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Comment by catiopatio | Hacker News Reader

It doesn’t take a religious nut or a conspiracy theorist to see the catastrophically enormous downsides of universally mandated, centrally managed, and cryptographically-backed state identification cards, complete with RFID.

Imagine, for example, that upon declaring a protest unlawful, the police could simply scan all the RFID-enabled ID cards in the area and issue everyone a court summons.

Not carrying an ID card? No access to anything - public transportation, payments, and can’t even authorize your car to start. Also, it’s a felony to do so intentionally and with intent to evade law enforcement monitoring.

State wants to search your laptop? Your 2FA and disk encryption is mandatorily tied to your ID card, and the state holds keys in escrow.

Some things should be onerous for the state and decentralized. This is absolutely one of those things.

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In Germany at least there are several measures in place to make this slippery slope a fallacy (as it usually is) and not realistic.

You can pick whether you want to have an ID card or a passport or both. You are not required to carry your ID card with you.

In general the actually existing surveillance of mobile phones that were in a certain area at a certain time is much more worrisome to me.

> You are not required to carry your ID card with you.

"I am not a lawyer" but:

"Deutsche im Sinne des Art. 116 Abs. 1 GG sind nach § 1 Personalausweisgesetz (PAuswG) verpflichtet, sobald sie 16 Jahre alt sind und der allgemeinen Meldepflicht unterliegen oder sich überwiegend in Deutschland aufhalten, einen gültigen Ausweis zu besitzen und ihn auf Verlangen einer zur Feststellung der Identität berechtigten Behörde vorzulegen sowie einen Abgleich mit dem Lichtbild des Ausweises zu ermöglichen."

You must either carry a national ID document or, if you are requested to identify yourself by the police, make it available to them in reasonable time on request (say, if you left it at home, show it to them at a police station the next day).

In the text says it clearly: you must have an ID, and you have to present it if requested. That does not means, you have to have it with you at all times.

Exactly this is the kind of fine details that a lawyer distinguishes in the law.

So no. Absolutely no. You do not have to carry it with you. If it comes to the need, then maybe the police have to scort you to your home and you have to show the ID. But you are not requested to have it with you at all times.

Except technology makes it possible to constantly send get requests to everyone not carrying it. The limiting factor here was how much time police was willing to waste.

Slippery slopes work exactly because people are incapable to predict the long term consequences for eroding safety standards and are at the same time arrogant enough to believe to be very much capable. Its cognitive biases at work in selecting some of the most reckless approaches for dangerous situations.

The law never states that you are required to carry your ID. It states that you are required to own one.

If you do not carry it with you, and have no why for them to identify you in a way that you can be looked up, e.g. because you have your ID number in your password manager, the police can summon you to the station, or escort you home or a variety of other protocols. The police like to convince you otherwise, because it makes their job easier. When children are taught about their ID in school, this is often accompanied by a police official. As you can see in the law itself, this is not true.

However, this only applies to German citizens, and EU citizens, if you are in Germany on a visa or any other type of scheme, you are in fact required to carry you ID and documents with you at all times. In that case not carrying an ID is actually an offense with harsh punishments. In reality most of these situations are handled like with normal citizens though.

Edit: improve formatting

That seems like a distinction without a difference.

If you’re required to have it and present it on demand, then almost everyone will carry it, and the tiny minority not carrying their card will be automatically suspicious.

It’s a very short step from there to simply requiring that it be on your persons.

How does that prevent anything?

An empty promise today is easily broken tomorrow. The best defense-in-depth against future abuse is not building the abusable system in the first place.

Adoption might start as a voluntary choice, but pervasive integration with other technology and services result in it becoming effectively mandatory.

> In general the actually existing surveillance of mobile phones that were in a certain area at a certain time is much more worrisome to me.

Integration of government ID with our smart phones is literally the next step:

https://learn.wallet.apple/id#states-list

If you want to argue for a slippery slope you actually have to argue for causal connecting links. You have to demonstrate how you get from A to B. That why slippery slopes are usually logical fallacies. They do not demonstrate anything. It‘s just empty handwaving.

There is quite a lot of slipper slope going on here.

> centrally managed, and cryptographically-backed state identification cards, complete with RFID.

Does not necessitate:

> universally mandated

> No access to anything

> felony to do so intentionally

> Your 2FA and disk encryption is mandatorily tied to your ID card

All the latter things are awful, but we can have the first thing without any of the latter things.

