Uganda's surveillance state is built on national ID cards
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Most European countries have them and they are as uncontroversial as passports.
Countries without national ID cards are not especially more privacy minded : for the purpose of identity verification they just use alternative documents & processes that are less straightforward and at least as intrusive (e.g. driving licenses, utility bills and credit checks in the US and UK).
IMO it's much more honest to recognize that there's a legitimate need to be able to prove one's identity in a functioning society, and to build a dedicated system for that, instead of tying your existence as a citizen to your ability / willingness to drive a large piece of metal around.
The core problem is digitization. Once you have people's activity in digital form, it only takes a couple of dozen bits to super uniquely identify every person in the country. ID cards just formalize that.
Just as much as it's a pain to deal with any other database without primary keys.
My mother is an actress and holds bank accounts (and gets paid) in her full name, her acting name and in her maiden name - I don't think the NI knows about these names any more than they know that she's paying tax to that NI number. Employers don't care as long as you provide an NI - there is not check to make sure it is the 'right name'.
They write to her at her 'full name' but she's able to live (entirely legally) as her other names too.
Database is just the cache of current state of things for convenience, but all the events that contributed into reaching this final state are also recorded somewhere multiple times and those pieces of trail capture a lot of duplicate information regarding the previous state of system.
Government itself (as big G) doesn't tamper with data really. There is no point to tamper with data if you can control the rules to reach the final state and can legitimately feed events into it. Individual employees do tamper with data all the time and eventually get caught if somebody else cares enough to point it out and dig enough papertrail to make a point.
Our licenses now need a federal registration for us to board a plane. I think states have dropped issuing the ones that don’t.
The NSA probably has everyone’s cell number, text messages, and metadata (including location) stored.
With tech being what it is these days anonymity doesn’t exist.
Other things like transportation, certain types of employment and participation in government, I can see why a national id would be required for those.
Does the government (any government) have the authority to require identity proof from a person, simply because that person exists?
Natural/inalienable rights are a fiction. No one has any rights unless someone with guns is willing to enforce those rights. And hopefully the people with guns have some checks and balances on them such that they can't use their guns to violate those rights themselves.
I think it's great that we have (some) governments that have some list of human rights enumerated in their laws and founding documents. But even then, rights are protected unevenly.
> Does the government (any government) have the authority to require identity proof from a person, simply because that person exists?
That depends on what you mean by "authority". If you're talking about moral authority, then I'd probably agree with you that no, they don't. But in the end the authority that matters in reality is the kind you get by wielding a gun; under that definition, governments have all the authority they need to do stuff like that.
In any case, I absolutely agree with the parent that rights don't just exist as some platonic ideal, but rather need to be enforced in an organized manner, and I haven't seen any case yet of that being achieved without a representative government.
Right? Be in the state of nature. Argue with that lion you have a right to not be eaten. I don't think she will listen.
But still, what I was alluding to was that while governments can alienate rights by force, them doing so is exceeding their authority and resisting their rule is not rebellion in that context. Even if the people voted to alienate such basic rights, the government still does not have legitimate authority. My goal was to take away legitimacy from such governments and their rule.
I stated this in a sibling comment as well but this is the reason by which american revolution (July 4th coming up!) was justified. The english rule under king george used force to restrict and regulate inalienable rights and thus lost it's legitimacy. Without legitimacy, it was possible to organize resistance and revolt against such rule.
For someone to have a positive right to shelter, for instance, you have to take shelter from someone (or, as we typically do, money from someone to pay for it). Taxation is the one way we’ve managed to get people to at least someone accept positive rights here, but if you ask anyone under 30 who is a Republican why they are, they’ll almost always cite positive rights like welfare. It’s so uncomfortable feeling to us that it becomes the basis of our political philosophy frequently.
It’s never felt comfortable to me to call things like that a right. Public health care is the only sane option, IMO, and we should do it, but calling it a “right“ always feels wrong to me and I think most Americans agree because we’re so strongly in the negative rights camp.
