CodeCon
On the second day of CodeCon, the guard at the door of the DNA Lounge asked me for ID, and of course (I say of course) I didn't have any. As I've told a few people now, to their surprise and apparent incredulity, I don't smoke, drink, or drive. So I don't carry any government ID with me, at all, ever, unless I am going to an airport (when I use a passport). When I work places which issue employee ID, I'll carry that to be able to identify myself at work. I think not carrying ID is usually a feature, not a bug, from a privacy point of view.
I have large-scale and small-scale comments about the ID request. The large-scale comments are about liquor laws, liability, drinking, cultural norms, identification, and government monitoring and surveillance. I'll skip over those for now.
The small-scale comments are that CodeCon was a conference, not a party; furthermore, it was a conference about privacy and anonymity, and there's some profound irony in having to show government ID in order to attend an anonymity conference. Inside, programmers were talking about virtual circuits, encrypted links, and store-and-forward protocols; some of the programmers were using pseudonyms. Outside, people were being carded.
It's unfortunate to think that people without ID, or people under 21, might have been turned away from CodeCon. Considering the theme and focus of the event, I can't imagine any reason why either of these groups should have been unwelcome. (I remember an earlier incident at LinuxWorld when a 13-year-old programmer was turned away and I was unhappy about that. But CodeCon prided itself on being more inclusive and community-oriented than large corporate-sponsored shows like RSA -- so much so that CodeCon actually used HTML to display the content on its home page, where the RSA Conference used Flash.
I've attended dozens of trade shows, academic conferences, and industry conventions, and never until CodeCon was I asked to show government ID at any of them.
A song.
On the second day of CodeCon,
the guard asked for ID,
to prove my age as
twenty-one or older,
how could CodeCon insist on ID?
