Companies that hire PR firms to lead their outreach efforts in Washington are making an implicit confession: They have a PR problem. So it is with Verax ‘Identity Fusion Center.’
I learned about the company when a representative of theirs from Dutko Worldwide called me requesting a meeting with one of their executives. I get these requests from time to time, and I’m open to anyone making the case for their technology or business model.
From the looks of things, Verax has a difficult case to make.
The animation on their site opens with a graphic saying “There is Only One of You.” This is true as a physical matter, but not in terms of identity. People have multiple identities, each of them denoting a different relationship. Collapsing the various identities we use across business, government, public, and personal life is a very bad idea.
But Verax apparently wants to build a biometric registry so that governments and corporations can ensure that no one uses a “false” identity. Perhaps they want to be the “A Root” identity server for all humanity, a neat idea – if you don’t think about it much. Intended to promote security, of course, it would be tremendously destructive of privacy, promoting record linkage across every level of government and among every business that used it.
Verax makes privacy claims, of course, but they’re mostly just assertions about security. When I say “I don’t want you to know,” it is not an answer to say “I will keep it encrypted.”
Still, I was ready to hear their pitch, and perhaps have an opportunity to do a little educating. So I cut out of a meeting at the Center for Democracy and Technology, arriving back in the office just in time for our scheduled visit. As I arrived, a downpour broke out, bringing some desperately needed cooling to our sweltering city. It was no surpise, with the sudden heavy rain, that my guests were going to be a bit late. They were probably sheltering in a building entry somewhere, waiting for it to break. So I set to some trivial tasks, assuming they would soon arrive.
You know where this is going: No-show.
A couple of hours later, having given up and gone to another meeting, I returned to find a voice mail message saying, roughly, “Sorry we had to cancel. Did you get my email? We’ve been having network problems.”
Coming as it did over an hour after the scheduled meeting time, I don’t find this believeable. Even if it’s true that they have network problems, the PR firm rep shouldn’t have rested until she knew that she had reached me. Like, by telephone.
Verax had its shot. They blew it. It’s just another of many surveillance technology sellers trying to mop up all the homeland security money that’s washing around Washington. And they’re wasting their money on PR, which won’t fix the fundamental problem with their approach.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.