The lack of positive rights infringes on a society’s own fabric, however. The right to a lawyer or legal counsel is a positive right born from the ideal of fairness under the law; I’m not sure framing the American (conservative?) character as so staunchly against positive rights is correct. Police protection is very popular with the right, and that necessarily involves the labour of others.
Society ensuring some minimum standard of health so that one may properly navigate life (and enjoy the rest of their rights) is framed as a right as health is a general precursor to everything else: it’s not that odd a framing, no? “You have the right to vote, but not to live long enough to get to the polls” is the outcome of categorizing essential societal functions as somehow out of scope of what society should do. I think the average Republican gets that, though a lower tax bill is always the priority.
"Rights to healthcare" ultimately means "rights to enslave healthcare workers". If healthcare workers refuse to serve you, you have no healthcare unless you force them to serve you which makes them your slave.
Positive rights always end up in some form of forced labor aka slavery.
The lawyer question is different. The government is given the right to enforce laws, but the responsibility to provide legal council to counterweight the force of government. Lawyers aren't compelled to be public defenders, but if no public defender were available/willing, the government would not be allowed to imprison and try someone, so it is a negative right.
The practice of healthcare already comes with the understanding that all who seek treatment (resources permitting) will be treated, and the interrelationship between patient, hospital, doctor, and the duty to care is foundational to the right to healthcare. It is however not the point. EMTALA in the US could be further reading if you’re interested in how refusal of care works in practice re: funding.
As per law, in the hypothetical where no lawyer could be found to take the case and no public defendant compelled to, the situation merely continues with rights violation, instead with a delayed trial or excess imprisonment. Like all rights in general, the loss of one weighs on the rest as if a ball on a net.
This is a negative right: the state cannot prosecute you without a lawyer on your side.
> Police protection is very popular with the right, and that necessarily involves the labour of others.
Police protection is not a right. The police will come and investigate and follow up, maybe, but you can't assume they'll protect you. They might be far away and unable to do so.
You are correct that police and attorneys for the indigent are a couple positive rights. I didn’t mean we don’t have any. We just don’t have a culture of them.
But man, good luck. It’s really hard to economically participate in modern society without it. Most of our country is really hard to get around in without a car. Your job opportunities are really limited without a social security number. Etc.
Whether right or wrong, we functionally have national ID and my point really was that lack of something specifically called that isn’t going to save us from the barbarians at the gate.
No it is not. All rights are created by the state and enforced by it.
The rebellion against english rule was justified because the state exceeded it's authority to regulate rights by restricting inalienable rights.
Some have. Oregon, as a single example, will let you opt for a non-Real ID card.
Data exchange between DMVs or for other non-law enforcement purposes is coordinated through AAMVA. You can see what states exchange data here: (https://www.aamva.org/it-systems-participation-map). There are loopholes that people exploit - for example NJ registered trucks won't be subject to registration action in NY... so you can accumulate lots of tickets in NYC with no consequence.
Some Canadian provinces exchange data between individual states as well.
A system called Nlets connects every jurisdiction for law enforcement purposes.
Not every REAL ID holder is a citizen & thus eligible to vote. Real ID needs only proof of legal status (citizen, permanent resident, tourist, work permit, study vis etc) and address.
A US citizen requires proof of SSN, either a social security card or W2. This is a heavy burden for many people.
That is incorrect. For example, see California's REAL ID checklist[0]. I got my REAL ID in CA by presenting my birth certificate and two forms of address verification.
It's possible that some states require proof of SSN, but that does not appear to be an absolute requirement for the feds to sign off on the state's process.
[0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-licenses-identification...
This is not a corner case (SSN required, not card). I would say its more like 90%. Since 2021 nobody needs proof of SSN, they just need the SSN number itself.
To quote CA DMV website:
> Applying for a REAL ID requires proof of identity, proof of California residency, and a trip to DMV. You will be asked to provide your Social Security number on your REAL ID application (exceptions may apply).
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-licenses-identification....
