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Comment by vxNsr | Hacker News Reader

>The rapid expenditure of COVID emergency relief payments highlighted the critical importance of having a resilient instant payments infrastructure with nationwide reach, especially for households and small businesses with cash flow constraints,"

The main issue with releasing cash as I understand it wasn’t that it wasn’t arriving fast enough; rather it was verifying the recipient was eligible and was who they say they were.

The only way to solve that as I see it is with a national ID which I am more against the more I hear about the abuses that both democrats and republicans do with what little power they have to identify political enemies.

Obviously ACH could be faster but when it comes to getting gov money back I just don’t see how the 2 extra days was the issue.

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Real ID act[1] is a national ID in every way but the name.

[1]: https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/real-id-act-text.pdf

Not really anymore than drivers licenses are.

The Real ID Act just sets a standard for "enhanced" drivers licenses that will also be accepted by various government agencies as "verified ID".

Each state still has their own databases of drivers licenses and you can still get the original IDs without the extra verification step (basically proof of address and immigration status).

Before Real ID, you pretty much just told them your address and they didn't care that much about immigration status (as long as you were legal). NOTE: this varied by states considerably - some states were already doing many of these things before the Real ID Act (they just were doing it their own way).

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Real ID act[1] is a national ID in every way but the name.

If it was a national ID, it would be mandatory. Real ID is optional.

Nothing about the word "national" implies "mandatory". There are other countries with national IDs which are not mandatory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_identity_card...

For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_card_(France...

Not if you want to travel by air.

That's an abusive attempt at a workaround by the Fed to make it mandatory.

Thankfully, it appears my state will continue to offer the same IDs it always has in addition to the "enhanced" ones. I suppose I'll have to start using my passport for domestic flights in 2021.

I'm well aware of this. But nobody is forced to fly in America.

Real ID is very worrying and I’m hopeful that it eventually goes away as it keeps getting delayed.

I don’t understand the criticism behind RealIDs and the criticism section on Wikipedia wasn’t helpful. Are passports not basically national IDs? Does it just boil down to blocking illegal immigrants from accessing some services?

Passports are not required to access (pretty much) any Public Service in the US. Passports, Drivers Licenses are optional, as are State IDs.

If you _want_ a Federal ID that is accepted by all states, you can certainly get a passport. It's what I often use for ID.

This. Passports are available in card form as well as book form too so you can carry a passport card in your wallet with your state ID. I have no plans to get a "Real ID" driver's license since I already have a passport card.

Not every American resident is an American citizen. If you’re not an American citizen, you certainly cannot get an American passport in a fancy card format

It comes down to an attempt to centralize and make mandatory which translates to excessive control and easy abuse.

If there were some pressing real world need for it then perhaps it would be acceptable. There isn't though, so I can only interpret such a move in the most cynical of terms (ie exploiting 9/11 to increase federal power).

It's already fairly difficult to get by without a state ID or passport. They're often required where they aren't really needed simply because everyone is assumed to have at least a driver's license. States already collect far more information about you (IMO) than they have any business doing. Various forms of state issued ID are already more than sufficient for the vast majority of use cases. In the rare instance that greater security is required for some reason, passports exist and can be used.

(As an example, the DoD has legitimate real world security concerns. As such they've had their own ID card system, which includes a PKI chip, for far longer than most institutions. But no one is complaining (I hope) about being subject to stringent ID requirements while working for the military.)

I just cannot understand how you guys accept bad cops, bad healthcare, bad employment rights, bad social mobility, bad education and bad banks, but apparently national id is where you draw the line. Why didn't you draw the line before all this other stuff that is far behind much of Europe?

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can't reply directly to the GDP comment as some cry baby has flagged my post and then a free speech loving mod has shadow-banned me with "you're submitting too fast".

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GDP comparison in $$ terms is a really uninformative comparison. Even between states inside the USA it doesn't work due to different land costs.

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social mobility: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-...

USA: 27th. Like the UK, the place you were supposed to break free from - anyone can make it!

Well, are we supposed to not resist this bad thing because there are other, worse things? That seems less than helpful.

I'm expecting you guys to give up on this, just like all the other stuff. Downvote away, but you've lost so many rights since the 1960s, with barely a peep.

