This country badly needs a national ID system.
If we severely punish a bank that looks the other way while someone opens an account using a stolen identity, I am very sure they'll work really hard to make that impossible. How hard they'll work depends on how severely they are punished.
You're treated like a criminal simply by doing business in cash or having a lot of cash. Enhanced KYC just means that banks capriciously terminate your accounts and services if they find out you're a sex worker. If you're living abroad, no one wants to let you open an account.
are you saying this because of onlyfans? AFAIK that was due to pressure from banks/payment processors themselves (ie. not wanting the PR associated with facilitating human trafficking or whatever), not due to compliance reasons.
When I say banks need to be better regulated I don't mean they need to have more insane rules, but that they do whatever is possible for them to a) prevent someone from opening an account pretending to be someone else and b) are forbidden to deny service to someone who checks all boxes except their hypocritical morality rules.
Obviously there are a number of potential pitfalls in any such system, but I have to believe that even a flawed system which was intentionally designed would be harder to exploit than a hodgepodge of 100 incidental systems.
The problem seems to be that American ID is extremely valuable; it will suffer more attacks than almost any other national ID, just because of the sheer amount of money involved.
Some easy improvements even keeping a number based system would be:
1) don't assign ID numbers sequentially and based on location of birth
2) have consistent laws about who can collect these and liability for leaks (like hipaa)
3) allow them to be changed in cases of theft
But we could actually do much better by using asymmetric cryptography.
In slovenia (and other former yugoslav countries) we have a unique ID for every person here.. It's set up from the date of birth (0101021 - 1. jan. 2021), then two digits for the foreign yugoslav state (50 for slovenia), then a tri-digit counter for each birth (first person born that day is 001, and so on), and one digit for the checksum, which can be easily calculated.... so basically, with a calculator and 2 minutes of typing in the numbers, you can calculate a valid ID number.
But to open a bank account, you show the ID, which has any-copying measures (like money has), a photo, a serial number (to be cancelled if stolen), and only then the bank creates a new bank account for you. You can also use the same card to buy alcohol and travel through many european countries (no need for a passport).
Great! You have just solved the illegal immigration problem. So we are going to legalize everyone right here right now, correct?
They are exactly the same issue.
National ID only works if everyone inside the border has it -- regardless of how they managed to get there initially -- be that a person who due to whatever the weird way cannot get an ID as their records are messed up ( hello rural Appalachia ) or someone who is here illegally. After that t0 day the borders control and immigration control get teeth and anyone who does not have a National ID gets removed from the country.
Otherwise you have just created two different classes of people with a near impenetrable barrier between them
It does not because we fundamentally have enough fake social security numbers based identify theft to still create a two class system except this time there's zero guarantee that the person who should get the ID will have it and not his or hers "counterpart"
My wife got IRS notification that she already filed taxes a few years ago when she attempted to file hers. It was because someone has been using her identity. That person did not get arrested. Rather there are now two people running around the country with her SSN - her and not her. Oh and they are still filing taxes as her. Year after year. She just needs to use a special code now to separate her return from an imposer return
> anyone who does not have a National ID gets removed from the country.
From what can tell you inadvertently already solved the problem you're proposing.
Of course you framed the problem wrong. National ID only works if everyone who is supposed to be inside the border has it. It doesn't work if Appalachians can't get it. But it works like a charm if illegal aliens can't.
Edit: The SSN seems a lot like JavaScript at this point. Y'all are talking about how you would never use it for anything and yet it's the one thing everyone is using for identity verification these days.
A previous comment I wrote on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28280851
Someone in the trenches wrote about it: https://billhunt.dev/blog/2020/12/18/federal-policy-recs/#4-...
"It wasn't meant for this, it wasn't built for it, it's not used in a consistent way that we could do that, and I'm not sure you want the Social Security administration to be in charge of that, that's not what we even do..."
I keep poking government agencies who don't support it. Some are easier, some are harder. Some I have to go talk to legislators about appropriations to extend their applications to include the support. A necessary schlep.
If I saw that someone printed a form with their SSN on the office printer and forgot to pick it up, I'd just set it aside without a second thought, because it just isn't something that makes one think "red alarm fire".
Contrast this with something like a private key, which never leaves your possession and is never shared directly, just used for signing. Unfortunately most non-technical people have no concept of such a thing, apart from...stamps and seals? The chip on a credit card might count, but it doesn't seem like people care about losing possession of that too much either.
So, consider how Apple is about to handle state IDs and driver's licenses with iOS 15. It's what you describe, mostly. Not a private key, but identity built on crypto, with a UX that doesn't suck. We're getting there.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/27/ios-15-apple-implementing-sec...
I hate how businesses trust it as sort of some password. It's ridiculous how much damage a scammer can do by using your SSN.
Like it's a freaking plain text number. At this point it really should not be used for anything at all, and we should just assume that our SSN is public knowledge. I think we have the technology and means to come up with something better.
This always comes up with identification requirements for voting. It seems superficially reasonable to require them, especially if you are looking at it from abroad, or if you are pretty young. But the fact is that within living memory many American states had local policies of not recording the births of black people, and to this day there are many living black people who can't prove their own citizenship.
Unless and until every one of the fifty US states can demonstrate that they've put an ID card in the hands of virtually everybody, it won't be reasonable to condition things like education, health care, or voting on the possession of one.
Today the coverage of state IDs is actually very poor. People who hold them believe they are universally held but in truth only 89% of adult Americans possess one. That is not high, it is terrible.
(a component of my work is digital identity/IAM)
Anyway I'm not saying such a system is impossible. I am saying that you'd have to order it such that the requirement for presenting the national ID was not triggered until universality was achieved. I will add that there are abundant forces in national, state, and local politics who would fight universal national ID systems, which would range from deranged Libertarians to classic racial vote suppressors who support ID requirements but who at the same time fight against actually issuing IDs.
So you're saying we won't therefore we shouldn't try? Somehow the Austrians and Hungarians and various Yugoslav republics and Latvia and Poland and Switzerland and basically every country in eastern and southern europe all can keep track of the people born within their borders even as the borders shifted but the US can't tell a black american? It just sounds like a very very weak argument to me.
If you want to know why Latvia has national ID cards and America doesn't, just imagine if there was a venue where Montenegro could sue Latvia to stop it from having them. That's the American system!
It seems like you havent thought this through well enough. How do the people you metion do other things in life, like get a driver's license, employment, or a bank account?
Besides, if they can't prove their identity today, what would change for them when others get a new id card? Those people wouldn't be impacted.
Yes. But, you don't need to repeat yourself in every post. The point I stated, which you glossed over, is that the people who do not have licenses today will not be at a further loss, when others obtain a national identification. How will today's unlicensed people be harmed when a national id is created?
You still haven't explained what the harm would be. Nobody who can get an education now would suddenly not be able to get one.