Believe me if you have the first thing the latter things will eventually follow. At least in the EU "universally mandated" has been a reality for a very long time.

Then why haven't they done that already? "Hold your encryption key in escrow" is perfectly feasible without a national ID system.

There are many places with mandated ID. Can you mention one in which any of the others on the list have "eventually followed"? You are presenting speculation as unavoidable fact.

That's the definition of the slippery slope fallacy. Those things need not necessarily follow, that's the point.

Yet. It's not slippery slope, it's looking ahead. Is the ice on the lake cracked? No. Therefore there is no chance of it cracking? Setup, then execute, not necessarily immediately.

It's literally the definition of a slippery slope argument.

> A slippery slope argument (SSA), in logic, critical thinking, political rhetoric, and caselaw, is an argument in which a party asserts that a relatively small first step leads to a chain of related events culminating in some significant (usually negative) effect.

Small first step => significant negative effect

"centrally managed, and cryptographically-backed state identification cards, complete with RFID" => everything the parent commenter said, basically

A slippery slope argument is not fallacious if the slope is, in fact, slippery.

Additionally, “centrally managed, and cryptographically-backed state identification cards, complete with RFID” is not a “small first step”.

That’s a huge step that centralizes a great deal of power that can be readily leveraged through small subsequent steps.

Except it is. The slope is always slippery. Nobody can predict with 100% certainty what the future holds and if you believe otherwise, then I have a bridge to sell you.

Also, you clearly don’t understand what it means if you are nitpicking about the size of the first step. The whole point is that it builds up, and nobody can truly predict how it would shape up.

Trying to do so to fit a doom and gloom narrative is, once again, the literal definition. Just because you’d not like it doesn’t suddenly make it not so.

I’m not a Lawyer, but between the 4th, 5th and 14th amendments it seems pretty clear that it’s not a slippery slope, more like a craggily rocky one. Necessitating searchable papers to use the public commons is going to be a pretty difficult argument, between the protection against unreasonable search, guarantee of due process, necessity for search warrants and extention of these rights under state law, it seems pretty far fetched.

The opening of the 4th seems just about tailor made for this(because it was I believe?)

Emphasis mine, obviously.

> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

See, I totally agree that you shouldn't require identification for most services.

But, for things like banking, car registration, etc... we require strong ID'ing, and it behooves society to make it secure.

I still think municipalities should own their own data rather than have it stored at a central federal level, but we need municipalities to rely on something better than a serially-issued social insurance/security number which I have stored in a million databases that can pop at any second.

It's easy to dream of the future dystopia and ignore the one we live in now, where identity theft is trivial.

Worth calling out imo, in our current world you have recourse and an ability to "recover" from identity theft (to some extent). If the government controls your identity and revokes some piece, what can you do?

What stops them from doing that today? What stops a government from not renewing your driver's license or passport or not issuing a SIN/SSN or leaking your SIN/SSN?

How about just denying you federal services _after_ providing ID? How about putting you on a watch list?

Governments have been using IDs to deny services to oppressed peoples since IDs existed, but I think the options that leaves you with is to fight for a free and democratic government or not have IDs.

I don't disagree that there are ways the government can deny you service now, just mean wrt a non-government example like identity theft, you at least have some path forward.

> car registration, etc... we require strong ID'ing

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "strong"?

I've been involved in precisely three car purchases over the last 20 years, and I don't recall what was involved in the way of ID checks. Have the feeling that at most some government-issued ID may have been pulled out of a wallet, presented ... and glanced at. The dealer handled the registration in every case.

Oh, and in all three of those purchases we drove a (brand new) vehicle away from the dealer having paid not even a deposit and clutching a paper invoice(!) with the verbal instruction to pay it "straight away".

Guess we seemed trustworthy :)

I guess I should have phrased it as "we _should_ require strong ID'ing".

Absolutely agree that currently you can get away with faxed signatures, photocopies of IDs, and all manner of incredibly "weak" ID'ing.

> "we _should_ require strong ID'ing".

Why? I’d much rather live in a world where privacy is prioritized over making life easier for the police.

I don't think the government considers it much of an inconvenience to use violence to handle all of those things today.