This is simply not true. The number and degree of rights that people have in America is unquestionably higher than the 1960s. I could probably spend 8 hours making a list.

Here's a good place to start:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landmark_court_decisio...

> Discrimination based on race and ethnicity

That's "won" is it? You've gone backwards compared to most countries, even if you did write some of it down on a piece of paper.

You've built quite the straw man there.

We make tradeoffs, just like different all different nations, even amongst those in Europe do.

Check out the relative prosperity of the US States individually vs the world:

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/us-gdp-per-capita-by-state-vs...

There are plenty of issues, but all countries have them, the US just tends to get the biggest magnifying glass on theirs.

Hold up the US has some of the highest social modility in the devolved world. (20-40% of people will end up better than their parents)

You are ranked 27th.

I wouldn't call massive sustained protests to be 'accepting'.

Mass protests are only about the bad cop bit. You guys have given up everything. Conditions are far below what Europeans would accept. Better late than never, but very late.

It's damaging to other countries, for example in the UK emploers are always trying to lower standards to align with new USA lows.

Downvote patriots, instead of fixing your country.

You're receiving downvotes not out of some sort of "Patriot Duty"... You're receiving downvotes because almost all you said is wrong, and/or perceived very differently by US Citizens.

This is the danger you wade into when commenting psuedo-authoritatively about the internal politics of another Nation. You're very unlikely to have a complete picture, or deep enough understanding to make anything but surface-level superficial comments. The only sources available are partisan and political, particularly the stuff that makes it's way overseas. It would be unreasonable to expect otherwise.

As an American, I could easily retort we could have all the nice things if you European's would just pay for your own militaries for once! But that would be a gross simplification of international politics, and a, likely, gross mischaractarization of your country's politics.

I agree on the perception part.

We already have a national ID. It is called social security, and it is bad at its job because it was explicitly not supposed to be a national ID when it was created.

I responded in more depth to a sibling[0]. SSNs are not valid for use in uniquely identifying individuals. If you try to use an SSN as a primary key for U.S. individuals you are in for a world of pain.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24104158

You may notice, however, that this practice is extremely widespread throughout both the government and private industry. Yes, it is unsuitable for the purpose as parent says, but this is still the de facto purpose. Use of SSNs as identification is so ubiquitous in certain fields that when security concerns around SSNs became apparent in the '90s they were simply replaced with "pseudo-SSNs" which are randomly generated in the same format - which had already been the practice for individuals not possessing an SSN or in other exceptional situations.

SSNs aren’t unique, and were never intended to be.

I'm not arguing with that at all! I'm saying that the fact that they aren't hasn't actually stopped anyone from using them that way.

When this assumption is violated, a psuedo-identifier is assigned. I have worked with multiple systems that work this way and it is the norm in finance and was the norm in higher education until relatively recently. State government information systems also use SSN as primary identifier surprisingly often, and in the system I've worked most closely with reused SSNs were resolved by just deleting the old record.

You could say that SSNs are the perfect storm - they aren't unique, but they're pretty close to unique, and this allows you to rely on SSNs as an identifier for long enough that when you run into a problem you're too dug in and so you find a workaround. For example, assign non-citizens "SSNs" with prefixes not used by SSA---this was the norm in higher ed, and many institutions "eliminated" the use of SSNs by just handling all students as international.

The IRS, of all organizations, uses SSN as a primary means of identifying individuals. They absolutely run into all kinds of problems with this that must be resolved by using other information as well but that doesn't stop them because it's just too convenient. Many such defects in use of SSNs are resolved by assigning an ITIN, which is just a pseudo-SSN with first digit '9' which is not in use by SSA. Even EINs have the same digit length as SSNs, suggesting that they're handled as SSNs by some systems.

Or consider this similar situation: name and DOB are not unique, but this doesn't stop them being near universally used as primary identifier in healthcare information systems. Actually healthcare widely used SSN before HIPPA mandated a change.

I've worked with several large healthcare organizations in a consulting capacity. You would be laughed out of a room for suggesting SSN or name and birthday as the primary identifier for an individual. All used an internal patient ID.