The only thing on that list that takes any effort to get is the birth certificate. And everyone really ought to keep a copy of their own anyway. Even before RealID we used birth certificates for ID at the DMV, so it is not a new requirement (for Oregon at least).
(I'm not an US citizen, but even I have SSN).
(Regardless, the GP is incorrect; proof of SSN is not a REAL ID requirement, at least not in every state. If a state requires proof of SSN, they're going above and beyond what the feds require.)
If I lose every single ID and show up at my birth town city hall with my full name and birth date, I am certain they will be able to identify me and produce a valid document via cross checks.
Why is it so hard for Americans to have an ID?
The issue is that it’s a rare issue where left and right wing extremists agree that they don’t like ID. Also, vital records are decentralized - 12,000 entities issue birth certificates with varying standards of competence. States like New York have centralized, well maintained registries. Other places adopt a hold my beer approach.
On the right:
Religious fanatics think it’s the mark of the beast. Anti-tax types worry that it will make it harder to evade taxes through shell companies and other entities. Libertarians think it’s a gateway for more intrusive regulation and loss of freedom.
On the left:
Advocates believe that the administrative burden and difficulty of getting documentation will marginalize the elderly, poor, children with complex family dynamics and the homeless. Voting rights advocates are worried about voter id laws and regulations that disenfranchise voters who are transient, have difficulty getting or maintaining the ID, etc.
Things that are trivial for middle class folks are often very challenging for people outside of that norm. Think about how difficult it would be to exist as a traveller in NYC without a smartphone. One of the great challenges of government service delivery is to move the needle without marginalizing thousands of people.
Some states, like California, electronically validate. Other states, for example Alabama, do paper verification which involves collecting identity proofs and either a social security card or a W2.
Bruh. If you don't have a social security number, you can't even work legally. Also, 99% of people born in the US[0] get them at birth.
What are you talking about?
[0] I on the other hand, didn't get one until I was about 8 years old, because my parents wanted to hide me from the draft, but that's now the draft works, and you need a social security number for all sorts of stuff now, like tax deductions.
You need a number to work. You need the card for real id. Replacement of a lost card is onerous. For a minor, incredibly onerous - you need a healthcare provider to sign a statement identifying the minor. (Good luck with that)
Huh?
All you need for a child of yours under 12 is:
1. Birth certificate for child
2. Proof that you are a parent (usually #1 plus a government issued ID covers this; an adoption order may be needed if you aren't on the birth certificate)
3. Proof that the child was alive recently. Either medical or school records will cover this; it needs to have parent and child's name on it.
If the child over 12, you need the above, plus the child must present themselves at an office, preferrably with a photo ID (it need not be government issued; e.g. a school ID is fine). If your child doesn't have a photo ID, the individual officer may be a bit persnickety in this case, so having both medical and school records are good, though may not be required.
As an aside, if the child has a passport (possibly even a recently expired one) you're basically good to go, since it establishes both identity and citizenship.
I’ve driven a car with USA license plates through tolls in Canada and gotten a bill at home.
Also, passports have existed forever.
"While the United Nations held a travel conference in 1963, no passport guidelines resulted from it. Passport standardization came about in 1980, under the auspices of the ICAO.
ICAO standards include those for machine-readable passports.
Such passports have an area where some of the information otherwise written in textual form is written as strings of alphanumeric characters, printed in a manner suitable for optical character recognition.
This enables border controllers and other law enforcement agents to process these passports more quickly, without having to input the information manually into a computer."
The UK abolished family passports in 1998, so since then it has been impossible for a person to add their spouse or minor child to their British passport, your spouse/child needs a British passport of their own-even a newborn baby
Whereas, our other nationality, Australian (I, my mother and my siblings are all dual Australia/UK citizens), I’m not sure if it ever had family passports, but if it did, it must have abolished them significantly before the UK did
A lot of states still issue the non-federal ones. They are much cheaper and easier to obtain (at least where I live).
