Transcription:
Penny Crosman (00:03):
Welcome to the American Banker Podcast, I'm Penny Crosman. Proof of identity is critical for many things, including being able to open a bank account, get a job or obtain healthcare, yet proving one's identity is getting harder in a world of frequent data breaches where the data and facts that make up our identity can be easily stolen. Mariana Dahan is a former executive at the World Bank. She's the founder of the World Identity Network and she's chair of the Universal ID Council. In 2014, she created and led a program called Identification for Development for three years, and she's with us today to share her views on how digital identities might be improved and protected. Welcome, Mariana.
Mariana Dahan (00:44):
Hello everyone, and thanks for having me on this podcast.
Penny Crosman (00:47):
How did you first get interested in the need for proof of identity?
Mariana Dahan (00:52):
It all starts with my personal story, really. I was born in the Soviet Union without a birth certificate. I was growing up on a farm in a small village, and my father just didn't see any use of having personal identity for his daughter because I was supposed to stay at the farm and work and help in the house, basically, not to travel the world. But my mom had another vision for my life and she managed to get me an identity documented travel document. I was able because of that, to enroll in school and later on get a scholarship and travel to France for my studies. And then I arrived in the United States at MIT during my Ph.D. program. So what I realized is that identity offered me a world of opportunities, something that I didn't have before. And when I arrived at the World Bank and decided to launch the Identification for Development agenda, it was really because I remember the story I lived through, which is also the story of a billion people in the world.
(02:07):
It's such a big number of people who today don't have a proof of identity, and therefore they are unable to enroll in school to get a travel document to vote or to open a bank account. So many opportunities are literally closed off for them. And I thought this must be the focus of a dedicated program at the World Bank, which I started in 2014. This year will be its 10th year anniversary, and I could see the progress that this program has made since I left the World Bank and a new team is managing it today. I could see all the successes, but also some of the flaws of the program.
Penny Crosman (02:58):
So just take a step back, what is the idea behind identification for Development? What are some of the things that happen under that program?
Mariana Dahan (03:09):
When we started in 2014, we identified 2.4 billion people living without a recognized proof of identity. So that was a very big number of people who had no officially recognized government issued identity document. And that was an estimate in 2014. And since then, the World Bank has been working on refining those numbers, but a very big push of ID4D was to enroll all children and specifically girls into these identification programs in countries that were not registering kids at birth. For example, Malawi back in 2014 was registering only 1% of children at day of birth. It was incredible how so many births were going unnoticed and children were missing on health care and immunizations and support from all these social services. So ID4D eventually grew into a multibillion dollar program that was at some point running in about 50 countries in the world, including in countries like Malawi and then Uganda and Kenya and many other countries in Africa.
(04:38):
In Asia, however, the biggest success and progress in identifying people around the world was achieved thanks to the Aadhaar ID program, which is India's identification program. And in a few years, India was able to biometrically enroll over 1 billion people into the program. Therefore, today we say that there are only a billion people left in the world who are not identified, but the protracted wars and conflicts and climate change cataclysms are pushing people outside of their homes. So we have an increased number of refugees and undocumented people around the world, which may lead us to think that these numbers are higher today.
Penny Crosman (05:33):
I think you have noted in the past that there are pros and cons of using biometric data to identify people. Can you share a little bit of your thoughts on that?
Mariana Dahan (05:43):
Yeah. What was interesting in that Aadhaar program is that they managed to biometrically enroll people who have never been registered before, people who belong to a cast called the Untouchables. These are the invisible people who never had any proof of identity or any proof of their existence really. However, the way the enrollment was done raised a lot of concerns. There was evidence collected on the ground that showed that agents enrolling people in India were discriminating against ethnical origins or religious beliefs. And that more than two million people in the Assam region of India were omitted, completely omitted from the National Registry of Citizens. We talk about 2018, 2019, where hundreds of thousands of people were denied access not only to financial services or government benefits, but worse to some very basic services that the government was providing food stamps or vouchers for young mothers. People were dying of hunger because they could not prove that they had a valid Aadhaar card. So for me, that was devastating because the entire idea behind ID4D was to increase inclusion and not to create opportunities for exclusion. And in a sense, technology showed that it can do both. It is actually a double-edged sword in a sense. It can enable actors who have very favorable behaviors as it can embolden, nefarious actors like autocratic regimes who are there to uniquely identify and target people that are not favored by the government, some minorities, some dissidents today because of the biometric technology, that unique targeting and surveillance is made possible.
Penny Crosman (08:10):
Well, so that brings up an interesting point that I wanted to ask you about. Who should be in control of digital identities, both in these countries you're talking about, and in countries like the U.S.? In the U.S. a lot of people are kind of leaning on Google and Amazon and Uber and companies like that to store all the information that makes up their digital identity, and it's not really the government. Do you think it is the government's job to come up with some kind of digital identity scheme and manage that for people? Or does that raise the problem of possible government spying or the government going after targeting certain populations who should be managing and controlling identities in your view?
Mariana Dahan (09:11):
In my view, it's not the government and it's not the multinational companies. It's the individual himself or herself, it's us, the people. So I very strongly believe in the principle of self-sovereign identity, which is a new concept that became possible only because the technology today allows us this opportunity to give control to the user of an identity system by allowing him or her to access their own identity data and release it only to those that he or she decides has the right to access it. Today we have the government as gatekeepers of this information. They are the ones centralizing this identity data information on you, and then they decide whether you can qualify for a service or for a benefit or not. And then some companies collect the information without your consent, they can exploit it. And then individuals unknowingly surrender their privacy, their right to their own identity data.
