Time for a little language lesson.

“Kenni” in Icelandic means ‘to know.’

“Tala” in Icelandic means ‘number.’

You might remember that I made a passing mention in my first daily life to the Big Brother phenomenon in Iceland. As I settle into my new life here, I’ve quickly realized just how acute this phenomenon really is. It’s everywhere. It’s around the corner, it’s up the stairs, it’s down the street, it’s in my video store, it’s at my library, and boo! right behind me.

I’ve now learned that this Big Brother phenomenon exists because of a ten digit number called a kennitala. A kennitala is the United States’ equivalent to a social security number, but is used far more extensively here. They (the proverbial they...) might as well implant a chip into our ear so they can track us with infrared.

An example of one might look like: 251270-3039.

The kennitala formula is this: the first six digits are the person’s birthday (DDMMYY), the next two digits are chosen at random, the ninth digit is a check digit, and the last digit indicates the period in which they were born. For those of you with 300-year-old grandparents living in Iceland and born between 1700 and 1799, their kennitala will end in seven. 

In many ways, this is an ingenious system for tracking the citizenry. Without a doubt, it’s fast and efficient, and at least according to Wikipedia, it eliminates the need for a census because the National Registry is as up to date as any census could track. 

But as a foreigner, I’m not used to the lack of privacy it imposes. Then again, I apparently did not have much privacy in the States, but at least I didn’t know that people were watching. President Bush could have been wiretapping my cell phone and I would have had no idea.

Here, I walk into my local branch of KB Bank and they ask for it. They ask for it at the movie store, the library, it’s on the back of my debit card, credit card, even the stock market here runs on the kennitala system. If you find yourself in a nasty fender bender on one of the death-defying roundabouts in town, they don’t ask for your name, but rather for your kennitala.

Even mortgages are connected with your kennitala, which means that if you’re considering stealing someone’s identity while you’re in town, you’d be wiser not to. You could land up to your neck in debt. Think about inheriting someone’s 10 million dollar mortgage payment, even if it is for an abode by the sea. 

I guess what this all means is that I’m not really a person here, just an ugly ten-digit, omni-present number. SB