[LINK] Numbering/identification systems

[Roger Clarke]

At 9:19 +1100 27/10/10, Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
>Does anyone know of any work that is being (or has been) done on using
>the individual (or role) rather than a device as the basis for a
>numbering system? And if it includes all forms of communications (voice,
>video, text, email etc)?

There used to be a person-specific 'exchange-code' (i.e. first block 
of digits in the phone-number) - 550 was it?

As I recall, it was dropped from the plan because of low adoption levels.

Musings from 1999 here:
http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/PLT.html#TC1
Since the mid-1980s, the PSTN has been supplemented by additional, 
mobile telephony services, including pagers (Chertkoff 1998), 
analogue and then digital telephones, and now satellite telephones. 
These present a very different pattern in relation to location and 
tracking (e.g. Waters et al. 1998). It is intrinsic to these 
technologies that the locations of caller and callee handsets need to 
be known within the radius of the particular geographical 'cell', 
which is of the order of 5-25km.
In addition, the practice of mobile telephony is such that a 
'telephone number' has ceased to identify a socket into which a 
device was plugged which could be used by anyone who was in that 
location. In the new context, it identifies a device, which is 
carried by a readily identified or identifiable person. In the 
absence of compensating measures, this process represents a major 
step in the direction of a personal telephone number, with all the 
benefits to law enforcement agencies and threats to civil freedoms 
that this entails.

More from 2008 here:
http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/YAWYB-CWP.html#V1
...
In some jurisdictions, all handsets are required by law to be 
registered to a particular owner, although in others some handsets 
may be used in an anonymous or at least pseudonymous manner, perhaps 
up to some limit of call-value. In practice, the vast majority of 
handsets are used for long periods with a single SIM-card installed, 
and by a single person. Hence what is being tracked is in many cases 
the individual user of the handset.
...

I don't recall any of the identification scheme discussions ever 
raising the prospect of a nationally-imposed id also being the 
person's phone-number.

But we've moved beyond the old-fashioned notion that a person would 
only have one device.  Will we be one day in breach of the law if we 
don't have a personal where-is server that looks after our imposed 
national-id, and that can tell, well anyone who can break into it, 
where we are right now?  I mean, think of the benefits for 
counter-terrorism operations!!!


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
			            
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
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mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University