being able to recite or produce copies of some significant subset of these credentials is sufficient to authenticate the assertion of identity on the part of a person. “After all,” the reasoning goes, “who else but the person in question could lay hands on all this personal information?” “Who, indeed?”

Rarely within this chain is there any strong, objectively verifiable connection between any credential and the actual, biophysical person. This, then, is the root of a growing systemic problem within our social ecosystems; a problem we refer to as identity theft. The term, identity theft, is something of a misnomer since the actual problem is one that involves the granting of privileges related to identity without satisfactorily authenticating that identity. The wrong person is allowed to spend the money in a personal checking account, for example. The real problem is not that someone else stole the account owner’s identity. The problem is that the bank granted the privileges of the account owner’s identity to someone else. In other words, the bank did not satisfactorily authenticate the identity of the account owner prior to allowing a debit transaction against their bank account. Hence, the process is not trustworthy and, in fact, constitutes a threat to the social ecosystem.

To this point, we have considered two pragmatic examples of trust derived through process. In fact, the trust imbued by one process attested to by a birth certificate then conveys to the second process in which a social security number is obtained. The two credentials that derive from the processes are elements of what we will discuss in the next chapter as experiential identity. Interestingly enough, without rigorous connection of the credentials to the person, both processes display characteristics of religious structures in that both involve trust derived from subjective evaluation; in essence, both derived trust as an act of faith. In each case, faith is derived first through logical consideration of the environment surrounding the interactions involved and then considering the details of the process of interactions within that environment. We might want to start associating process with ritual in these circumstances. The predictability of set processes brings them close to the formality of rituals, which we would suggest brings confidence in a community’s commitment through repeated affirmation of determined synchronized action. While our examples were rather simplistic, the whole solidity of ritualized processes has been explored in depth in Victor Turner’s groundbreaking The Anthropology of Performance.

The discussion for the remainder of this chapter will be aimed at better understanding these concepts within the context of human social structure and then relating these concepts to the software used in computer systems. In the course of this consideration, we will draw parallels between the operations of the mind and such software. In so doing, we hope to express some rudimentary thoughts on the feedback loop that seems to be at work in this provisioning process. We suggest that this consideration will illustrate how trust derives from both environments through rather similar processes.

Expanding prowess of the brain evokes a good summary of the evolutionary uniqueness of Homo sapiens. The physical structure of vertebrate species is remarkably similar. A turtle or a fish displays anthropomorphic characteristics. Little wonder that we can readily believe the tales of mermaids or that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles could gain wide acceptance in adolescent circles. The world’s great religions take the same tack; human striving for truth and beauty is more an activity of the mind than other actions of the body. Buddhism teaches the search for enlightenment as a cognitive process driven by faith in the end goal, which is the attainment of the state of pure enlightenment. Faith provides a degree of trust, which from our perspective appears as one level of the ranging emotional state that culminates in ecstasy. Protestant Christianity teaches that the right to enter the gates of heaven cannot be earned by good deeds. Rather, they

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