Australia tried to introduce a national ID card in the 1980s but the concerns over privacy made the idea so politically unpalatable that the government had to kill it
But in practice, for most Australian adults, your drivers license de facto functions as a national ID card. And with modern computer databases, data matching, identity verification APIs (which governments make available to trusted private businesses such as financial institutions) - the privacy benefits of dividing your identity across multiple purpose-specific ID cards vs a single generic one are arguably more theoretical than real.
Plus, Australia is far from being a poster child for privacy, especially as far as privacy intrusions by the government go. (It arguably does somewhat better for those done by the private sector - the AU government’s messaging to corporations who wish to invade its citizen’s privacy is very much we can, you can’t)
I can't speak for other members of the Commonwealth but I'm sure there will be similar stories.
As you say we all have a de-facto ID cards via driving licenses and/or passports. On the bright side, I don't fear for my life describing this state of affairs ... yet 8)
"Identity-less" societies are the same. You don't actually guarantee privacy, you just shunt the need to prove identity onto systems that are less suitable for the task (like driver's licenses and Social Security numbers), with less transparency and portability as a result. So where, exactly, is the utility in the collective lie?
This is true for a lot of things the US allegedly "doesn't have", including domestic surveillance.
To ACTUALLY not have a social credit score system in the US, you MUST make even attempting to collect the necessary data so legally radioactive that most businesses are afraid to ask for birth dates, and keep voting out any politician that doesn't push for aggressive enforcement
It's just so stupid to trust governments. They won't be the same government in a couple years, in most places in the world. (Gods fear those who do remain static & fixed!) The temptation to legislate, to start saving the children or hunting terrorists by becoming a police state is a temptation that should never ever be technologically open.
A decade before my grandfather was born the area of my country was part of the Russian empire.
He was born into a democratic republic that turned into an autocracy while he was a child.
When he became a teenager the country was occupied by the Soviet Union, then the nazis, then the Soviet Union again. That last one lasted for 50 years during which he was sent to a gulag camp.
Then the Soviet Union collapsed and the country became a democratic republic again.
And now war seems to be on the horizon and the country might end up as part of a new Russian empire again. Probably won't, but the possibility exists.
Modern democracies are young. The US is the odd one by being so old without changing the form of its government.
Edit: the country also joined the EU, which took some sovereignty away, but I think this is a minor thing.
I do view technology as a double edged sword for the freedom of the people.
I strongly disagree, given that you're also talking about a system which will be difficult to reform at best. At worst, it will require bloodshed (God forbid, but it does happen often enough throughout history). A system that will be that difficult to fix is one that you absolutely cannot afford to trust with more than the bare minimum of power.
Even in the US it’s not. I don’t know of a state where you can’t get a state identification card that has nothing to do with being licensed to operate a motor vehicle.
Of course in a car-centric society as the US you could argue how optional that is :)
> Countries without national ID cards are not especially more privacy minded
Two interesting things here: They are uncontroversial because people are so used to them and, yes, the UK is much more privacy minded than, e.g., France in that regards.
In France everyone is used to carry their ID card with them (ID cards include the person's address and finger print is taken when ID card is used to anyone older than 13). Police have the right to ask for proof of ID without cause, and failure give them the right to detain the person until ID can be assertained (which means being driven to the police station). The history od ID cards in France is indeed one of state surveillance and control, and, tellingly ID cards became mandatory under the Vichy government in 1940 and although they have no longer been so in law since 1955, they de facto still are in daily life.
In the UK people are free to go about their lives with no ID and the police have no right to stop and ask someone to identify themselves (or any other questions) without cause. There is a big resistance against creating ID cards.
I read other comments that in the UK driving licences are de facto ID cards but I think this misses the point above. Of course they are situations in daily life when one needs to prove their ID (banks, etc). But the point is protection against the state/authorities and against being forced to identify yourself for no imperative reason.
