# guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php (part 5 of 5) > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [31], part 5 of 5. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: document (Text), 2006 (from the career record), https://guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php. Text: document text - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the start (Hexayurt, 2002), before the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Design of cheap private identity and notarisation, the identity/accounts layer Harappa assumes. - Career works it belongs to: - Small is Profitable (2002): Co-edited Rocky Mountain Institute book on the hidden benefits of right-sized, distributed power; The... - Hexayurt infrastructure kit (2003): A household kit around the Hexayurt: water-purifying bottles, dry toilets, efficient stoves and solar lights. - CheapID (2006): Design for a sub-$1 identity card, written for the US Office of the Secretary of Defense, that keeps... - The Future We Deserve: "Facebook for the Five Billion?" (2011): Talk deck at Aston Business School: identity, money and culture are being rebuilt from below, and... (suggested by machine) - Taking a crack at a practical system (introducing the ESCROWNYM) (2012): Blog essay proposing the escrownym: an identity lodged with escrow brokers under a legally binding... (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. - cyber and defense: Security work for defense clients, built on one idea: set rivals to check each other. Resilience and Opportunity in... - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction. - Ideas whose earliest source in this archive is this one: CheapID / identity for everyone; State in a Box - Ideas developed here: Hexayurt - Topics: CheapID, biometrics & identity (85%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: SIAB (25 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); CheapID (60 here; 25 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); SSTR (27 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); identity infrastructure (11 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); State In A Box (12 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); e-gold (7 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); microfinance (5 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); digital signatures (10 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); citizens (13 here; 63 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); DNS (6 here; 23 sources in all, earliest dated 2006) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): contracts; standards; citizens; supply chains; accounts; human rights; Frontier; digital identity; digital signatures; clean water - Importance: core-text score 0.81 (1.00 is the top), number 15 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [66] [My State In A Box – Identity Services Architecture paper... (2007)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/66.md): same career work: CheapID - [266] ["Blockchain: IoT's trust broker?" talk on the fly by... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/266.md): same career work: Small is Profitable - On the same works, just before: [100] [Hexayurt project (2002)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/100.md); [185] [Hexayurt (2002)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/185.md); [201] [Colophon, Danish Environmental Protection Agency (2003)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/201.md) - On the same works, just after: [108] [User:Vinay Gupta/The Unplugged (2006)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/108.md); [29] [Saving the World on the Cheap (2007)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/29.md); [66] [My State In A Box – Identity Services Architecture paper... (2007)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/66.md) ## Reading it Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it. Cite as: guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php, document, 2006, https://guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [31], https://guptaoption.com/texts/31.md. ## Passages, part 5 of 5 [passage 50](https://guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php) real name, or an IP address, which is then mapped back to service providers, then billing records, then an actual hard physical identity. Internet users typically feel rather violated by having their online actions tracked back to their physical location because it is a cross-namespace violation, rather like having a foreign nation state come and enforce its laws on you. These illusions have built up through common custom and the largely privileged academic communication which was the initial environment of the internet. That separateness is largely collapsing as the Internet becomes a part of the "real world" and the new privileged spaces are massively multi-player online roleplaying games like Warcraft, Second Life and Everquest. Authentication for these systems is extremely problematic. Computer security is very ineffective for most home users, and falsely authorized emails generated by viruses, for example, are a common problem. Online banking security is constantly under attack from criminals compromising home computer security over unaccountable emails. This situation cannot go on indefinitely. The solution is simple: a special, privileged class of Single Sign On Identity Providers who require an ISA-style blind contract before they will provide you single sign-on services. An identity with these groups is indicated by a cryptographic signature from the vendor attesting that they have a CheapID contract on file and will reveal it under a specified set of conditions, usually a court order in their native jurisdiction. Ideally, this move would be coupled with a definitive upgrade in authentication. Pseudo-random number generators, when used for security applications like as the common SecureID tag are subject to man in the middle attacks, so probably we are going to wind up with an additional PKI level, perhaps small USB-type tokens. In any