Security: Licenses and SINs, A branciation from a Behind the Shadows Options

[Chrysalis]

Greets,

I was thinking about licenses and SINs, I am still unsure on how to play them. The way I play them is like this:

The Ronald Reagan Airport flashed along the display, a president who symbolized 20th century paranoia. The 21st century one was indicated through the AR display, that the threat level was cerulean and that all arrivals would go through a security check. The road had been blocked with concrete barriers and gray coloured APCs. Around the D.C. Metroplex guard swooped helicopter sized vector thrust drones with their missile racks and distended miniguns as if its was the stingers from a swarm of angry wasps.

Tyler's commlink licenses were scrutinized with excruciating detail. This was not some punk who was checking for gang affiliation but a government from a disunited UCAS, with CAS separatists, humanist policlubers, technomancers, and the Shdowrunner kind threatening its existence every day. A drone followed his movements as he navigated the serpentine road block, the sweep of a weapons lock before he was allowed to pass.

From a game mechanics side I would see the winning hand always being with security. How do fake licenses help? I mean obviously if you are at the stuffer shack and you want to buy a fag and you flash your electronic equivalent of a cardboard and stick figure photo ID drivers license that would be a License 1 and a hand wave by the GM.

However, what about airports, hospitals, and government buildings? Customs officials have special training to identify forgeries. Wouldn't this involve a similar four point system of verification (biometrics, checking the international system of SINs, interrogatory mathematical verification system, and old Mark I eyeball).

What about spells? Magecuffs have bacteria that glows when spells are to be cast. It is a simple, mostly fool-proof system. I would see the same technology incorporated in scanners in the sixth world. A little bar on the side which sets off an alarm when a mage walks through the scanner.

What about identity theft? What's to stop a character from mugging a person who is of roughly the equivalent size and gender, steal their commlink and go on an identity theft shopping spree? As technomancers are the new Al Qaeda, commlinks are rarely cranial.