That's because the surveillance creeps in sideways. I believe it was Lee Kuan Yew who once stated that a 'vertical' strong government where duties between citizens and the state are explicit and clearly defined is much more rights preserving than a weak, 'horizontal' government, where you don't have to show your id but then the police goes and buys all your private information from the gray market private sector a la ClearView AI and sends it two the fifteen three letter agencies. It's no accident that the US, UK, AUS etc. are some of the leaders in this gray zone, intelligence, mission creep.
The UK census and most NHS health records include ethnicity and religion data. In France it's forbidden by law for any entity to collect this information.
Any idiot in the UK (including direct marketing firms) can purchase the electoral register which has a wealth of personal data. You can opt out of one version, but not from the one that political parties, election officials or private credit agencies (!) have full unfettered access to.
Credit agencies, by the way, don't exist at all in France.
I think this qualifies the UK as "not especially more privacy minded", for at least some definitions of privacy.
The ban on ethnic/racial data in France is a byproduct of the idealistic French republican view that the only thing that matters is whether people are citizens or foreigners and that citizens are all identical. This is not about "privacy".
But, pragmatically for a census, the British questions make much more sense and give a better snapshot of the country. In fact, in general the UK is more pragmatic than France and that has worked for the better historically.
In the UK the electoral register is a public record for good reasons (who can vote should be transparent), and as such it is available to anyone.
Credit agencies are a pragmatic (again) and private (emphasised) tool to protect against credit risk (I believe the GDPR express this as "legitimate interest"). The UK is much more trade and business oriented than France. Again that has worked rather well for them historically.
None of that counters my point about protection from the state.
In fact this is historically a very key difference between the UK and France: the power of the state/king was limited early in England (Magna Carta and all that) while France has had an absolutist streak (Louis XIV, French Revolution, Voltaire in exile in England, even Napoleon). To this day the role and power of the state is much stronger in France than in the UK.
I find this is a contradiction of French culture: on the one hand this disobedient and 'revolutionary' streak but, on the other hand a very strong state with people tending to call on the state for help about everything and anything. Or maybe these are the two sides of the same coin.
Anyone who has watch police auditors in the uk knows how true that "no right to stop" actually is. They'll invoke Section 43 in 5 minutes top and detain you. They'll find something suspicious and detain you; they'll lie and forget to mention you don't have to id yourself.
Only people that haven't interacted with the police think that because there are no explicit laws requiring ID then the police can't actually ID them. Especially in the authoritarian UK.
You can present your out-of-state id, birth certificate, license plates and have them accepted anywhere. Universal != centralized, we build systems like this every day -- DNS, TLS, GPG, hell UUIDs.
It's very weird IMHO. It just creates a lot of headache for the illusion of it, yet I like the attitude. The attitude is important because it defines the expectations from the government.
Another country where I have living experience is Turkey and Turkey has kick-ass ID system and consolidated online government services. Although its very convenient, it makes you feel like living in a boarding school. You can't do anything without providing your national ID number. Kid you not, they are implementing centralised package tracking system, the companies doing deliveries are required to report every package so the government knows who send stuff to whom at any given time. It's crazy, you feel watched all the time but its alright because the society is already collectivistic and the Turkish attitude expect that kind of control.
Bulgaria on the other hand, another country where I have living experience, does have ID system and used to employ national identity number since the communists days feels as free or even more free than UK. In Bulgaria, the government actually doesn't know where you are or what are you up to. When you have some governmental stuff to do you show up with your national ID card.
We kept ID cards after the end of WW2 for a period, until some time in the 50s. They were finally scrapped when a car driver rejected a police demand to see his ID card, and the court case backed him. Parliament got rid of them some time later.
Ever since successive governments (of all flavours) have wanted to bring them back, it seems there is an institutional desire for them amongst the mandarins of the civil service.
Finally the prior Labour government brought them back in 2006, but the subsequent 2010 coalition government scrapped them. Every party bar Labour had promised to scrap them in their manifestos.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006
So I'd not be surprised if our current GE led to another Labour government, and they brought the ID cards back.
At the time, and currently for some (i.e. me) a driving licence was a different document, without a photo. One which one is not obliged to carry while driving.
