Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

We need a general solution to reestablishing authentication.

The hard-line solution would be that you go to a post office, airport, police station, motor vehicle office, passport office, or bank, they take your fingerprints, picture, and a retinal scan, you get a new ID card and token, and your old ones are invalidated.

The US just pushed the date for REAL ID enforcement further out, again. This time from spring 2023 to 2025.[1] REAL ID terrifies illegal aliens. Once everyone legal in the US has one, getting a job or traveling will be much harder.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/dhs-real-id-deadline-exte...

View on HN

It's already illegal to hire illegal aliens. Why will REAL ID change anything in that regard?

Employers who disregard the law now will continue to disregard the law.

> It's already illegal to hire illegal aliens. Why will REAL ID change anything in that regard?

It's hard to enforce that when there's no easy way to prove someone isn't in the country legally.

How does Real ID help prove that someone who doesn’t have one isn’t here legally?

I am here legally and renewed my license since my state offered Real ID. I still got the old “Not for Federal ID” license. If I show that to someone, does that somehow prove I’m not here legally?

If you represent an expired or otherwise invalidated license as legitimate proof of ID then that's fraud. I'm sure a sufficiently dedicated citizen can find a way to pretend to be here illegally, but as long as you're not going to mix up a reasonable law-abiding citizen with an illegal immigrant you can arrest them and sort it out afterwards.

I have literally no idea what you’re talking about.

My state offers RealID now. When I renewed last year, I received a valid, current, expires in 2026, drivers license that is not a Real ID/is Not for Federal ID. (I’m a citizen.)

Are you trying to say that Real ID makes it easier to prove someone is here legally? I agree with that.

P => Q does not mean that (not P) => (not Q) ∴ RealID doesn’t help prove someone is not here legally.

Businesses just ask for a social security number, and a random one is provided.

So they can plead ignorance.

No, they are supposed to ask for documentation, not just a number.

https://www.uscis.gov/i-9-central/form-i-9-acceptable-docume...

That's if you're hiring an immigrant as an immigrant, not as something who pretends to be a citizen.

No; the I-9 process is for everyone.

No that's incorrect. I-9 verification is for everyone including citizens. Basically you need to show proof that you are legally allowed to work in the US which also applies to citizens. Source: I am an employer.

My bad. I wish I could delete my comment now :(

I think I saw it's USCIS form and jumped to conclusion...

Enforcement is weak, and there's strong political pressure to keep it weak.

"You may NOT require your employees or potential employees to use Self Check or myE-Verify under any circumstances. Requiring applicants to provide proof of their employment authorization before they accept an offer of employment is known as “pre-screening” and it may constitute a violation of the anti-discrimination provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act. You may not require an employee, once hired, to use Self Check or myE-Verify. Use E-Verify to confirm a new employee’s work authorization."

[1] https://www.e-verify.gov/mye-verify/self-check/employers

It won’t stop cash transactions, but it will hinder inter-state movement as generally give police an extra reason to detain somebody.

It depends on state to state. In California, you can get non-REAL ID if you have at least one form of ID (i.e. passport from another country). Doesn't matter whether you're documented or not.

REAL ID looks different and essentially proves that you are not undocumented.

Visually, there used to be no difference between ID for undocumented and documented, so you can travel freely. My immigration lawyer recommended against traveling to AZ with that ID.

Not sure what it changes in terms of hiring. Even with REAL ID after background check, I had to submit proof that I'm allowed to work in this country.

Real ID is terrible, and I am a perfectly legal not alien nor criminal.

Tying commercial account unlocks to governments feels like a terrible idea.

Amazon uses Whole Foods for returns. Apple can push to all your devices for MFA. Imagine the impact on perception of google customer service if they deployed support kiosks to grocery stores.

Not meaning to hurt any feelings here, but are you aware that people in Sweden have been filing taxes, accessing medical records etc. online for years with the help of nation-wide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID ?

As for REAL ID, it just seems like a requirement for the plastic ID, which seems to be weaker than the old EU requirements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identity_cards_in_the...

Not meaning to hurt any feelings here, but have you ever tried explaining to someone in rural Texas that you really think that a Government issued ID with which your taxes and medical records can be easily tracked is a good idea?

Federalism in the US, a large section of the population that has no intent to travel outside the country, and general suspicion of the Government in a lot of states means that there is a patchwork of different IDs with different requirements, all of which are perfectly valid for their own jurisdiction. Real ID is just a way to set a basic standard for this kind of ID that will be required for (mostly interstate) air travel.

A better analogy for you might be a European ID. Get back to me when you can file taxes and access medical records anywhere in Europe using the same ID. (I half expect someone to pipe up saying that this is indeed possible and make me eat my words.)

Unfortunately for the Texan, this information is already being tracked. I imagine it’s easy for the government to do so.

It’s just harder for the Texan, and for every single other person in the country, to interact with the government. National ID would even save government resources! Imagine all the duplicated state processes and spending that could be eliminated! Imagine the various political arguments about voter ID that wouldn’t even matter if every single person was assigned an ID for free at birth.

That sounds like a one-way ticket to a police state.

Yea. To say nothing about the abuses possible if the US was in charge of the account unlocks for American citizens, picture for a moment if the Russian government was responsible for unlocks for Russian users of Google.

And then there’s the question of how the heck you scale this if you’re a new company and want to handle unlocks for global users.

It sounds like a one-way ticket to not being frustrated at the government and inadequate, duplicated, pointless state ID processes.

What checks and balances would be in place to prevent government from abusing control of national ID? How long do you think it would be before you were required to provide national ID before creating an account on the major social media outlets, accounts that they would ask the outlets to lock when they don't like the speech (as they literally just did with Twitter)? How long would it be before they used that ID to lock people out of their bank accounts, like they just did in Canada and regularly do in China? How long before you have to present that ID at checkpoints, and they use it to limit your travel, as they would have during the COVID lockdowns?

I don't want to live in a police state for the sake of "convenience", and that's exactly what people in power would do if you let them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com