Re: When Technical Standards Meet Geopolitical Reality

>>What you're talking about sounds a lot like how OpenCVRS works wrt. birth
declarations... The only difference here is when that digital credential
pops out of the process... What it seems that you're looking for is for
digital credentials to exist by the certifier, attendant, and the parents
first. Those are the things you are saying must be foundational and the
government should only recognize (or not) those foundational
things as a second digital credential. Translating that to something
concrete, it means that if we were to use verifiable credentials for this
activity, there would be VCs from the certifier, attendant, and the
parents, and then a VC that would refer to those and/or wrap those by the
local vital records agency (as a second step). Is that accurate, and if
not, where did I go wrong?

This is close to how I might summarize. YES - tbere should be two forms of
verifiable data, and the government's credential should be second, and
endorse information created earlier, elsewhere. However, I think there's
still a core part of my argument that I'm not getting across, because the
summary above doesn't emphasize how the two types of data differ except by
issuer. Let me try to refine.

It is not necessary to know (or have) a legal identity to be a person. If I
encounter a stranger, I know they are a person (and could even testify to
that fact in a rigorous court proceeding or a war crimes tribunal) long
before I ever get around to wondering what their legal identity is. A
stateless person may have no legal identity, but they are indisputably a
person. So if we say that a personhood credential is issued by a
government, and if we put fields in the schema of that credential that only
a government can attest to, then we teach the world to ignore this
distinction, and we implement stacks that make the short-circuit
inevitable. Not only do national governments have a monopoly on the use of
force to enforce their legal regime, they also end up with a monopoly on
the question of whether a particular entity is a person or not. This is the
human rights violation that I claim is intolerable.

The first verifiable data in my mental model should attest the existence of
a person. The focus of the required fields in its schema should be whatever
is practical to uniquely identify an individual human being. That probably
means biometrics of various types, but also less strong identifiers like
birthmarks, parentage, blood type, etc. Some basis of comparing a human to
the verifiable data is needed, but I don't want to narrow the options to
just one biometric type, or just to extremely strong ones. Any biometric
fields that are not null in this data must be selectively disclosable.
Essential metadata should also be part of the schema (e.g., DOB). For
convenience, there could also be some given and personal name hint fields,
but these fields MUST NOT be construed as an assertion about legal names,
because the question that this data answers is NOT whether this person has
a legal identity, but whether the described entity is a person at all.
Also, since these fields contain mutable data and the rest of the fields do
not, I'm tempted to exclude name entirely to avoid confusion.

I've called this artifact "verifiable data" instead of a "credential",
because I don't think it should be bound to a cryptographic identifier for
a holder. Babies can't be holders, and a lot of stateless persons lack
access to tech, too. Their proof of binding is their inherent ability to
match the biometrics, not fragile cryptographic control. A good name for
this artifact might be a "personhood affidavit". Although this affidavit
might be hidden or suppressed or deleted from various registries, as long
as the original exists somewhere, the personhood it proves cannot be broken
by a human trafficker or a hostile or uncaring government. (I read today
that Epstein or Maxwell compared young victims on Epstein's island to
disposable kleenex, to be discarded as worthless after they'd served their
purpose. History is replete with similar objectifications. A personhood
affidavit must withstand such assaults on human dignity without recourse to
legal systems that may prove far weaker.) Even if an individual affidavit
does get lost, it can be recreated (with lower assurance about DOB) simply
by transparently and formally witnessing the existence of a person again.

I think the issuer of this verifiable data must be one or more individual
human beings. They could be human beings that have a trusted role
authorized by a government (e.g., judge, doctor, nurse, tribal elder, etc),
and they could be registered somewhere to give them gravitas with
strangers, and they could (and should) follow carefully processes mandated
by authorities, and they could use government tools for the mechanics --
but they still have to issue with their own identifiers, in their own
names. I don't think we should encourage trusting any nameless bureaucracy
or any pure piece of technology to attest humanness.

Once a personhood affidavit exists, then I think a government (that is, an
identifier controlled by a government bureaucracy via its IT
infrastructure) could issue a birth certificate. This artifact should
reference a personhood affidavit. It shows that the data in the personhood
affidavit has been checked, accepted as referring to a unique and
previously unregistered person, and recorded by a government vital records
office. For convenience, it may repeat some of the information from the
personhood affidavit, but there should be no confusion about where
personhood came from (elsewhere!). In addition, it adds information that is
connected to legal identity -- the full legal name of the person, and the
legal parents or guardians of the person, for example. I have no problem
with this part; a government truly is authoritative about the legalities it
recognizes for a given human being. Further, birth certificates can be
changed if the legalities around a person change (name change, adoption,
etc.). But we should never imagine that governments change personhood.

So, to restate my beef: I'm not just focused on "when a credential pops
out". I'm focused on keeping these two types of data very separate. The
first data isn't a birth certificate from the government bureau of vital
statistics -- the second and derivative one is. The first data doesn't have
to be at a local records office, either. It logically pre-exists any
interaction with offices.