PAN and comlink questions Options

[Loestal]

I know another member posted something similiar to this, but I have different questions. I read thru the book, and read all the stuff about SINS and comlinks and what to do with them. Are you practically forced to carry your comlink with you? Buying is almost completely done thru comlinks and online accounts. What happeneds if you get arrested and don't have your comlink. Do they assume your SINless or is there a way to get your info like a retinal scan or the more primitive fingerprint. I wouldn't think either of these because they can easily be changed within few hours. So really if your gonna go out and cause trouble...just leave your comlink at home and really how can they proof your you? Can you get busted for not having some form of official ID? I read where they even have drones that randomly scan the level of access people put on their comlink to follow up on suspicious folks.

What would the standard procedure be if your arrested, have a SIN but no comlink or form of ID on you? Are you fined, are they harsher on you because it makes them do more work?

The book isn't very clear on these types of situations and any opinions would be appreciated.

[GrinderTheTroll]

I'd bet you'd be treated like a SIN-less citizen which means bad-news for the recently-aresseted. As such, the poor treatment by the cops and long holding times would probably get you to cough up your SIN (fake-SIN for you runners) quickly.

[Serbitar]

I wouldnt say that your retina or fingerprint can be easily changed within a couple of hours. Especially not for Joe Normal, and the law is mostly for Joe Normal.

By RAW, there are certain areas where you have to be on broadcast mode with your comlink. You will almost certainly get arrested there when you do not have it on or even with you. Your comlink is your ID card and in most modern day countries, you are required to always carry your ID arround with you (though it is not enforced, most of the time, today).

If you are arrested and you carry no SIN (in your comlink) with you, they will search for your SIN (with your biometric data). If they dont find any they consider you SINles and give you a criminal SIN.
In any case, walking arround without a comlink is abnormal and you will face a lot of trouble. Dont do it.

[Lebo77]

[Serbitar]

Thanks for the praise.

My information is from SR4 p.210 black box.
Of course, this is only for AA/AAA and some A areas, but I think there are definately certain places where you will run into a lot of trouble without a comlink.

BTW: The cheapest comlink is 200 Nuyen. Buy it used and you get it for 100. In Germany the cost for a passport (this new biometric one we have to have because of USA) at the moment is 85 Euros.

[TBRMInsanity]

If you have a SIN the police will check to see if it is legit. If it is legit you will be treat as an ordinary citizen that has committed a crime (ie detained, bail procedures, court appearance, sentencing). If the SIN is not legit and they find out you will be treated as most SIN-less people and there is a posability of falling through the cracks (ie beaten badly and dumped in some field (or worse the ocean). If you have no SIN at all and the crime is serious (but not enough to be too much trouble) you will recieve a ciminal SIN (and the SINNer flaw). This should haunt your character from then on as you will be marked as a criminal to everyone how has access to your SIN (ie everyone with a commlink).

[Tarantula]

That is, of course, only if you don't bother picking up a new fake sin, or three, before you head back out into the world.

[Lebo77]

[Serbitar]

I agree. Somebody without a SIN (2070) can only live in in the barrens (E) and there is no reason why the "system" wouldnt everybody to have a SIN.

by the way: Look at lifestyle costs to convert Dollars to Nuyen. SR4 uses 1 Dollar today = 1 Nuyen 2070. Even a very low lifestyle person can afford a 100 Nuyen used comlink. Only squatter lifestyle cant. Thats why I think, that everybody not living in the barrens has a comlink and thats why the cops will be very suspicious if you dont.

But in the end, thats all fluff and up to every GM himself.

[Kanada Ten]

An RFID can have the SIN data on it and serve the function of broadcasting the ID; this is probably the form of a SIN card issued by the government.

[mdynna]

I agree with the "government issue ID-card thing." The UCAS gov't probably has some provision for SIN-ed citizens who can't afford a Commlink. However, in high security areas where your SIN must be broadcast I have always seen little hidden scanners and Lone Start drones everywhere. Having a short-range SIN "card" doesn't mean you escape the constant scrutiny. Bottom line for runners: get a fake SIN (or 2 or 3 or 4)

[GrinderTheTroll]

[kigmatzomat]

No. Pets have more protection under many laws than people do.

Remember, once upon a time a child abuse case was tried under the "abuse of an animal" laws because it wasn't illegal to beat your child senseless.

I imagine similar kinds flaws exist in corporate-law areas.

[Shrike30]

I don't see there being a particular interest in issuing cheap-ass RFID SIN cards to people on anyone's part. By the time you're close enough to scan the card on a voluntary subject, you could just as easily get a biometric ID, and those are a hell of a lot harder to forge.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you're wandering around a AA/AAA neighborhood and you don't have enough money to afford a 100 :nuyen: commlink, you're SOL, in my game. The cops don't want you there, the citizens don't want you there, and you're lowering the property value in the neighborhood every time you think it'd be nice to live there some day. If you're so poor that a used MetaLink with a pirated OS is more than you can afford, you've already fallen through society's cracks. If you had a SIN ID card on you, the cops would legally be obliged to let you hang out, walk the streets, annoy the gentry, or whatever... that 100 :nuyen: minimum one-time entry fee into the nice parts of town is a good way to keep the riff-raff out of the parts of town that pay enough taxes to keep Lone Star officers on the payroll.

We're not talking about spending $300 or whatever on a cell phone, people. We're talking about the device that carries your ID, accesses your bank accounts, contains your resume, lets you call people, recieve and send information and email, apply for jobs, operate your car, get into your house, keep in touch with your relatives, tells your parents where you are, lets the cops know who you are, and is generally a prerequisite for being a functional member of society. If you can't afford a used, bottom-of-the-barrel commlink, you're unemployed and begging on the streets because doing anything more involved in society requires a commlink.

