The most important part of modern government is database management
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Consider gun registration. Gun owners are not, as a group, considered to be at the cutting edge of technology. But even they understand intuitively that a database is the first step toward any policy that will threaten gun rights.
And that brings the stubbornness: people want government, but don't necessarily want a super-effective government because it would be effective at both policies you agree with and policies that you don't.
It goes beyond "disagreeable policies". There are real events that lead people to be distrustful of government.
Personally I think that not having trust in government and not allowing for an effective government because of that lack of trust is a critical problem. But it's not adequate to simply ignore the previous bad behavior of governments. There need to be some structural improvement to increase the credibility of trust.
What structural changes would you suggest?
The US could eliminate whole classes of guns today by this simple measure. After the first 100 people are charged with felony possession after open carry demonstrating with their AR-15's, how many do you think you'd really see in public? From people with jobs and mortgages who can't afford a criminal record? When the police departments get given bonus pay per weapon destroyed?
It won't be many.
Making things illegal is easy, and stomping most of them out is easy. The database problem is more to do with positive policies where you're trying to give something to citizens, whether it's money or passage onto an airline.
Again: make it illegal, make compliance an individual responsibility, punish breaches heavily, (optional) incentivise law enforcement to find breaches
And in the US, the answer is: heck no. Thanks to civil forfeiture, it doesn't matter how much evidence you have that the money is yours and obtained from legal activities, first and foremost it'll be seized the the money charged with a crime.
So people just plain don't transport large sums of money around unless they absolutely have to, and get completely screwed over for it regularly.
The common refrain when people get done for this is "well you shouldn't do that". It's completely unethical and a miscarriage of justice, but it's effective.
Authorities can only get away with civil forfeiture precisely because transporting of cash across state lines has become unusual enough. If millionaires had to haul their cash stashs across the USA when going on vacation, the police would polish their boots instead of trying to seize the money.
It is always much more efficient to prosecute things that are rare. In contrast, recreational MJ use was never stamped out, regardless of the heavy punishments and resources thrown into the War on Drugs; it was widespread enough that it could not be eradicated by brute force alone.
It's not just, that. Having a database of guns and gun owners is goldmine for would-be thieves looking to score some firearms.
Unregistered firearms don't completely negate the usefulness of keeping track of guns, in the same way that unregistered cars don't completely negate the value of having a car registration process.
It's socially desirable to be able to investigate crimes involving guns, have some idea how many of what types exist and where, and to be able to restrict access to known firearms for specific individuals who might be having issues with violence or mental health.
I think you could reasonably make the case that in the U.S. the cat is "so far out of the bag" that there's no point even trying, but in many other countries it's a useful system.
We do driving licenses have so much info unrelated to operating a motor vehicle?
Cars are expensive, deadly and ubiquitous and much of the regulation around them was written in blood. When you write "bike" I'm not sure if you mean bicycle or motorcycle. Most places, motorcycles which will be driven on public roads do require registration. I expect that bicycles don't require registration because they don't kill as many people who are not the rider, so nobody has really called for it.
But nobody advocating for registration has that idea in mind. They all want to use it against gun owners, somehow or another.
The government can be effective at helping you or oppressing you. Some kinds of databases intuitively seem weighted more toward one end than than the other. Most databases are a gray area that could be used for either.
And a lot depends on trust, too. Perhaps you simply trust your government more, and perhaps with good reason.
Yes, they could use better database management. But that would not cure these problems.
And data about people can enable metrics on the country and metrics about progress towards strategic goals, but in truth mostly exists to satisfy some internally imposed reporting requirement, or to prevent people double dipping in government programs and benefits.
The author is not wrong in their tweets that "database management" is akin to the challenge that governments face, but more precisely it's fact management that's at stake. Every division of government ought to be able to assert facts they've been authorized to measure, maintain, and assert about people, and those facts ought to be visible to other divisions in some contexts, in line the with laws and ethics of the state.
The problem is that instead of federated attributes, most government business is still at (or below) the level of mere "database management".
The author admits that they used to lobby against ID cards. ID cards simply move identity proofing into a one-time ordeal, instead of one that must happen every time a person wants to interact with the government. ID cards do not violate privacy; the inappropriate consumption of data violates privacy.
Vaccine passports and other similar instruments are tools of policies that are designed to limit freedom of movement. This is by design. The reduction of movement among individuals of unclear health status is a key goal of these policies, alongside developing an incentive mechanism to encourage the receipt of a vaccine, and simply to curate knowledge about people's health status to craft further policy.
It's a civil liberties issue of course, but the government can deny you access to a military base too, and few governments send you food or provide shelter despite these needs being critical to existence, so it's another policy that tries to make difficult choices fairly while trying to avoid direct harm. Care should be taken to ensure equal access to vaccines to all people within the same priority group.
And if that hampers legitimate government aims, it still serves the purpose of a society founded on the primacy of individual liberty.
Without a limit, this appears to be an argument for anarchy
For example, lots of countries across all ages were perfectly capable of fielding large armies and winning wars while the average citizen didn't have enough education to sign their own name.
A balanced state is a rare exception of good governance and I am not sure how many of them are out there.
In particular I am looking at distributed technologies, which, counter-intuitively given their name, are actually the best ideas we have for creating ubiquitous holistic systems (such as databases).
Ethereum (2.0) has great potential for enhancing government. I also think that some type of distributed data exchange protocols standardization would help. Or maybe a standardized protocol package registry rather than mandating specific protocols, in order to facilitate dexterous evolution of the systems.
One of the most competitive countries globally, which seems to say something about the value surveillance offers.
The only thing that has stopped it has been the challenge in building the systems and cleaning the data - for now.
I really want to understand how Germany manages to make things work.
Given the results of gold confiscation in India, it seems that revealed preferences of citizens in India are not aligned with such an idea.
Germany is not alone in this approach, but they are a little unique in some aspects due to some historical events. Canada and many others do not even have a national id at all, and it works great: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_identity_card...
You simply present multiple sources of identification, and de-facto in many cases driver license is the national ID. However, you can always present a combination of multiple documents. e.g. birth certificate + photo ID of some kind. As such, there is no central database, but multiple databanks in most of those countries.
I think central databases are an extremely misguided approach, because even with biometric databases - people just end up selling their identity for money to fraudsters. It just hikes the cost to commit fraud a little bit.
Estonia's e-residency cards were obtained by the truckload, and then resold to "evil doers" who then proceeded to launder something like $250 billion. That's for a country of 1.5 million.
Thanks for the update on Germany/Canada.
I agree - central databases are a bad idea.
Is Earth going to be at war with the planet state of Mars, in the great water wars of 2150, and the Earth forces VA department is still processing injury claims on paper?
I have to assume that VA department you're talking about is Dept of Veterans Affairs - and if that's the case, you're in luck! You don't have to wait till 2150 for this to happen. I know that we no longer process injury claims on paper probably since 2014 or so. Most of the paperwork filed are shipped, scanned, and processed into digitized forms into a system of record known as Veterans Benefit Management System (VBMS) here at the VA. VA Regional Office staffers can then pull the digital records for further processing.
I supported the VBMS team's effort in migrating to a cloud based environment in 2017/2018 and my team help start the Caseflow/Appeals project, a system used to track appeals cases - which relies on VBMS daily. Caseflow is open source as well.
However, in the developed world more and more organizations (especially Government) are becoming information organizations and we need to focus more on Information Management over Process.
Somehow that's not sufficient this time?
> All vaccinations are subject to notification to SYSVAK, and shall be registered without consent.
https://www.fhi.no/en/hn/health-registries/norwegian-immunis...