, as everyone else, increasingly interested in the subject of personal identification, both for what it tells us about the individual,and about his or her changing relationship with the State and the society to which they belong. Here one should mention Jane Caplan and John Torpey’s path-breaking collection of essays, Documenting Individual Identity, which covers a broad range of subjects from the identification of citizens in the French Revolution to the use of identity cards to organize genocide in Rawanda in the 1990s.¹¹ There are also important historical studies of specific technologies of identification, such as John Torpey’s important work on the modern international passport system,¹² and Simon Cole and Chandak Sengoopta’s separate, and equally impressive, studies of the development and spread of fingerprinting.¹³ Members of numerous other disciplines, including political scientists, lawyers, criminologists, anthropologists and sociologists, are interested in how people identify themselves, or how they are ‘pinned down’ by states and private businesses. Most of these discussions of the subject lack a historical framework, although this is certainly not true of some of the pioneering sociological analyses of David Lyon.¹⁴

None of these authors has tried to produce an overarching theory of the historical development of the means of personal identification. In a newly emerging field of research, they are more concerned to document particular facets of the historical story, or to examine issues of contemporary relevance. However, their works do contain asides, or introductory observations, that hint at a broad set of assumptions about the development of the means of personal identification – a sort of shadowy ‘meta-history’. There is a tendency to understand the development of identification in terms of the impact of increased mobility during the Industrial Revolution, which is associated in turn with urbanization and the assumption of increasing social anonymity. For example, in his innovative Suspect Identities, Simon Cole argues in a preparatory remark that:

In general, premodern societies already had an effective method of personal, and criminal, identification: the network of personal acquaintance through which persons were ‘known’ in the memories and perceptions of their neighbors. Most people spent virtually their entire lives in the village, or region, in which they were born. . . . In village society, there was little need for a signature to verify the identity of a neighbor. If a signature was used, it was more a gesture of good faith than a test of identity. . . . In the wake of the industrial revolution, enormous numbers of people migrated from intimate rural villages to anonymous urban settings. Cities grew dramatically along with population density. The informal system of personal acquaintance and collective memory began to collapse.¹⁵

Hence, Cole hints, the need for new forms of identification, such as the fingerprint, to deal with the social problems connected to the rise of anonymityin society. Similarly, Chandak Sengoopta in his Imprint of the Raj argues that fingerprinting can be seen within the context of urbanization and movement:

Nineteenth-century Europe was a haven for criminals. Life was becoming steadily more urban, anonymous and mobile – in the large cities, one could simply disappear into a milling crowd of individuals and take on new identities that the surveillance and policing methods of the time could not hope to detect.¹⁶

Caplan and Torpey, who are fully aware of the complexity of this history, also see the development of identification in the period of the French Revolution and its aftermath against ‘the background of an increasingly mobile society in which older and more stable conventions of identification were dissolving’. However, they also see new forms of identification in terms of political developments associated with the creation of the modern nation-state, a theme to which the present work will return.¹⁷ In works written by non-historians on the politics of identification, the lack of mobility in pre-modern societies, and so the absence of a need for formal means of identification, are taken as axiomatic.¹⁸

Some of these arguments draw, in part, on classical sociological concepts. As I have noted elsewhere,¹⁹ sociology was born in the nineteenth century in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, and its pioneers – Durkheim, Marx, Spencer and Weber – were concerned with that momentous transition in world history, and with its social and institutional results. Understanding modernity, in the sense of grasping what makes the modern, industrial world different to societies in the past, is still a fundamental concern of historical sociology. In the Western social science tradition the emergence of industrial capitalism at the end of the eighteenth century is seen as resulting in key shifts – from status to contract, from mechanical to organic solidarity, and from the sacred to the secular.²⁰ It should not be a surprise to discover, therefore, that sociologically informed accounts of the development of means of identification implicitly regard the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a period of fundamental change.

The belief in increasing anonymity during the processes of industrialization and urbanization was given one of its classic formulations in Ferdinand Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Originally published in 1887, this work contrasted the supposed communal life of the ancient rural community, the gemeinschaft, with forms of contractual association in modern urban society, the gesellschaft. In the gemeinschaft people supposedly worked together, and were bound by ties of kinship, tradition and the common tilling of the soil. The gemeinschaft was an ‘organic’ entity in which feelings of love, habit and duty were said to combine to create harmony, and where individuals were knownto each other personally. In the modern gesellschaft, or so Tönnies argued, all are strangers to each other, and people are orientated towards the fulfilment of personal goals and the making of money. In this form of society, others become mere tools to personal gain in a market economy. The State then acts as a means of keeping individuals from each other’s throats, and enforces the rule of capitalists over the discontented working classes.²¹ The concept of a ‘society of strangers’ is also found in the work of the early twentieth-century sociologist Georg Simmel.²² The vision of a mobile, anonymous, society is plainly one, or so it can be argued, in which new forms of identification become necessary to prevent fraud and to impose social control through the punishment of known deviants.

The discussions of political scientists regarding the development of modern identification systems for tracking and limiting the movements of migrants and asylum see...