Some had processes that would use an SSN or name and birthday as inputs to an identification procedure. These procedures would invariably include additional steps.

It's perfectly reasonable to ask someone their name and birthday. You can easily use these as search keys to be presented with a list of options. Then, you can select the appropriate record from that list. Sometimes you might need additional information to determine the correct record. If so, you ask the patient.

Each organization also had many reconciliation processes to resolve misidentified patients.

All this to say, they were explicitly not using SSN to identify patients. Sometimes they are put in situations where this is the primary identifying datum for a record, and this is an (unfortunately common) exceptional situation to be resolved.

The allocation of a PRN to identify patients is an explicit requirement of HIPPA which was introduced in response to the exact problems you discuss, which were common prior to the change.

This directly contradicts your own prior statement, made in the present tense:

> name and DOB are not unique, but this doesn't stop them being near universally used as primary identifier in healthcare information systems

Right ssn is part of the problem. It’s used as a national I’d despite being terrible for the job. I didn’t wanna make my comment too long, but I have a lot of issues w how SSN is used.

Alternately, every flipping service that demands you identify with a phone number (or billable credit card); which is being used as a proxy for an ID.

> demands you identify with a phone number...

I recently found jmp.chat [0] which provides an easy workaround for this.

[0] https://jmp.chat

The problem with jmp.chat and Google Voice and all of their kin (all of those "disposable number" or "second line" apps on the various app stores) is the numbers provided by them are SMS-capable VoIP numbers and a significant minority of businesses will flatly refuse to allow users to use that type of numbers.

T-Mobile's DIGITS service was fantastic for this, at least for doing SMS with a number not attached to the SIM you have inserted in your phone, but they blocked almost all short-code senders when the service entered production.

What I do these days is give banks and businesses a mobile number attached to the second SIM in my iPhone. That number is on a prepaid carrier under a completely different name and address than mine. There's the non-zero chance that someday I'll have to "prove" who I am to that prepaid carrier and won't be able to prove that name. The odds of that are a lot lower than the odds of having my main number snatched from my mobile carrier just by an attacker knowing the last four digits of my SSN and persuading a customer service rep to swap SIMs on the "strength" of knowing this information.

> a significant minority of businesses will flatly refuse to allow users to use that type of numbers.

How unfortunate to hear, I guess I've just gotten lucky so far.

What's the concern about national ID and political enemies?

First, your life is already pretty bad if you don't have either federal or state ID at all. It's hard to drive, it's hard to fly, it's hard to get a paycheck. (You can live off the land in the middle of nowhere and avoid contact with the outside world, but you're not much of a political enemy for anyone if you do.)

So, your data is already in some sort of database, and if the authorities want to make your life bad, they can do it whether or not you happen to be carrying an ID on you. They've got facial recognition databases that are plugged into all of the various state IDs.

And you don't have to be compelled to carry your ID with you. This can be solved by saying, if you want certain government services, you have to have an ID. We do this for the very simple government service of public roads, and it doesn't seem like that's been a step down a slippery slope. I think it's important that we not live in a "Papers, please" society, but I don't think that's a necessary consequence of a national ID program.

What's the concern about national ID and political enemies?

Because America has seen what happens when it's used in other countries.

The HN crowd is mostly too young to remember these sorts of things, or to have learned about them in school. But it's a very short ride from "What's the big deal with national IDs?" to "SELECT * FROM 'residents' WHERE 'religion' = 'jewish' ORDER BY 'national_id';"

I answered that objection already, I thought. If you want to find every Cohen in the country, you can do so from state driver's licenses, birth certificates, voter registration data (which is public!), tax records, E-Verify, social security, whatever. If you want to find everyone who's traveled to a "terrorist" nation in the last few years, USCIS already has that data.

Sure, the government rounding up people by religion is bad and worth protecting against. I do not follow the argument that blocking a national ID actually protects against this in any meaningful way.

(Also, uh, don't put a religion field in your national ID?)

But the government already has all the data about you. Just in lots of places and kind of disorganised I guess.

I see that having an ID number for everyone would better help to organise the data and let the government offer better services. Like.. when one deparment has asked for my address then it stores it somewhere, and when some other department needs it, then it gets it from the database, and doesn't have to ask for it again, and again and again on every interaction.

