How does a birth certificate prove one's identity

Factual Questions
21

This is probably the best answer. A birth certificate is just one more document in a long list of evidence that Jim Smith of 123 Main St. exists and you are him.

What the BC does is prove that there is an actual Jim Smith, and he was born at time X in location Y. Given more modern ceritificates issued on more secure paper, and correlated with database entries, it makes things more secure. Hence the PR dilemma - a birth certificate could be totally invalid as in containing data that is not true, so make people obtain a new one. Now, a new (valid) BC at least relates to one real person’s birth.

There are a limited number of people. If you start with the presumption “this is Jim Smith” then if 2 people try to claim they are the same person (based on BC) that can set off flags. So it makes it harder to fabricate a name and birth. If you must then impersonate someone, the trick is not getting caught as a duplicate.

The “dead baby” technique (as made famous in the original Day of the Jackal) might have worked once, but more and more, birth and death are correlated in databases to eliminate this option.

The next step is additional ID, the “paper trail”. The DMV can ask for a birth certificate - that does not prove who you are, but it links you to one particular legitimate birth. Person A belongs to drivers license for A. If two people appear to be the same person - different addresses, pictures, etc - that sets off alarms. If you cannot create a fraudulent BC, if you can’t use a dead person, you can’t avoid the “duplicate” problem.

Throw in supporting paper trail - SSN, employment history, school records, etc. The SSN is tied to a birth record. It also must have a history of tax records tied to it. (note the other difficulty - if you hire on with Jim Smith’s SSN, your employer will remit your taxes on that SSN. Eventually the IRS will note that oddly, Jim Smith is working two places at once, either submitting two different tax returns or failing to declare half his earnings.

And so on… You can dream up a dozen easy ways to bypass this for a good crime novel. They typical one, find someone who won’t be missed, murder them, hide the body, move far far away where nobody they knew will meet you, and assume his identity. Avoids the lack of paper trail and possible duplicate issue.

The birth certificate itself proves nothing, but forces you to tie your claim of identity to a specific person born at a specific place and time. It makes it that much more difficult to fabricate an identity out of thin air.

And, since the quote was from the thread on the effect of ID laws on poor people and elderl, and identification for votingy - note that people on the fringes of economic life, with a minimum of accumulated documentation still in their possession, no money and no computer - will have a much more difficult time establishing the necessary paper trail to validate their identity.

22

Couldn’t big brother just say that he lost his license a couple of years ago, got a replacement, but then found the original in a drawer somewhere, then threw away the copy?

What could he be charged with? He is in possession of a license that on its face is valid. He was never told that this license is not valid, and he, in fact, does have a valid driver’s license (just not the physical card he is carrying).

23

Oh, I never did it because:

  1. I don’t have a big brother and
  2. I’m terrible at deception. I would have been shaking in my boots at the DMV and probably would have ended up confessing to the clerk that I was committing fraud and to please take it easy on me.

But, off hand, I recall at least five members of my freshman college class that did this exact same thing. Even though they were the same age as us, they bought the booze for the parties. :slight_smile:

24

nm

25

My very first non-passport photo ID was my Quebec driver’s licence. Now that is hardly useful for proving US citizenship. My passport is considered the gold standard for that. So how did I get that? Back in 1964 when I was going to Europe for my honeymoon. So how did I get that? Well I asked the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for a copy of my birth certificate. Oops, the name on the certificate is not the name I use. Well, this is common enough that the state dept. has a form you fill and get two people who knew you under both names to sign it and get it notarized. The only two people in the entire world who knew me under the name on the birth certificate were my parents. (Question: which names did they use?) Passport comes back and I have made sure never to allow a lapse in getting renewals. But really, what does this prove? And when Quebec issued the photo ID, they took my word for it.

Then in 1999, my employer wanted a birth certificate to calculate my annuity. Passport not considered good enough. So I wrote to Harrisburg to get one, figuring that I would then have to convince the pension office I was the same person under a different name. Instead some clerk in Penna vital stats wrote my that if I could send evidence that the name I use was in use for at least ten years, they would issue it in that name. What evidence? Photocopies of passports (current and expired), school diplomas, etc. So I copied and sent them all of that. If I had had a kindergarten passport, I would have sent them that. For I had never, ever used the name on the birth certificate. When I immigrated to Canada, I did use the passport as proof of identity. Now I have a Canadian citizenship ID card, also a photo ID.

The point is that this is all based on trust. If I really wanted to fake my ID, what I would do is go back to the newspapers from about 6 months after I was born and look for records of deaths of infants and try to get a birth certificate for that person. Nowadays, death records are probably correlated with birth records, but I doubt it was done then. Too much work.

26

Well, it wouldn’t make any sense for him to throw away the copy once he found the original, for one thing, unless the photo on the new card just sucked or something. And in most states I’ve driven in (if not all of them), lacking the physical card means you do not have the valid license in your possession.

All this of course assumes that the state that issued Big Brother’s driver’s license is equipped and inclined to render lost or replaced licenses as invalid in a way that will turn up on later inspection. Ironic that Big Brother could get in trouble for not having the most current version of a document on him. :smiley:

27

The simple answer is that it does not. For many legal thingamajigs, two forms of documentation will be required. One is proof of citizenship (birth certificate suffices for this), the other is proof of identity (birth certificate does not suffice – you need a driver’s license or passport or the like).