(10:36):
And this in turn creates a real surveillance economy, where the personal data is the currency. So I think we're entering into a very dangerous era where, again, technology is at the center of these possibilities. And for over 20 years now, I've been a very vocal advocate for technology, but I always caution that it's just a tool in the hands of humans, and depending on what the human intentions are, technology can be used for evil or it can be used for good. And that's why it's so important to have this agility, this possibility to change the course of history if we see that something bad is about to happen. So to go back to the story of Aadhaar in India, I saw the early signs of something really terrible happening to the people of Assam and to other minorities in other countries, and I decided to go on the ground myself and to document these stories and to reveal the faces of these people who are being affected by these developments and to see how they are being marginalized, living in the shadows outside of the formal economy, because the systems that were being put in place were not serving them.
(12:22):
In fact, the data that was collected on them was weaponized against them. So the World Identity Network that I have created in partnership with a lot of human rights organizations and also always help from the United Nations, we were looking at how technology, especially the emerging technology like blockchain, the decentralized technology that basically gives power to people and is not concentrated in the hands of one government or corporation, how can we use it for good to enable self-sovereign identity and to enable a fair access to services to which people are entitled?
Penny Crosman (13:17):
So in a scheme like that, I imagine each individual would have a private key that secures their personal identity on the blockchain, but how do the individuals store and safeguard those private keys in your scenario?
Mariana Dahan (13:37):
Well, there is no such global program yet. A lot of these are ideas or pilots, so small-scale programs that worked in some settings and did not work in others. For example, a blockchain project for Syrian refugees in a humanitarian camp in Jordan, which was run by UNHCR and World Food Programme, another United Nations agency was looking into identifying biometrically the refugees coming from Syria, and then providing them access to services or benefits or even cash using this blockchain technology and using the private keys that these individuals were able to manage. The problem, of course, is as always, with every new technology, and remember how we were back in 2000 when internet applications emerging or mobile apps or any technology is creating this sort of chaos at the beginning, people not knowing how to use it. There is a need for education and people to get up to speed and more of these trials and pilots to be implemented so everyone can have access to the system and learn how to use it.
(15:20):
And that is a problem not only for refugees, of course, sometimes they don't have the level of literacy or computer literacy, or they don't speak the language. But it is also true for us here in the United States when we talk about blockchain cryptocurrencies, we are still far from a widespread usage of this technology. It's still the early days. So to your question on the private keys being used by refugees, heck, I don't know if even I would be able to remember that. I think we're still in this phase where we need to figure these things out and make it user-centric, easy to use so that everyone can access these opportunities. But I think it's worth it because at the end of the day, we will be free and not a target of some surveillance machine.
Penny Crosman (16:32):
I also read that you are championing something called the Sustainable Development Goals. Can you tell us about that?
Mariana Dahan (16:40):
Well, I was lucky to be part of the group that was putting together the Sustainable Development Goals agenda, but that is a very big undertaking of the United Nations, and they were announced in 2015 as the global development goals done with all the member states. So basically every country had to sign up to those goals, and there are 16 of them, and they touch upon everything. Education and infrastructure and digital identity is part of that global agenda. Perhaps my personal contribution was to really make sure that we have a specific target on coverage of legal identity in the world. So we say by 2030, everyone should have proof of their legal identity, proof of their existence. Today, we're falling behind this target. Like many other targets or goals in the SDGs agenda, we are not on track, and I think more needs to be done, specifically more collaboration between governments and member states.
(18:22):
What's happening today is that wars in Syria or in Gaza recently affect people in a way that it's unimaginable. People flee homes without any proof of their identity, any documentation, barely. They can save their lives, and then they find themselves in a host country, let's say Egypt or Jordan, they cannot prove who they are. They cannot say they are a teacher or they are a doctor. They don't have any credentials about them. So it's very hard for them to start a new life, and therefore there must be a system that allows us to be able to welcome these people and rehabilitate their lives so that they can start again. While filming this documentary movie, which now has premiered on Amazon, it is called "Shadows in the Dark, our Global Identity Crisis," I realized that this identity crisis is not just about them, these refugees in some far away countries.
(19:38):
It is also about us here in the United States. This can happen to anyone. It can touch any of us. Imagine a big, natural, catastrophic climate change pushing millions of people out of their homes. How will we be able to say we are who we are when we arrive in some different city or country? There have been a lot of security breaches in the past, a lot of identity theft in the past, so anyone could actually claim that it's them. It's not us. So I think we need to rethink this approach to how we improve our existence on this planet. And I think the sustainable development goals, at least this identity target was designed specifically for that.
Penny Crosman (20:50):
Yeah, certainly a huge problem of huge magnitude and with big challenges. So I'm glad somebody is thinking about this and trying to work on it. Well, Mariana Dahan, thank you so much for joining us today, and to all of you, thank you for listening to the American Banker Podcast. I produced this episode with audio production by WenWyst Jeanmary. Special thanks this week to Mariana Dahan at the World Identity Network. Read us, review us and subscribe to our content at www.americanbanker.com/subscribe. For American Banker, I'm Penny Crosman and thanks for listening.