The notion of identity is still fundamentally misunderstood, even as emerging technologies change beyond recognition how we manage it, we heard yesterday at the LSE. Yet still there has not yet been any sort of full and proper interdisciplinary or public debate.

Bruce Schneier told the seventh Social Study of ICT workshop we live in a unique interim period where identity checks are increasingly everywhere but for now we still know they’re going on. We still use cash and the cameras are still big enough to see. “Everything creates a transaction record - calls, web browsing, buying, not buying, automated toll collection..These records may have value; there’s a reason they’re kept.”

But identity checks can’t deliver security, he said. “The notion that identification is necessary for security turns out not to be true.” To check someone’s ID is not to check whether they’re a bad guy. Osama bin Laden does not have anID card marked “evildoer”.

A critic had put it to Mr Schneier if he were sitting next to someone acting suspiciously on a plane he’s surely want to know that person’s identity. Not in the least, retorted Mr Schneier: I just need someone to stop him. “Identity does not map to intentionality.” Walls, locks and safes create safety in the real world without checking identity, and the same principles are true in the online world.

Wholesale surveillance is now possible, he said. We don’t just say “follow that car!”. We follow every car, in real time and back through history. Governments like it. It seems to make the police’s job easier. Corporations want to sell services like location-based advertising.

But people don’t make good security tradeoffs. For a small reward they’ll give away a lot of information.

When they’re finally told what’s going on, such s in the UK ID card situation, they say ‘Hey, stop. We didn’t want that’, Mr Schneier said. “But it’s rare they’re told what’s going on.” It’s not a dichotomy of privacy or security, he said. It’s liberty or control.

To think technology will protect us from this is futile, he said. We need laws which anticipate the effects of the emerging technologies. “Learn to look for the cameras now,” he said. “You’ve only got a few years.”