Besides, I'm sure there's a charity out there that gives away 4 year old commlinks running someone's hacked-together OS supported by adware and that leaves a datatrail like a leaking oil tanker, incidentally monitoring your food and shopping preferences and telling you what a mistake you're making if you buy something made by someone other than a subsidiary of your commlink's manufacturer. Anyone who's got their shit even mildly together can come up with something to use.

[TheOneRonin]

There was an earlier thread on the topic of people not being able to afford commlinks. The way I run it in my games, commlinks are commonly purchased like cell-phones (free, or really cheap with a 2 year service plan or something like that). Your SIN data is actually an expansion card that fits in the commlink. The SIN cards are issued by the government (a' la US Driver's Licences). The SIN card suffices for ID, though the broadcast range is short.

Setting it up this way doesn't really effect gameplay at all, but it makes it plausible for everyone (including children) to have commlinks.

[Kanada Ten]

[Shrike30]

In a corporate environment, the odds are that you'd be chipped anyway. That's pretty standard practice for corporate employees. Nobody going into a university or corporate environment is too poor to afford a commlink... those who are unemployed (or unrelated to someone who is, in the case of uni students or corpkiddies) don't belong in those locations anyway. If a primary concern of these people is that commlinks are hacker houses, it'd make more sense to take commlinks away from people going into these places than it would to issue RFID cards to a portion of the population that isn't likely to go there in the first place.

If you don't have biometric data stored in the SIN registry, and you can't afford a commlink... you're screwed when the cops pick you up trespassing in Queen Anne (hey, you were in front of that guy's house...). If they can prove that you're you well enough to issue you an RFID, they could just as easily give you a retina scan, put that data into the central database, and prove you're you in the future, without bumping into the whole fake ID problem. It's a hell of a lot easier to burn an RFID to say "Yeah, uh, I'm Joe Smith," than it is to hack into the SIN database and change someone's biometric data around. If the guy the cops are trying to talk to isn't broadcasting any ID and won't look into the retinal scanner, they're going to arrest him.

[Kanada Ten]

It's just as easy to hack a commlink SIN, so that's a bogus argument. The university/school thing isn't about money, it's about data control. Thank you for agreeing on corporations. RFIDs never need batteries and are relatively inexpensive - the cards be paid for by part of the birth tax (plus, in secure areas you're always within a meter or two of a scanner). I see no disadvantage to issuing them.

[Shrike30]

Universities and corporations, unless they're prepared to tell every single student or employee "Hey, you have to surrender your ID, your telephone, and the device that you keep your personal journal entries, your corporate logins, and your homework on when you get here," are going to have to accept the fact that there will be commlinks in their facilities. Every piece of fluff about SR4 indicates that AR and wireless networks are, in fact, an integrated piece of daily life in corporate environments, which directly contradicts the thought that these people feel the possible security risks of having commlinks around are greater than the added productivity of not taking away every single student/employee's personal computer when they arrive.

Besides, why do you think they've got all this wireless-blocking wallpaper and random crap like that? It means that you can interact with all the stuff in the office to your heart's content, but you have to go through the corporate firewall and security setup if you want to push data (like, say, a hacking attempt or data theft) into the outside world, meaning the CorpSec hacker gets to watch whatever you do.

My understanding is that the SIN portion of every commlink is protected by a rating 6... something (Firewall, I think). Since this isn't data that's ever supposed to change, keeping the keys a secret would make sense; the person with the commlink doesn't have any legal need to know how to change what SIN his commlink broadcasts and how it responds to police queries. Getting through that Firewall to change the SIN data in a meaningful way is fairly difficult. RFIDs, on the other hand, can't even *run* a Firewall.

[Lebo77]

Your comlink/RFID would only broadcast your SIN number. That number can be used as a pointer into the database to look for a a particular set of biometric data. That data can then be compared with the person in front of you to see if they match. This is many orders of magnitude simpler then taking some arbitary biometric data and searching the complete database looking for a match. The "search for an unknown person" process is sufficently computationaly expensive as to be impractical to do for every person walking by on the street. The "look up the number in the database" is very parctical. I would go so far as to say that very few people would store their biometric data on thier comlinks.

As for "a comlink is the price of admission" to AA+ security areas: PRACTICLY I agree. Anyone without one will find themselves harassed and questioned by every Lone Star officer they come across. However, I imagine that there is no law requireing a comlink in public areas. The cops may drag you off for jaywalking or any other technicality they can think of, but if you have an alternitive method of ID (Like a gvt.-issued ID card / RFID tag) that alone would not be grouds for arrest. (They might do it anyway, but unless they could come up with something better to charge you with, they would eventualy have to let you go in a couple of days/weeks.)

So why are there still people without legal SINs? Unless it's for secrecy (like runners and other criminals), moral objection ("I am liveing off the grid man!"), or insanity ("SINs are the mind control of the Horrors! You get one of those and you bear the mark of Virgigorm!") why would anyone NOT have a SIN?

As an interesting real-world point, the ID cards at my university are RFID tagged now. You hold your wallet up to the door, and it unlocks. Kinda cool.

[GrinderTheTroll]

[bustedkarma]

I'd like to think that the gummit issues some kinda hard copy version of your SIN.

What happens when you Com dies, or breaks, or you catch some virus? I'd think you'd need to dig out hardcopy of you SIN, and load it (or have it loaded) onto your new Commlink.

I guess the alternative would be going with your newly purchased com, to the 2070 DMV, them running your biometrics, and loading it on for you.

[Kanada Ten]

[Serbitar]

Nice discussion. Thanks for the posts, Shrike30, Kanada ten and Lebo77.

[Shrike30]