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Comment by naboonga | Hacker News Reader

Why is the US so far behind the rest of the world when it comes to technology? State IDs/Driving Licenses already exist. These should have chips on them that could be used for authentication.

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The main reason we don't want a ubiquitous national ID is that once it's there, everything will require it, which means everything you do will be tracked. Which is okay until the government decides to go psycho and attack some section of the population. Right now, literally every red state would love to get their hands on logs filled with IDs of people who have anything to do with abortion (a Texas bill makes it illegal to even drive someone to an abortion) so they can put them all in jail (abortion doctors get 99 years). In the past it was the gay rights movement, civil rights movement, the satanic panic, the communist panic, rounding up all asians into concentration camps during ww2, etc. We can expect more of this, and a ubiquitous ID makes it much easier for the government to execute these plans.

I'd be more sympathetic to this argument if all that info weren't a couple subpoenas or search-warrants away at most—in fact, the government can often just pay for access to these things, usually with the implicit threat that if access isn't granted at a reasonable rate, the business may find itself in some trouble. Like, if we banned private parties from collecting tons of info about us, then maybe that concern would have some merit, but we don't, so it doesn't.

Point is, they don't need a national ID to pin you to some cell phone records that place you at location X at time Y, to get your CC usage data, to find out pretty much anything they like, to connect that to a license plate, to snag toll and other photo records of the vehicle from various sources, et c., and the only reason there are any restrictions whatsoever on that ability isn't because we don't have a national ID, but because we're not yet living under a tyranny. Difficulty IDing people isn't the limiting factor.

The public-private hybrid ID we have now is terrible and also carries all the same risks under tyranny as a national ID, which is at least not-terrible.

It's not like having a national ID would mean all the spying-data companies collect on us would automatically be shared with the government—more than it already is, anyway. It'd be the same as now, except with fewer ID-related problems for people.

Yes, the government can trace people right now, if people are not protecting their identity. Because there is no ubiquitous ID, it is still possible for you to protect your identity in almost every part of society. But that possibility will rapidly disappear when a ubiquitous ID arrives.

The difference between rounding up people or not is often just whether it is logistically feasible. Right now, even if they collect every kind of data from every business, it would be a nightmare to attempt to collate it all, because it comes in so many sources with so many differing fields that may be out of date or inaccurate or wrong and would have to be normalized etc etc etc. Impractical to do on a very large scale. Except when there's a single identifier they could look for, which would completely solve the problem for them, and make it easy to round people up.

Companies that sell data to the government without the consent of the public is a huge problem we need to deal with, for obvious constitutional reasons (4th amendment).

Getting an ID in the US is more difficult than this account recovery procedure that the letter complains about.

Especially for the the specific demographic that this letter is referring to. It's so easy to get caught in a catch-22.

Making these (and especially electronic ones) mandatory is a baaad idea : <insert random dystopian example>

I used to feel the same. But in reality, we prove our identity daily - every credit card transaction, banking, electronic tolling, bill payment, health care visit, tax payment, legal proceeding, employment opportunity, voter registration …

What protects us from invasive search is not lack of a uniformly accessible system for identification - its due process. And if the government chooses to compel you against your will and without due process - whether or not you have a laminated ID in your pocket will be irrelevant.

Most of those are optional. You can use cash, you don't need a bank account, nor electronic tolling, or bill payment, emergency room visits are free and there's free clinics. Other various things like legal proceedings, voter reg, and taxes are not things that are "tracked", that's just basic citizenship requirements.

A national ID would make the few cases where you need to hide your identity (like you're a 10 year old girl who was raped and needs an abortion, or the doctor that needs to perform it - https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/10-year-old-rape-v...) much harder. Until our government decides not to be so fucking crazy, we need to push back on its ability to unjustly track and then punish its citizens.

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