Comment by techsupporter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by techsupporter | Hacker News Reader

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> The US is an odd case where there is no central government ID or identification base layer.

As others have mentioned, the US Federal government issues passports and passport cards, yet it's entirely up to the agency that wants ID what IDs they will accept. I've been turned down for using a passport card for some Washington State government activities ("the card doesn't have a signature"), using a passport to buy an age-restricted item from a store ("we can't scan it"), and a passport card with the state's largest credit union ("too much fraud with passport cards").

Yet none of these are documented anywhere. Everyone just assumes you'll have a state-issued driver license and if you don't, well, you're obviously up to something nefarious. (Before anyone asks, I do have a state-issued enhanced identification card. It looks identical to a driver license, except it says "identification" on it. I've still been told "that's not a driver's license, I can't take that.")

I use a Federal ID when dealing with legal purviews of the Federal government, and a State ID when dealing with the legal purviews of State governments (which is most things). This is the only reliable scheme I've found. As a matter of Constitutionality, the States are largely required to recognize State IDs, but no one is required to recognize Federal IDs because there is no authority and as a practical matter many governments don't.

It doesn't help that some clerks are confused by the zoo of government issued IDs that exist in the US. IDs in the US are a mess, the legal barriers to making it possible to have an organized identity system are very high, and both the Democrats and Republicans are resistant to removing those legal barriers, so this situation is unlikely to change.

Real ID has more or less happened. States still issue IDs that don't meet those requirements, but at some point it's likely enough to actually become a requirement for using the ID to fly (instead of being delayed again).

The ID standardization parts mostly happened. The parts where the underlying State databases are shared with a central Federal government database did not.

There's a data sharing system, it isn't clear if it is entirely functionally equivalent to a centralized database, but it certainly goes in that direction if you compare it to not having a sharing system.

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