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Comment by mariojv | Hacker News Reader

Yes, this is a small operation, population wise and financially. The Brooks County most recent fiscal year budget has around $6M in revenue: https://www.co.brooks.tx.us/upload/page/5141/docs/2021092212...

Really the federal government should be publishing and distributing guidance to local governments about how to run IT.

I am wondering about how the ransom payout is going to show up in next year's budget. "Miscellaneous"?

Off topic, but there is a documentary about migration through Brooks County and the perils faced by people trying to migrate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_in_Brooks_County

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While it might be politically unpalatable, it's appalling to me that there aren't any standards for government websites. With ~3000 counties and I don't know how many municipalities, trying to synthesize data between different local governments is a nightmare for journalists, citizens, legal actors, and who-all else. Political science types like to mention 'laboratories of democracy' with a misty-eyed gaze into the past, but frankly it's far more common to end up with meth labs of bad governance, and the idea that great software solutions for the public sector are going to bubble up of their own accord has been shown to be wrong. There needs to be a system that is open source, accessible, and standard enough that city managers have to come up with a decent excuse as to why they're not using it.

For a country that gave birth to nearly all of the technologies the world is using, seeing the U.S. response to covid in terms of vaccination proof was an absolute shock. My American friends were walking around Europe with a piece of paper saying they got vaccinated. So yeah if you guys can't get your shit together and create a centralized vaccination certification system amid a global pandemic, a standard website kit isn't happening either.

You think that’s bad, wait until you hear about our federal identification system…

I think people from other countries don’t understand that Americans don’t want (federal) government knowing anything about them besides taxes. There’s a whole bunch of reasons why, but for the most part it boils down to various forms of liberty - and tales of the mark of the beast.

… but it’s usually fine when your state or a corporation is doing it.

The uk (at least at the moment) has no federal ID card a bit like the US. Much like in the US it’s a point of contention when voter ID requirements are being mooted. That being said they managed to roll out a vaccine passport pretty easily.

> I think people from other countries don’t understand that Americans don’t want (federal) government knowing anything about them besides taxes

I'm not American, I know that, have heard various reasons for it, and i consider it to be profoundly stupid. It might have made sense in the 19th century, but today? Your federal government already knows all there is to know about you. They can tap in healthcare, financial, state government information, all that online stuff. The cat is out of the bag, why not use it for something practical? A common unified ID which gives access to e-government services is the norm across the EU, and it's pretty cool and practical.

I do not find it stupid at all. I would prefer to live a life without a government, that issues proof of identity for me. And rather have a working economy, where the problem of ID independent of government is solved. I know, it is convenient to have a single persona, that i can use everywhere and they are interoperable. But i AM. That is proof enough. It does not need a government for the proof of that, imho.

> And rather have a working economy, where the problem of ID independent of government is solved

That sounds profoundly stupid. You mean like the credit rating agencies that provide credit worthiness identity, but where you have no control of how and with whom they store your data? So how would that work, how would the companies providing that service make money and how could they prove your identity? They'd still need to use government info like birth certificate/drivers license to verify who you are, but they'd have a profit motive. Of course that sounds better than the government, which doesn't need to sell who you are, providing an identity service.

Why have a useless middleman trying to make money off you?

Just take the government and a centralized ID out of the equation and it becomes an interesting problem. And why do i need a big guy, who hands out an ID with a silly watermark, prooving, that it is me? We have families, we have offspring, we have friends, we have relations, that we build over time, this should be proof enough?

This gives "Sovereign Citizen" vibes not gonna lie.

> We have families, we have offspring, we have friends, we have relations, that we build over time, this should be proof enough?

So fuck any homeless, people living alone, orphans, etc. ? Not to mention the utter unreliability of relying on random people (who claim they know you) for information like place/date of birth, etc.

Yet there is the social security number and card. It's a defacto federal ID for citizens. And a similar tax ID for everyone else.

Yep. And i am not saying its a bad or good thing to do it that way. Just that it is one solution to a problem. Another could be, that people in need are part of their communities, people know you, and there is a charity, where people pay in and they organize themselves, to pay out benefits for the less lucky. Many things were tried out in the past, so other ideas may come up in the future. But it doesnt always need a centralized government, a big guy, far, far away.

I don’t interact with any e-government services. They can tap into “all that online stuff” with a warrant.

>Americans don’t want (federal) government knowing anything about them

At the same time they don’t have any issues with commercial companies knowing everything about them, without any kind of control or oversight.

I get class action privacy litigation notices all the time.

And yet nothing changes.

I think the big difference there is in what capacities for violence exist within these two entities. One has a monopoly on legal violence and is armed (government) the other has no such powers (corporations). You want to limit how much power you give to an entity that has a legal monopoly on violence. Behind this desire to limit power is the recognition of the sad recurring reality of what is known as democide. Also on the table here is the distinction between tyranny, trending tyranny, and potential tyranny. If you’re not a member of a society in the state of potential tyranny then it may be too late to reverse the trend. So the question arises what safeguards and obstacles can be set in place that keep people in a state of peace and potential tyranny and how do you upset things from devolving into trending tyranny. These are pretty deep questions that I’m starting to scratch the surface in learning about.

Yah, it boils down to the 10th Amendment at the end of the day and the US's approach to federalism.

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-10/....

Shameless plug of envy.[1]

[1]: https://www.gov.uk/service-toolkit

> Really the federal government should be publishing and distributing guidance to local governments about how to run IT.

Or even running the IT for them. Lots of smaller municipalities and counties, even with all the guidance on the world, wouldn't have the resources to properly manage everything. Not to mention what a colossal waste it is, financially or practically, for every single administrative entity to reinvent the wheel for each of their IT needs.

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