On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 3:36 AM, Robert J. Hansen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> It may be helpful for you to think about things in terms of not just how > many identity documents are present, but the relative difficulty in > forging identity documents, as well as your ability to spot forgeries. Living in the EU, the only forms of ID I got to see were government-issued. Of course, not all of them are officially an ID card, like the German dirver's licence, but a German driver's licence has more security features than a few passports I have seen. > E.g., a university ID card is pretty easy to forge. You also probably > don't know what Wayne State University's ID card looks like, so if > someone presents it to you, you have no way of knowing whether it's on > the up and up or not. I noted which IDs are of the laminated, bazillion-checks kind of type and which were mere paper. Of the two paper IDs, one was an old German passport of a person I have known for quite some time, the other was a German passport for children under 16. I know and remeber these, but while I will sign the first, I did not yet decide on the second. Of course, I did not have a full list of reference ID cards for all major countries with me, but I _did_ try and remember if a Greek passport from guy one matches the Greek passport of gal two. > Compare that to a passport. You might already have a passport. Even if > you don't, it's pretty easy to find out what a passport looks like, what > sort of paper is used in it, what security features are present. You > can thus have a lot more confidence in someone's identity if they > present you with a passport than if they present you with, say, a > university ID card. I would never sign anyone with only a university ID unless I knew them for years. Richard _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
