Comment by akerl_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akerl_ | Hacker News Reader

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Are AU drivers licenses issued by the national government, or by states? The thing that makes DLs wonky in the US is that while you can basically use a DL as a national ID, it is issued, managed, and operated by the state. So no two state's DLs look the same or have the same info. This makes them amazingly easy vectors for fraud.

As two amusing anecdotes:

A while back, I went to buy some beer in a state other than where I lived. I was asked for my ID, and provided my drivers license. The employee pulled out this comically thick three ring binder, flipped to the page for my state, and had to read through a list of compiled identifying factors for a legitimate ID from my state.

Even further back, I worked at a company where a small slice of my job was verifying ID for new signups flagged as high-risk. Except... we were an online business. Our users were global. So if somebody happened to upload a passport or US DL, I could at least eyeball it. But if somebody uploaded an ID issued by basically any other country on Earth... I guess that's what IDs from The Confederacy of Independent Systems look like? The only surefire way to get rejected was either not uploading anything, or the many, many bots that uploaded random pictures of flowers or trains or random nonsense.

AU drivers licenses are issued by each state, but same as the US they can be used as a national ID. And yep, they all have unique designs as well. However there is a baseline for the information they have to have on them, which is: Address, date of birth, first/middle/last name, card number, and license number.

The issue here is the license number is the one used for most verification, and that one is static. The card number changes every time the card is re-issued.

Examples of them are here: https://www.mygovid.gov.au/verifying-your-drivers-licence

A funny anecdote along the same lines:

A friend of mine recently moved from WA to NSW. If you move state, you have to apply for a new license within three to six months depending on the state. So he got a NSW license, it's a trivial process to convert your license thankfully.

He came back to WA to visit for a while, and tried to go clubbing. One bouncer read the post code from the address (like a ZIP code, only 4 digits instead) as his birth year because he had no clue what he was looking at... NSW post codes start at 2000, so you can see how this mistake could come up. WA post codes start with 6000 so there's no possible confusion there, until we reach the year 6000 at least!

Of course, the Date of Birth is still clearly labeled on every states driver licenses so this bouncer may also have been a bit daft.

Ah, the shared information is actually a low, though it was not set until the Real ID Act of 2005, which has required: full name, date of birth, gender, photograph, address, signature, and the license number.

>The employee pulled out this comically thick three ring binder, flipped to the page for my state, and had to read through a list of compiled identifying factors for a legitimate ID from my state.

This is literally the core gameplay of Papers, Please, a game designed to make you feel bad. (A great game, I hasten to add, and surprisingly enjoyable -- though allowing yourself to enjoy it means turning off empathy more consciously than in anything I've played before.)

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