But a birth certificate is part of the documentation required to get the proof of identity card in the first place. So this woman is still two steps back from being able to vote.

28

You know what’s seriously insane? We also went to get our marriage license on Friday. (Well, apply - it’s like a gun, there’s a 24 hour waiting period.) And to get this marriage license, you had to have three things - 40 bucks, both Social Security cards (printed pieces of paper, totally bullshit ID) and another form of ID. What you did NOT need is the divorce decree we went to great lengths to get reissued for him. They asked if this was your first marriage (me: yes, him: no) and what number it was (him: second) but not only did they not ask him to prove he was divorced, they didn’t even ask if he WAS divorced!

So here’s another piece of documentation we’ll acquire tomorrow - marriage license based on 40 bucks cash, easily faked SS cards, and drivers’ licenses we could have gotten from fake birth certificates.

29

The trouble with the “older brother license” scam is that years ago, many palces did not have photos on drivers’ licenses. Even when they did - there was no easy way to verify it. With wireless in car computer terminals, and advanced computer graphics, perhaps in the last 10 to 15 years, we are at the point where both the DMV clerk and the police can compare the old photo and new… if they bother, if the resemblance is not close enough to pass…

As another data point, my brother, like me, was quite stunted (5’6") and cherubic-faced until his growth spurt at about age 19. He used to give his (non-photo) driver’s license to his 15-yo friend, a thyroid giant exomorph type about 6’2", to buy alcohol. It simplified the arguments in the days before photographic proof. Nobody ever questioned the 15-yo.

So a birth certificate is just one in a long line of pieces of the puzzle that prove who you are. If at age 50 or 60 you suddenly find you need to re-establish this paper trail, and you have lost or never acquired much of it, if you don’t have a relaible and steady presence and economic life in the community, you will have a significant challenge.

I wonder if a copy of a criminal record is considered valid government photo ID? :slight_smile:

30

Our state is going thru this “need a birth certificate to get a driver’s license” nonsense.

Mrs. FtG’s case is complicated, being female and needing to document name changes. But the easiest part was getting a BC copy. She just needed to mail a copy of her current driver’s license to the state and presto, new BC. And using that she can get a new driver’s license since her current one wasn’t good enough. Wait, what?

I mentioned this in another thread. It’s called “security theater”. Thinking that a BC proves anything is just wishful thinking.

31

But this is just more of the “building a paper trail” situation. You can’t get something without having something.

If Mrs. FtG had nothing, she would not have gotten the BC copy. So an al Qeda sleeper starting cold today would have a bit more trouble than someone who’s been here accumulating paper for several decades. Or, if you were a street person who got back on their meds and decided you wanted to vote, say hello to Abdul, you are both out of luck.

32

The BC can be checked. An immigration clerk could ring up the author of the BC and check the details on it.

33

Funny story, when I was 15.5, I was applying for my Driver’s Permit in Oklahoma (Driver’s Permits let someone who is 15 years and 6 months of age drive a motor vehicle with a licensed responsible sober alert adult in the front passenger seat). My dad worked for AAFES at the time (they’re a DoD company that runs restaurants and department stores on military bases for the uniformed folks to shop at tax-free), and we both had military-issued civilian IDs.

The state of Oklahoma has two lists of documents that can be used as identification for getting a driver’s license or non-driver state ID. If you do not possess one of those documents from each list, you cannot get a driver’s license. So my military-issued federal ID, complete with photo, birthday, height/weight/eyes/hair and my dad’s SSN was not accceptable, even though the clerks knew exactly what it was (this was near Fort Sill, so they saw military-issued IDs all the time). Since it wasn’t on the list though, it wasn’t acceptable under the law.

Now, what WAS acceptable as photo-ID was a passport. Didn’t seem to matter if it was expired. So we got my driver’s permit with my Social Security Card and a passport that expired when I was 6. Ah well.

34

I had a similar experience once when I was 21. My state had begun to issue hard-to-forge ID cards mostly for liquor purchases, and I was one of the first 200 in the state to get one (legally). But when I tried to use it at another state, I was told, “Oh, anybody can make one of those. Let’s see your driver’s license.”

Which I showed them. The one that I had altered not long before with some carbon paper to make me 2 years older. It worked, too.

35

The US state department actually does confirm your BC is real by contacting the issuing agency before issuing any passports. So you won’t get far with a fake one and will likely get arrested. See here on EVVE electronic verification of vital events.

http://www.naphsis.org/naphsis/files/ccLibraryFiles/Filename/000000001638/NEWTON_NAPHSISJune2012.pdf

I have had a LOT of trouble using my US passport as ID or proof of age in the US, many clerks simply freeze up on seeing it and some then try to claim it isn’t valid ID or government issued:rolleyes:

36

That is probably more a case of them not seeing passports very often, if at all. Kind of like the whole $2 bill thing that you hear about every so often.

37

But note the circularity: Use DL to get BC, use BC to renew DL. But can’t use DL to renew DL.