Or: How to start from nothing and get all the ID you ever need.
Writer’s Note: It’s been pointed out to me that this writing comes from a place of privilege: The person I was helping had only ever had their birth name and gender markers and had never changed anything, which clearly can be a complicating factor in pretty much any situation. It’s for this reason that I always suggest that if you have both a pending name change *and* a document you want to get — get the document first.
When my roommate first moved out with me in California, the only document of identification they had with them was their birth certificate, and an expired provisional driver’s license, which I guess was enough to let them board the plane.
Ergo, we had a problem: How are we going to boot up your new life in California, from nearly zero?
Step One: Establish State Residency
It turns out, that one of the documents that can be used to establish residency in the eyes of the State of California DMV is a lease.
Ergo, I went to some online document provider, and got a boilerplate lease made up, saying that I was renting her my second bedroom for $500 a month. The person at the DMV gave us some weird looks about this, but I presented my own information as an assertion, and he scanned my info and the lease into his system, and issued us a temporary id. They scanned her thumbprint (which I think is just a way of assuring she’d never had a previous California license under a different name). A new one would be in the mail in a week or two.
Step Two: State Benefits
Once the Driver’s license was underway, we were able to take the temporary document they gave us, and go to the local public assistance office and play the “I literally just arrived in the state” card, and apply for EBT, as well as get a line on healthcare options. It took a couple hours, but wasn’t hard to do. The people at these offices are used to people with minimal documentation, and this particular part of the process is not designed to be overly difficult to use.
Step Three: Healthcare and Vaccination Records
My roommate was unemployed (having just arrived) and didn’t have insurance. She was in decent health, but I wanted to make sure that she had an avenue of care in case she got sick. Because she was in her early 20’s, she qualified for a local young adults/teens clinic a few blocks from our house, colocated with the local high school. Their care was pretty solid, and they never asked us for a dime. Additionally, they gave us a few leads on chasing down any old medical records she needed. (These records would all get filed away in a shared document store for later reference).
Step Four (a few weeks later): Social Security Card
The social security office wasn’t willing to accept the DMV’s temporary ID copy (it had a very rough, very pixelated digital photo), but after a week or two, we had the hard-card variant, and that was sufficient to get the social security card re-issued. Wait time of another week or two.
Step Five (a few more weeks later): Passport
With a real license now in hand, we went down to town hall, with the birth certificate and a photo ID, and spent the $140 for a passport book and card. It would be a several week wait, and they would take her birth certificate, but after receiving her passport, she had a fully second document that anyone would accept as an ID for any purpose except driving, which led to the mantra of “always keep these two things in separate places” (unless you’re actually traveling).
Step Six (several years later): RealID
My roommate didn’t start driving again until we moved to Washington, and this as well was a start-from-scratch process, rather than transferrring her original license. In Washington, the licensure process is a weird mishmash of private driving schools for testing, coupled with the DMV who worked only limited hours because of the pandemic, so we weren’t going to put too much work into a RealID until after the official license was in place.
But after that, she was able to present some government mail, plus her passport and her birth certificate, and get a RealID. (It was several years because nobody was really going anywhere in 2020.) Now, because Washington is one of the four states in the union with Enhanced Drivers’ Licenses, our licenses also have the three lines of “passport” numbers along the bottom back, so this is now a card that backs up both your passport book, and your passport card, in at least these ways.
Step Seven: Nexus
We now live very close to the Canadian border, and everyone in our household has a card with a program called Nexus. This is a passport-like card that has special “fast lanes” that you can use in a car, so long as everyone in the car has a Nexus card.
Additionally, you can use the Nexus card at any land or sea border crossing between the US and canada, even a non-nexus lane, and the card serves as a RealID in order to board a flight. It comes with TSA-precheck privileges (because you need a background check in order to qualify for it), and it gets you Global Entry benefits when returning to the US from Abroad. If you have this card, people are very sure you are you.
So that’s it. You’re at the end of the ID game. You’ve got multiple backups. This is probably enough for most normal people, who are not nerdy engineers, and who don’t think too much about it. I am, and I do.
So now the question: was this too easy?
I’ve thought about this from time to time. If you have your whole house burn down, lose everything in a flood, get robbed, you’re able to boot everything back up this way. It’s a need, and it happens.
But this also exposes a loophole. This all started with a birth certificate, which is a thing you can order online from your issuing state. Sometimes with, sometimes without, ID.
In New York, for example, these are the requirements to get your birth certificate:
That option B, though. Two utility bills, or letters from a government agency? Impossible!
(My utility bill here in Washington State has all three of our names on it, and they didn’t ask for anyone’s identifying info but mine).
Even then, nobody unscrupulous could abuse this. Do these New York people know about the desktop publishing revolution that started in 1987 with Adobe Photoshop? I hear those new AI features can be so helpful.
(Sidebar, please stop selling me literally everything that now has AI in it. It’s the High Fructose Corn Syrup of the Digital Age and it’s gotten old way fast.)
But what about the opposite case? What if you wanted to abuse this same system to impersonate someone, who you knew had never had a passport or a California License? How hard would it be?
It feels like the answer is: terribly easy, and I don’t like that answer.
From my point of view, the best way to stop someone else from getting a passport in your name, is to get one yourself, which is expensive, especially if you aren’t planning to travel internationally. It causes any future passport acquisition attempt to be flagged (at least, hopefully).
Given the amount of security I’ve seen in protecting my social security number from leaking, I’m not optimistic.