Right - the problem with "the government shouldn't be too competent so that it can't competently do harm" (which my gut wants to agree with) is that the parts that do good are unloved and unfunded and the parts that do harm will figure out a way to make it happen, usually because the harm benefits someone in power and the good does not.

I think it's about propaganda and "symbols". Americans view the concept of a national ID as a symbol of federal government oppression.

I completely agree that a national ID would not enable the US government to do anything that it can't already do. But enough people in the US react to this sort of thing emotionally, not logically.

Technically we already do have a national ID: the passport. But relatively few Americans actually hold passports (when compared to, say, Europeans), and the federal and state governments would get a lot of push-back if they required passports for common things like banking. Hell, there are enough un- and under-banked people in the US due to other socioeconomic barriers; adding another would not be great.

The issue is that the only practical reason to have a national id is to implement a “papers please” society.

The same can be said for databases that keep logs of facial recognition and license plate camera feeds.

(Both are widely deployed in the US, but don’t seem to be usable in cases involving crimes against individuals. I think they’re reserved for “terrorism”, victimless crimes, etc.)

This thread started off with a very practical reason to have a national ID - the ability to authenticate who receives COVID relief checks. My question was in response to someone who believed that this was a legitimate purpose for a national ID and was nonetheless concerned about them.

ACH could still be expedited even with the need to verifying identity. Technically it only need to demonstrate that the identity of receiver and the identity of the referred bank account are consistent, a national id won't be necessary. Fed is not technically a branch of the government.

The fed is absolutely an agency of the us government: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm

>The Federal Reserve System is not "owned" by anyone. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 by the Federal Reserve Act to serve as the nation's central bank. The Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., is an agency of the federal government and reports to and is directly accountable to the Congress.

> fed is absolutely an agency of the us government

It’s absolutely not a government agency but also absolutely not privately owned. It’s best thought of as a non-governmental entity that is strongly influenced—and sanctioned—by the government, but does not operate underneath it.

This is why e.g. the Fed and Treasury negotiated how losses fell from the Main Street lending program. And if you visit a Fed, one of the first things their employees like to point out is that they’re NOT federal employees.

> It’s absolutely not a government agency but also absolutely not privately owned.

The closest analogy is that it's a co-op:

> Some observers mistakenly consider the Federal Reserve to be a private entity because the Reserve Banks are organized similarly to private corporations. For instance, each of the 12 Reserve Banks operates within its own particular geographic area, or District, of the United States, and each is separately incorporated and has its own board of directors. Commercial banks that are members of the Federal Reserve System hold stock in their District's Reserve Bank. However, owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company. The Reserve Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System. In fact, the Reserve Banks are required by law to transfer net earnings to the U.S. Treasury, after providing for all necessary expenses of the Reserve Banks, legally required dividend payments, and maintaining a limited balance in a surplus fund.

* https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm

It’s got nothing to do with that. ACH is a batch processing system written in COBOL in the 1970s. Nothing is going to get rid of the batch nature of the system except a new system based on asynchronous messaging. That’s what FedNow is.

The issue with ACH isn't the batch nature, it's that banks on both sides of the transaction are allowed a fairly long amount of time (upwards of a business day) to decide whether to accept or decline the transaction.

If they decide immediately, it can go faster, but they don't have to, and many banks have no incentive to work on processing faster.

They could still use a batch processing system, and just process the batches once per hour, or half hour, or whatever. It would still be slower than some newly-designed instant payments system, but could potentially be more palatable within the current system.

> no incentive to work on processing faster

Not sure I agree. How about the incentive to prevent customers using competing services like Venmo and others?

Also the incentive to quickly receive funds into bank coffers so the bank can lend it faster.

Presumably, increasing the ACH batch frequency would break something in the system or it would already have been done.

ACH is used either to get paid by an employee or to move money between accounts, neither of those things are that easy to do with Venmo, in fact zelle was created to compete with Venmo and it addresses that competition so nicely that many of my friends have moved to it.

> […] a national ID which I am more against the more I hear about […]

The US already has a de facto one AFAICT: the Social Security Number (SSN).

