Signing people with only one form of ID?

[Robert J. Hansen]

Richard Hartmann wrote:
> It seems that most people assign the highest trust level to others
> who have presented only one form of ID. Personally, I tend towards
> only granting that to people who showed me two seperate pieces
> of ID.

It may be helpful for you to think about things in terms of not just how 
many identity documents are present, but the relative difficulty in 
forging identity documents, as well as your ability to spot forgeries.

E.g., a university ID card is pretty easy to forge.  You also probably 
don't know what Wayne State University's ID card looks like, so if 
someone presents it to you, you have no way of knowing whether it's on 
the up and up or not.

Compare that to a passport.  You might already have a passport.  Even if 
you don't, it's pretty easy to find out what a passport looks like, what 
sort of paper is used in it, what security features are present.  You 
can thus have a lot more confidence in someone's identity if they 
present you with a passport than if they present you with, say, a 
university ID card.