What kind of abuse do you expect?
I would be genuinely surprised if this was not true of every current day "western" society.
United Stated Postal Service takes, stores, OCRs & shares with law enforcement photos of the cover of every letter you receive.
If we know for a fact that phone call and internet metadata is routinely stored, I have no reason to expect mail or packages to be any different. (All the protections in that space tend to be for the contents not the metadata.)
Telecommunication secret is part of the german constitution
this is a quote from a decision of the german federal constitutional court (the german supreme court)
Dieses Grundrecht schützt nicht nur die Kommunikationsinhalte, sondern auch Informationen über Ort, Zeit sowie Art und Weise der Kommunikation. Insbesondere erstreckt sich der Grundrechtsschutz auf Telekommunikations-Verkehrsdaten, die Aufschluss über die an der Kommunikation beteiligten Personen und die Umstände der Kommunikation geben
this basic right not only protects the contents of communications but also information about place, time and form of the communication. especially it includes transport data (metadata) which can reveal the circumstances and the people involved in the communication.
When the bad government tries to do the bad things it will use the tools it has to hand.
If there is a national ID card system that is required for daily life then it is much easier for the baddies to take control of the population.
You can see this in WW2 when the Nazis took control. The Netherlands was twice as effective at killing Jews than France. This is because the Netherlands had good record keeping and already knew who the Jewish people were.
Hundreds of thousands of French Jews survived because France did not have a pre-existing population tracking system. The Nazis had to build one from scratch and that took time, giving French Jews time to run and hide.
This is why a friend of mine refused to tell our local supermarket that she wants kosher food.
When I lived in the UK, I found the lack of ID cards liberating, especially associated with the lack of mandatory reporting to the central government of your every address.
I now live in Sweden and the degree of centralisation and digitisation is scary. The current and foreseeable governments are wonderful by Western standards, but isn't it inevitable that darker times will come at some point?
As a result the modern ID card system and citizen registration is decentralized by design. When you move between two Bundeslände (states), your records are digitally transferred. They may not under any circumstances exist in two. They get held in a kind of digital holding state during the transfer.
Post-Nazi Germany is one of the most privacy conscious nations I’ve ever seen. Germans still largely insist of the privacy on cold hard cash. Credit card uptake is still vastly lower than neighboring countries. Privacy laws are stringent and well defined. Usage of dashcams and ring cameras are challenging to keep legal.
I trust the German state more with an ID card system than I would the UK for example. British citizens have long given up their rights meekly to be spied on by their government and the UK government has a poor record of safely delivering well designed large IT projects.
Fun fact. When the war in the East started, first thing russians did in certain places was to go to the district tax office, get the to the decentralized paper storage and ransom every person who can reasonably have about 30K USD to not sit in the torture basement, including some random IT shmuks reading this forum.
Then the same people had a huge pain in the ass to prove their identity to other part of split-brained system, since all the primary documents are stored in a province that government can't physically access and trust their word.
Not surprising -- do you know of any sources to read up on about this?
This doesn’t sound like much of a protection to me. The rouge central government could just seize the records from the states, then do bad things.
Good thing that the AFD only gets about 20% of the vote. (The AFD is considered too problematic by most European fascists. Many prominent members of the AFD want to deport a million people from Germany and are openly sympathetic to actual Nazis)
Btw, ID's was mandatory first time by Hitler during WWII.
Note that through this mechanism, the society is still a control society [2], even though citizen themselves have more to say in that control.
I'm absolutely blown away by how clear and functional these services are and how seamless and user friendly the whole thing is.
I just signed up for blood transfusions should I ever need them in Estonia and that process involved using my smart card to sign the consent agreement and can see which department and when accessed this information.
Meanwhile the province I'm from is still handing out paper healthcare cards in 2024.
I think it's dangerously naive to assume a nation with as capable a surveillance state as the US to be physically unable to tie together everything about you just because there's no national ID.
