[Cryptography] IDs and licenses, not Possible reason why password usage rules

Jerry Leichter leichter at lrw.com
Sun Mar 8 08:24:45 EDT 2020


> How long is the term of a driver's license?  That's actually quite difficult to answer!  The AAA summarizes all the state laws at https://drivinglaws.aaa.com/tag/drivers-license-renewal/ <https://drivinglaws.aaa.com/tag/drivers-license-renewal/>  
When I mentioned this I did a quick scan for the most complicated one I could find (Iowa) but missed the simplest - Arizona:  "Upon issuance, a driver’s license is valid until the applicant’s 65th birthday and is renewable thereafter for successive 5-year periods."

Somehow Arizona seems to manage without all the hassle of periodic renewals, except when actually retesting eyesight and such becomes a significant issue:  "Persons 70 and older may not renew by mail. Persons 65 or older renewing by mail must submit a vision test verification form, or a verification of an eyesight examination conducted not more than 3 months before."

All kinds of systems grow up around ostensible purposes and are retained with explanations that sound reasonable but aren't tested.  (The *real* reason they get retained is that getting rid of them costs someone money or their job.)  Then along comes someone else - sometimes another state - and shows that in fact the requirement was never needed to begin with.  Every state I've even lived in had periodic renewal requirements, and until this moment, I frankly never questioned that there might be a need for renewals - it was just "the way things were."

BTW, Iowa, the bizarre case I brought up earlier, is a case study in the opposite direction.  Ever buy land, or a house?  Have to pay for a title search?  Be forced to pay for title insurance?  Doesn't it seems strange that it's complicated to determine who owns a piece of land?  The reason is that land records are kept sorted *by owner*, not by property.  The reason goes all the way back to 1086, when King William the Conqueror ordered the "Great Survey" to determine what nobles controlled what land all over England.  (Rough approximation.)  The emphasis was on a small number of nobles, not the land itself, since the purpose was to determine what they each owed William.  And ... that's the way real estate recording has been done in England to this day.  The method was, of course, brought over to the original Colonies, retained by the new United States, and spread from the original 13 to the new states as they were incorporated.  The system is based on recording transfers between named individuals.  "Clearing title" - ensuring that the person selling you some land really owns it - requires a complex historical search.  It can go wrong - sometimes due to historical inequities.  All kinds of land on the East Coast has turned out to actually have been invalidly transferred from native peoples back in 18th century.  There's no inherent limit on how long such rights can be re-asserted, though courts ignored them until late in the twentieth - when many towns discovered that they didn't actually own the land they were built on and had to settle with the descendants of the people it was stolen from.

Anyway, the complexity of the whole system leads to having to pay for title searches - usually a few hundred dollars - and, in some cases, for title insurance, which can be quite a bit more expensive.  (Mortgage issuers - who rely on the property as collateral - have often required title insurance, sometimes with no good cause.  There are strong claims that title insurance is basically fraudulent - it ends up being a way for the mortgage writer to steer some more of the buyer's money to an associated entity.)

All this is the case ... except in Iowa.  Iowa keeps track of information by plot of land, not by owner, and by law completely clears title at every transfer.  It's actually illegal to write title insurance in Iowa.

Why don't the other 49 states do things this way?  For that matter, since all these records are computerized now anyway - does it really matter how the old paper documents used to be sorted?  Well ... they've always done it the good old-fashioned way, it works just fine for the people who run the system, it only annoys people on the relatively infrequent occasions when they transfer real estate - and then their lawyer deals with it anyway.
                                                        -- Jerry

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