But on the other hand, what I find myself lost in a city or country with no ID?
I think about this scenario a lot. Once you get off a plane, they really will not let you back on it to get anything you forgot. If you’re in a redeye-induced-stupor and forget your carryon, your laptop bag, and your phone, you’re utterly hosed.
If I found myself dropped in a city with no other ID (and bonus challenge, no phone), what would I do? How could I re-establish things to get myself home?
I mean, for me, this is pretty easy: I’d call my job’s main number, hit 2 for sales and get a human (they always answer the phone), and explain the situation, and being a reasonable organization, the job would just make it happen. I’d be on the next flight home, we’ll sort it out later, just stay safe. But that feels like the easy way out. Almost like it’s cheating.
What if I didn’t have that option? What if I were totally solo? What if I were unemployed?
The key to some of the way I think is this: Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. Having four different valid forms of ID (three of them, Federally Issued) saves a lot of headaches.
Lost ID or payment instruments:
- This is partially why I split my ID between several different places when I travel: passport card in my luggage, passport in my laptop bag, ID in my phone, Nexus card in my wallet. The chance of losing all four of them is pretty small, but: what if? Also, you can’t rent a car with a passport.
- The Washington DOL has a partial provision for this: they’ll let you download a PDF of a temporary license when you order a new one. That, combined with *any other* form of ID, is enough to drive. (It has a 2d barcode on it, for whatever that’s worth). So any of your IDs can become your driver’s license.
- For the same reason, I keep one credit card and one debit card in my luggage, and one in my laptop bag. I can bounce money between my cash accounts fairly instantly with Zelle.
- If that doesn’t work, credit card cash advances are sodding expensive from an APR point of view, but they’re incredibly useful in an emergency.
- Chase ATMs work with Apple Pay, so the watch on my wrist is enough to pull cash out of my Chase account, and it accepts Zelle payments, which are instant. (And Chase is pretty much everywhere in the US).
But even then, if I’m without my laptop and phone, I still need access to my data and accounts:
- In the event my phone were stolen, certainly I could go to an Apple store or library and log in and figure out where my devices were, and remote-wipe them. My luggage and laptop bags also both have airtags in them, tucked into crevasses that are non-obvious.
- I’ve done a CSV export of my password manager, and keep it PGP encrypted somewhere that I can get at it if I need it, with a long, complicated, symmetric password that’s not used elsewhere.
- Nobody asks for ID if you need to buy a backup phone with cash, but I’d still need to get access to my apple ID from a second device, or my Apple ID Recovery Key. Luckily, I’ve got that tucked away somewhere encrypted as well, that I can get to online if I need it.
- I also have set up a way for a trusted person to help me re-gain access to my Apple ID if I need it (Apple calls this a Recovery Contact), and I know that person’s phone number by heart (and I would have no problem giving them any password I have, I trust them with root on my systems).
- I’ve also backed up (again, encrypted) the numbers on all my credit cards, and as long as I’m sure they’re not in someone else’s hands, I consider them usable to have a phone shipped to me or to someone friendly in the city where I am. Also in that backup? The customer service number for every single one of those cards so I can cancel them if need be.
- Several of my accounts (including Chase, Amex, and Capital One) allow a new tap-to-pay card to be provisioned instantly to my phone, without waiting for the physical card to arrive.
Travel without ID:
- Amtrak rarely asks for ID if you have the ticket on your phone. Lost my license and have to take a long-distance train ride entirely on Amtrak Points? Oh no, that’s awful!
- If I find myself in, say, Chicago and am able to rent a car for one day from Enterprise, then drive home to Washington State and claim I had a family (or medical) emergency, they’ll be pissed off, but it’ll only cost me money. They may never rent to me again, but I’ll get home.
- If you really need to fly home, The TSA does also have an option where, if you have no ID (and a police report) they can ask you a bunch of extra screening questions and give you a pat-down and let you through.
- If you’re in a foreign country, travel.gov has a whole page about what to do, but the short answer is: find a US Embassy and they’ll figure out to help you. It will cost the same as a regular passport, but they’ll bend over pretty much backwards to help you.
- If I can gain access to my password stores, then I can order another copy of my Driver’s License, to be shipped to my home (then express-mailed to me). It won’t be fast, but it would be *something*. Several of my friends have access to my home where they could get to my mailbox.
I’ve gone to some elaborate ends to make sure I have backups. More than most people I know, but I feel like I’m solving the wrong problem.
In movies like Back to the Future 2, and Minority Report, we see a world where your fingerprint or your retina tells the whole story. You are your own ID, and we’ve advanced the technology to the point where, in those futures, it’s both payment device and identification in one, you just have to tell the terminal which account to use.
I can authenticate myself to my phone with my face, nearly without duplication (unless I have a twin), but to my knowledge, there’s not a government or bank out there where I can say “please use my facial features as a backup ID”, as opposed to this little plastic card, that people rarely compare the photo on.
We’re probably still pretty far from that, and I’m sure we’ll figure out ways around it, because some religions seem to fear people wearing numbers on their foreheads or something because it’s the mark of the beast or will be used to track you in some way your phone and google aren’t already doing. Or maybe you’re just a member of a religion where one simply does not show their face in public. There’s always a “but sometimes” problem in these cases. It really comes down to two problems that we haven’t fully solved:
How do we know you’re who you say you are, when you are that person?
How do we know you’re who you say you are, when you’re not that person?
And I don’t think we’ll have an answer I trust, in my lifetime.
