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Comment by jdmichal | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. I'm not quite sure why people think the government doesn't already a "national database of citizens" between social security (theoretically assigned to every citizen) and taxes (ties SSN to address yearly).

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For sure, and on a more philosophical level, I would think that 'knowing who her citizens are' would be on the shortlist of things a nation-state does.

Yeah, but there's knowing that a person named John Smith is a citizen, and knowing that John Smith lives at 123 Maple Way in Sometown, State, that he is currently an organ donor, that his face is a partial match to faces sighted at at least 3 crimes, that he flew out of the country 14 times last year, and that he currently owes $43,578 in back taxes as a result of some unreported contracting work.

The latter kind of knowing is what we're afraid of, especially the database of faces.

To be honest, nearly all of that sounds perfectly reasonable information for the federal government to have. Trusting the card being presented to you by the person making the identity claim is a fundamentally flawed idea that has always been mitigated with technology (stamps, seals, holograms, etc) which is all now irrelevant. You tell me you're "John Smith", I look it up. Even current forms of ID use biometric data (a photo & DOB) to validate the claim. I would certainly hope the government would know that John has left the country X times and owes Y in back taxes, as that's their job to know. Address and organ donor status are IMHO silly things to put on an ID card, (you don't need to live somewhere to be John, or have decided what your organ donor status is), but don't strike me as dangerous things for the federal government to know.

How this information is disseminated within the federal government or between states sounds like an excellent debate to have, as does the discussion about due process for suspects... but 'should the government be able to know who it's citizens are' is a silly one.

Organ donation I can see, and maybe the facial matching. But international border crossings and tax status seems like exactly the sort of thing the government should know.

The real ID act created a data sharing system between all the states of everything encoded on your driver's license, including picture. the picture is then fed into facial recognition software which is used in a variety of places. A while back a Chinese national was working with a dataset in an opaque federal "fusion center" before abruptly quitting and flying home to China, woops https://www.propublica.org/article/lizhong-fan

> social security (theoretically assigned to every citizen)

Participation in the Social Security program is optional.[0]

[0] https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10023.pdf

That database doesn't yet include everywhere you go for example (hopefully)... Governments would love it if your online activity would need to be tied to a national ID for example...

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