case it would be nice to indicate the level of authentication in the account so that third parties could judge for themselves how much trust they want to put into a log in from a particular SSO provider. Common Operations Identity Recovery Upon display of proof that a given account has engaged in an activity which requires an identity to be revealed (i.e. presentation of a court order) the sign on service returns the original ISA-style blind contract, with associated CheapID Identity Card to the court to decrypt. Electronic Democracy With sufficiently secure SSO services, including perhaps specially created government-backed SSO accounts along the lines of the Estonian system, it should be possible to do secure electronic voting over a variety of devices including cell phones. Challenges pertaining specifically to this project will be the subject of another paper. In essence, this discussion is about extending the reach of the Professional Witness to transactions at a remote site like your home, using the media of a cell phone or other computing device as the intermediary. This is non-trivial and may involve windows of revocation in which coercion can be reported, for instance. Technical Challenges There are no difficult technical challenges specifically related to the ISA aspects of this system. Implementation Let's get down [passage 51](https://guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php) transactions at a remote site like your home, using the media of a cell phone or other computing device as the intermediary. This is non-trivial and may involve windows of revocation in which coercion can be reported, for instance. Technical Challenges There are no difficult technical challenges specifically related to the ISA aspects of this system. Implementation Let's get down to the nitty gritty of implementing a system like this. The hardest individual project in an implementation is the International Phenotype Database. Even a prototype has to be able to accurately match incoming biometric data against a database we expect to be vast, and provide auditing at a level that makes people like you and me comfortable being in that database. However, that is a problem which has an enormous number of really smart people working on it. We are minimizing the problem in two ways: firstly, by anticipating seeding the system with very good quality biometric data captured under controlled conditions, with an initial check for false positive matches and refinement of the dataset to reduce these. That's a big step up: being able to flag a person on enrollment as having fingerprints which partially match a bunch of other people helps later on. Secondly, we are not pounding the database every time somebody wants to get access to their bank account. By carrying a card with data on it, and matching face-to-data, we are minimizing the load on the centralized system. It cannot be slow, but it can be non-real-time. Secondly we have the whole dynamics of the exchange of information between courts and leviathan and issuing stations and so on. For now, this can be done with web services and digital signatures. Perhaps eventually a different architecture is appropriate, but for now? HTTP and XML are sufficient for all of these transactions, as long as the protocols are carefully designed, and all traffic is encrypted at an application level. Audit trails, again, are a lot of the difficulty here. Then we have the cell phones. 574 bytes is the largest 2D barcode I have been able to get a vendor to sign off on as a workable reality with current generation cell phones. It is not enough to do a general use ID card which is reliable enough for banking because of image compression issues. However, because we have been discussing a deployment involving perhaps millions of people, we can discuss the issue with cell phone manufacturers. Adding the additional optical elements required to get a good quality close up of an ID card is not a major engineering obstacle, it is just a case of being an item with limited market demand. Likewise, the full color variant of Data Matrix boosts data densities for a given optical system by 3. So I think that a special run of cell phones with better cameras is perfectly reasonable and, once there is an established application for those cameras beyond taking pretty pictures, the upgrade should become a standard [passage 52](https://guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php) an item with limited market demand. Likewise, the full color variant of Data Matrix boosts data densities for a given optical system by 3. So I think that a special run of cell phones with better cameras is perfectly reasonable and, once there is an established application for those cameras beyond taking pretty pictures, the upgrade should become a standard feature relatively quickly if there is market demand. It may even be possible to have the Data Matrix standard extended to include an optional color implementation. The hardest problem in the entire system is getting banks to allow account access using a CheapID card. Once that problem is solved the systems can be adopted. Until then, it is all theory. Status of this Work State In A Box is an ongoing project, and I will continue to release and improve documents related to the work on an ongoing basis. If you are a commercial or government entity and would like me to present or consult on this work, please get in touch. Vinay Gupta, [email removed] This paper is descended from a piece I wrote for the Department of Defence, OSD/NII. That paper was commissioned to be rather narrower in scope than this work, and the origins of this work in that piece should be taken, in no way, shape or form, as any kind of endorsement. --- End of [31] guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php, part 5 of 5. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [108](https://guptaoption.com/texts/108.md) User:Vinay Gupta/The Unplugged (2006); the most closely related, [66](https://guptaoption.com/texts/66.md) My State In A Box – Identity Services Architecture paper... (2007); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.