Unique to every individual, assigned from birth (or whenever applied for), and which never changes for the life of the person until they die.

> Many countries issued such numbers for a singular purpose, but over time, they become a de facto national identification number. For example, the United States developed its Social Security number (SSN) system as a means of organizing disbursing of Social Security benefits. However, due to function creep, the number has become used for other purposes to the point where it is almost essential to have one to, among other things, open a bank account, obtain a credit card, or drive a car.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identification_number

Unfortunately....

> Unique to every individual

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3004654/a-tale-of-two-women-...

> assigned from birth (or whenever applied for)

Sort of. Mostly yes, but not for everyone. As social security and medicare are de facto insurance policies, there are populations in the U.S. which object to them, and are not required to register, and therefore do not have SSNs. The Amish are one group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Non-uni...

> and which never changes for the life of the person until they die.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Replace... Note that one valid, accepted reason for issuing a replacement is when a duplicate has been issues.

And finally, as anyone who has ever worked in records management for a large institution that happens to receive SSN information, an SSN very explicitly is not a candidate primary key for an identifier of an individual. Everyone I've met who has tried has horror stories to tell. SSNs are not primary keys for individuals in the U.S.

Unique to every individual

Oh, wow. I laughed at that one.

Come work in healthcare IT, where in some geographies if you were to pick a group of 50,000 unique person records, you'd find that dozens, even hundreds, of people are using the same Social Security Number.

Sometimes you'll find eight or ten people with the same SSN in the same household. Or more often, several dozen unrelated people in the same state who have the same SSN because they all bought it from the same guy at the border.

Unique keys are a bitch in healthcare.

assigned from birth

Also nope.

I'm an American-born American citizen. I didn't get my Social Security number until I was 17.

The SSN is not an ID but a number: anyone with your number can claim to be you for the purposes of transactions. The number is only tied to name and birthdate, maybe address if you are of the age to pay taxes. This enables a lot of fraud: I once saw someone apply for a rewards (credit) card in a US store with SSN and no photo ID ("Oh I left my drivers license at home, could you take a student ID?")

Not sure how Europe handles this, but here in Korea phone numbers are tied to government-issued photo IDs. Sellers of phones have to fax ID scans to the central office for verification. Remote transactions such as signing up for a credit card require phone name + first half of ID + phone number 2FA at a minimum.

As a result, I'm not aware of any cases of identity theft. US infrastructure is so broken.

> This enables a lot of fraud: I once saw someone apply for a rewards (credit) card in a US store with SSN and no photo ID ("Oh I left my drivers license at home, could you take a student ID?")

They could have also just done it online in the US and not needed any photo ID to begin with.

As an aside, I assume the student ID had a photo on it, although accepting it begs the question of whether the teller is able to distinguish authentic and fake ones, although this is a problem for obscure state IDs as well.

Yes. It’s important to emphasize that US infrastructure sucks because we have chosen to make it suck, not because fixing it is impossible or even difficult. “Identity theft” is a joke.

Why would there need to be any more ID systems in place for a payments system that just goes faster? What about bank transfers and business transfers? Why would there need to be a 'national ID' or any new system created?

How is a national ID still a thread with all the data on voters which is already out there?

You could have verified voters accounted this way too which would probably raise the amount of voters. You could even establish mail voting properly sending the documents to everybody who's eligible without a need to register.

I don't understand that fear of a national ID in the US. It works in other countries and you have stuff like the Social Security Number too.

The GOP doesn't want more people voting; they hang onto power mainly through gerrymandering and various voter suppression measures.

The GOP doesn't want more people voting; they hang onto power mainly through gerrymandering and various voter suppression measures.

If you think this is unique to the GOP, you missed the last century of politics in Chicago.

They weren't saying it was unique to the GOP, and your comment almost makes it sound like the two major parties are equivalent in this respect. At a national level, I think their point stands. I find this distinction actually relevant here given the current renewed interest in a higher nationwide standard for voting accessibility and representation. Also, consider that the states with independent redistricting commissions to mitigate or prevent gerrymandering are all historically left-leaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_commission

A national ID wouldn't change anything about voting in the US. The US national government doesn't run elections. Elections in the US are run by state governments, who already issue the IDs that most Americans use.

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