Automatically issuing court summonses without first using chemical weapons and forced restraints is pretty good actually. If youre trying to make it so the government can't prosecute people for protests, you need to get rid of the idea of an illegal protest

The government can already torture, enslave, and kill you. If you can trust your government to handle those well, then this is no problem because they'll also handle ids responsibly.

If government can't handle those things well, the ids don't make for much of a change wrt to the government

The bigger disadvantages of a national id I think are that it moves ownership away from you, and to the card, like with block chain systems, the card is the owner, and you only have access to the card

> I don't think the government considers it much of an inconvenience to use violence to handle all of those things today.

Of course it does. It’s expensive, inefficient, and plays badly on TV.

How much easier would it be if every single person could be identified automatically from a drone and arrested out of public view?

How much more efficient if people suppressed themselves, and never attended a protest, out of fear of it being declared illegal and automatically receiving a summons (or worse, an arrest warrant)?

> The government can already torture, enslave, and kill you. If you can trust your government to handle those well …

I don’t trust them to handle those well. That’s why the legal system incorporates strong checks and balances, and even then is still ripe with corruption and abuse.

Why would I want to give them more powerful tools with far less oversight?

> If government can't handle those things well, the ids don't make for much of a change wrt to the government

That’s absurd; if you don’t trust a government, facilitating their abuse of citizens obviously has a material impact on the scale and scope of their actions.

Your argument, taken to its conclusion, would justify any privacy violation by the government.

This is a strawman, and plainly untrue. Many countries have mandatory id. I have personally lived in Argentina and Spain, both of them have it, for close to a century (89 years in Spain, 54 years in Argentina, but it replaced a pre-exisitng system). The Spanish DNI has RFID.

In neither place, nor any country with mandatory ID as far as I know, you get "no access to anything". The worst thing that can happen is that if the police choose to stop you, not carrying your ID can lead to you being taken to a police station temporarily. Which is not great, but not anywhere near close to what you are suggesting is inevitable. And police can detain you arbitrarily in places without state-mandated IDs, this is just a cute excuse that they can add to their repertoire.

If anything, I'm annoyed by having to have three IDs in my pocket (ID, drivers license, health insurance card) and still not being able to achieve much with them alone. There's usually some other document involved (proof of residence, birth certificate, something else).

Western Europe is one example where IDs have not been abused. But China is another example where they have been.

If you give your governments tools that can be used for oppression, even if they aren’t abused today, it would make it easier for a new authoritarian government to abuse them later on.

Spain was a dictatorship for much of the 20th century and Argentina had had multiple military dictatorships too — it could happen again. Europeans are far too confident that they have overcome the problems of the past by building the EU etc. A bit more American-style distrust of government would be a good thing.

Both of the examples I used had mandatory state IDs during their dictatorships. The IDs were not significantly instrumental to the government's power. I don't think the addition of RFID really would change that in the event of a new dictatorship.

But even if mandatory RFID IDs were a critical tool of authoritarian governments, what would prevent the dictator from issuing mandatory IDs after taking power?

First of all, during the Franco government the internet was an academic curiosity and nobody carried smartphones. That has all changed, and the tools the government has to monitor people are way beefier than they were back then. Facial recognition cameras, for example.

What prevents a dictator from issuing mandatory IDs? The resistance of the people. Yes, the government has police, and an army, and fighter jets, etc. But in the past few decades we have seen that insurgencies and popular resistance can succeed anyway -- the US got kicked out of Afghanistan and had a lot of trouble in Iraq, Ukraine is outfighting Russia despite massive disadvantages numerically and technologically, and even in China the government softened the zero-Covid program after mass protests. The people have more power than we think and can resist such things, if they want to.

All I'm saying is I don't see how the pre-existance of mandatory ID under a democratic government would be a significant boon for an eventual dictatorship. I understand that based on principle one might prefer not to have them, but to me they are really innocuous and extremely practical.

Unlike facial recognition cameras, which there's at least some political will to ban (https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-edges-closer-to-a-ban...).

>Ukraine is outfighting Russia despite massive disadvantages numerically and technologically

You are somewhat misinformed about the Ukrainian war. Ukraine has 3-4 times less population than Russia, but it started full mobilization early in the war. Meanwhile Russia started partial mobilization just recently. So it was common for the Ukranian army to have a numerical advantage on the ground. Most of the recent Russian retreats can be attributed to the lack of personnel to properly mount defensive positions.

