Russia’s new law cracks down on citizens avoiding army service

Its not true that we are powerless against some too-powerful to stop state. Or that were at the mercy of some cabal at the top.

The answer, as always, isn't to reject the benefits of technology because were scared. It's to demand responsibility from the citizenry.

Napoleon started civil registries with birth/mariage/death and an obligatiry first and last name, to know how many subjects he had available to tax and send to war. Germany used paper tax records in the Netherlands to decide who was and was not a jew. No computers needed.

The USA is another interesting case. In theory, people have no required ID and there is no civil registry as understood in the rest of the first world. Yet there are drivers licenses and public but secret social security numbers as pseudo identity proofs. Taxes are paid, somehow. People provide proof of residency with utility bills (or is that a myth? I can't even tell). The USA WW2 draft was executed with an even more primitive system. Basically, people and gov do an elaborate, expensive, work intensive charade to keep the illusion of freedom from gov interference alive, while a fully computerized system of private companies provides parallell construction, resulting in less actual privacy overall.

I'm not going to claim everything is perfect outside the USA, but it surely isn't worse. I do claim 1) you don't need computers, paper is enough and 2) You are in enough computer databases anyway,supposing you live in the first or second world or otherwise reasonably modern country.