Katherine Kern (via email):

The Problem

It takes years for disaster victims to restore their identity.

From what we’ve learned, that’s because even before the disaster, their identities were broken.

Our identities are broken into individual pieces that are stored in mega organization silos. These mega-organizations don’t know or care how all these pieces fit together, including other identity pieces known only to the individual.

To top it all off, the pieces the organizations are supposed to protect have been breached, so those identity pieces have been corrupted by theft and fraudulent use. Proving that the piece we are holding is the one that is true requires more evidence - the whole identity.

Solution

The solution has three parts:

(1) Initiating personal ownership with face to face authentication by local trusted organizations. (Something you’ve identified is going on via the Red Cross)

(2) Followed by issuing a certified digital copy of that ID to a safe place - replacing the wallet and the vault that can’t protect IDs during day-to-day sharing or a disaster.

(3) Personal ownership of all identity pieces and administrative ID control.

Benefits

For everyone:

• Reduce the friction through face-to-face authentication by local trusted organizations.

• Identities will be more complete and accurate - harder to replicate.

• Identity control is distributed and not as easy to steal at scale.

For the individual:

• Identities are shared only by us, with our consent.

• We receive instant access to services.

• We have more free time.

• We have more peace of mind.

For the organization:

• Individuals are non-anonymous and accountable, reducing the organization’s liability.

• Organizations instantly know their customers (scaling the face-to-face authentication of the local librarian or Red Cross volunteer), lowering the cost to verify, reducing friction, and restoring trust.

Dave Crocker (via email):

For smaller, personal disasters, such as a home fire, the ARC role is to show up with a small team for immediate assistance and then have followup by client casework.

ARC provides clients with reference information for recovery, such as with Recovering Financially [2]

For a larger disaster, the small team is instead a larger team that does an Evacuation Center, for as a place to gather, and/or a Shelter, for overnight stays. Client casework occurs in these or in a Local Assistance Center (LAC).

A LAC is run either by local government or by FEMA and it houses a wide range of organizations, such as ARC, local utilities, Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) or even a country's consulate staff, such as from Mexico. It seeks to provide one-stop shopping for recovery next-steps, including getting new ID. I'm told the DMV can even show up with a camera to permit issuing a drivers license more quickly. Also, sometimes each client is assigned an advocate to facilitate their walking through the process(es) in a LAC.

In some/much of the United States, a DMV has both the client's picture and their thumbprint. This makes the safe and accurate recovery of a drivers license copy straightforward. Similarly, the lack of rigorous controls on getting a birth certificate means that it, too, is easy to get. Easy but not quick, of course. This gives a person two form of ID (if they had a DL) which is enough to bootstrap the rest of the ID recovery.

ARC also can often provide a Referral Letter with ARC letterhead and an ARC staff leader's signature, vouching for the occurrence of the disaster. This can help with some of the more flexible situations needing identification.

In terms of the possibility of spoofing, the birth certificate path is know to be problematic, but the DMV one looks far more difficult to subvert.

So all of this seems to describe a process that is painful but reliable and reasonably accurate. That is, it seems to ensure ID recovery for most people, albeit typically involving hassle and delay

(There are, of course, some cases that are problematic. As an example, I was told of an 18-year-old abandoned by his father in the shelter. Luckily, the mother was elsewhere and was able to provide the child's Social Security Number. Having only that is of some benefit though of course, only some.)

This leaves me with three questions:

1. What problems need to be solved or reduced, for ID recovery in typical US disasters, and seem tracable to pursue?

2. How is this group's efforts going to achieve that improvement?

3. Recovery in cases of displacement, elsewhere, when their is little or no infrastructure and little or no social support for a person -- such as a refugee without any documentation -- is such a massively different situation from what happens in places that still have surrounding infrastructure, such as the recent US disaster, it would seem to require an entirely different effort.