As for technological advantage... It depends. Ukraine effectively has the whole NATO and a number of additional countries as its rear and supply base, while Russia depends only on itself and a bit on Iran. In terms of communication systems, intelligence, and likely anti-tank and anti-ship systems, the Ukrainian army is miles ahead of Russia. Russia has advantage in air, artillery, anti-air, and ground-to-ground rocket systems.

What's stopping a dictatorship from adding these things? It's very strange to assume a dictatorship would be so noble as to not add a tool for abuse, and you include the Chinese government as an example already.

Not adding it today does nothing to ensure a dictatorship cant use it in the future

> Not adding it today does nothing to ensure a dictatorship cant use it in the future

Yes it does, if the people have the will to fight. Insurgencies have been surprisingly successful against the most powerful militaries in the world in the past few decades. Even in China, the threat of mass protest forced the government to soften Covid restrictions -- and the protesters didn't even have guns, or any leverage at all except their willingness to put themselves in harm's way.

Every dictatorship that has ever existed started off with the consent of the people, at least at first. All of the dictators in history were swept into office on a wave of popularity, and the people only regretted it later on. It's just not possible to impose a dictatorship on a population that doesn't want it.

> A bit more American-style distrust of government would be a good thing.

Nope. The American distrust is resulting in a self-fulfilling prophecy of a failing government. Your bureacracy is years behind basic things we've had in many European countries, and because there's massive distrusts there's no investment making it impossible to improve.

E.g. your tax process is a massive joke, but will it ever be fixed? Probably not soon because if nothing else, one of the only two parties claims government is by default incompetent so any money spent on it are by definition a waste.

You seem to think that Americans want a European-style society and have failed to achieve it.

We don't want it. We don't want to "fix" our tax system -- we want low taxes and lots of deductions, and that is why we have them! We want cars. We want suburbs. We don't want the government to be our mommy. This is not a failure, it is an intentional feature of the American system.

Also just remember that if we built a competent bureaucracy that enforced a nationwide ID system, it might be handed over to Donald Trump if he wins the next election, and he really could win. Every power we give the government, assuming that the government will be good, will also be given to a bad government. Sometimes it's better to refuse to give that power at all.

> We don't want it. We don't want to "fix" our tax system -- we want low taxes and lots of deductions, and that is why we have them

You can have that without having to rely on third parties you pay for to get there. How exactly does a middleman help if the point is low taxes?

> We want cars. We want suburbs

Funnily that's in direction contradiction to your previous want. Suburbs and cars are much more expensive, therefore you have to pay more for them, either in taxes to pay for the useless infrastructure, or to pay for it directly.

> Also just remember that if we built a competent bureaucracy that enforced a nationwide ID system, it might be handed over to Donald Trump if he wins the next election, and he really could win

And how exactly would someone like Trump abuse an ID system?

> Funnily that's in direction contradiction to your previous want. Suburbs and cars are much more expensive, therefore you have to pay more for them, either in taxes to pay for the useless infrastructure, or to pay for it directly.

And yet we have the infrastructure. This is not a thought experiment. I am posting this comment from a house in the suburbs with high-quality roads and utility services, which we have managed to build despite our tax system.

So where is the contradiction? Clearly it's possible to live like this, because we do now, and we have done so for a very long time.

This doesn't sound very forward thinking to me. What might not currently be abused is, however, now in place to be abused in future.

I really don't see the problem with having an actual ID. We have universally mandated, centrally managed IDs in Colombia, and we have been using them for many decades now.

I find the idea of using social security ID or a driving licence as an ID very backwards.

I have a wallet that has RFID protection.

Public transportation uses a different card, payments also use a different card (a normal bank card, like you surely have), and I don't see why you think these payments will be forcibly linked to the ID card.

And don't get me started about laptops or smartphones. There's an application for smartphones that allows to have your ID digitally inside the app, and that's it. Your ID is not tied to any encryption or login.

So, you actually sound a bit unreasonable. I repeat: the use of social security numbers or driving licences is very awkward in my opinion. An actual ID has many advantages.

We have many of those things already, but using flaky inconsistent ID forms like drivers' licenses and social numbers.

It sucks that this seems to be the only way. Why can’t we support both. Given how QR codes are forcefully replacing menus with no paper fallback options seems to be the only way

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