- There are many less people (probably 2-3 orders of magnitude) accessing the data at all at Google, and (probably?) most sensitive data isn't accessible at all
- As you can't choose to avoid the government, the standard of trust should be much higher
- I don't know how well it works at Google. The reports of videogame leaks through employees accessing accessing unreleased Videos and the (for now) inability from Google to solve this problem at least indicates to me that the approach has issues.
- There are many more valid reasons for a government employee to access the data, so it's harder do differentiate. You also have the issues of police dempartments (and similar), where an access might not be allowed but done as unoffical policy "for the greater good"
- I would think that Google is much more capable of implementing and managing such a system than goverment suppliers or agencies, unfortunately
but if you can't trust the government, the friction is necessary.
> unable to tie together everything about you just because there's no national ID.
SSN anyone?
If I were a hypothetical evil US government and there wasn't an SSN, I'd just create a database with an INTEGER PRIMARY KEY, compel Visa, MasterCard and American Express to send me 6 months of transaction history under a national security letter, correlate and quantize them all and presto, a few hours later, indexing complete.
It doesn't even have to be 95% accurate, although with some otherwise-anonymous looking demographics data you can get several nines of uniqueness. [1]
[1] https://dataprivacylab.org/projects/identifiability/paper1.p...
If you think it's a `Float in range [0..100]` it makes a lot less sense.
How do you propose doing this without a centralised (or public) place that tracks your relationships?
If the answer is local, you'd expect to be inundated with cases within a few years of people who couldn't revoke a permission because they lost their phone or whatnot.
The idea is to take identity upside down: you issue your own identity (think key pair), and an authority certifies it (aka. signature). That's why it's called sovereign.
Adding zero knowledge proofs adds support for more privacy preserving tech: prove your address is in a specific country, without giving your address, or prove your age without giving your birthdate.
Although it could all be implemented today, governments don't... because they love centralisation for the power it gives them. European institutions are working on Sovereign Identity projects, but it's mostly 100% centralised bullshit from what I know.
As with all things cryptographic, if you don't own the keys, you own nothing.
And so when someone on the street steals your wallet or your house burns down, you no longer own anything. Brilliant!
Brilliant indeed
Ownership is a social construct and socially enforced, pretending otherwise isn't particularly effective.
The last few years must have at least taught us that much.
ID cards only facilitate a surveillance state, when they are monitored for every purpose... mobile phones and payment cards (even loyalty cards) already provide that.
UK taxes are based upon a (National Insurance) number, or at least contributions are, which is explicitly stated as 'not' being an identifier, and often has the same number used by multiple people.
There seem to be many ways that identity is handled that create massive technical debt, but very few that actually try to do it correctly for the actual benefit of citizens.
ID cards also do not collect data like everything people give up willingly every day.
The ability to transact without friction creates a lot more value than the perceived protection of entities that pretend to care about your privacy, but have no real incentive to actually do so.
The ACLU claims to be trying to fight it but AFAICT they aren't actually doing anything
https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/national-id/r...
I was going to sign up for one but then they wanted so much stupid info. It was ridiculous. I can get a passport with less info than a REAL ID. They wanted billing statements and they wanted to know a "permanent address". None of my addresses are "permanent".
The US seems to have one of the most vulnerable systems when it comes to identity theft, between SSNs being used as bearer tokens and utility bills being used as proof of residency.
National ID cards can be done in very concerning, but also very privacy-preserving ways. For example, the German ID card has an e-ID function that lets you assert minimal statements about yourself (e.g. you can provably assert "I'm over 18 years old and live in Berlin", without sharing your exact date of birth or name with the requesting party).
Something like that seems desperately needed in the US. Security questions (largely sourced from data in the public record) and taking a photo of your driver's license isn't going to cut it much longer, in a world of daily database breaches and plausible deepfakes.
Furthermore, the current identification systems are already being abused by surveillance companies as corroborating keys to facilitate their creation and storage of permanent dossiers on us. Until that is fixed (eg a US port of the GDPR that applies to every industry), I have absolutely no desire that the technical strength of identification be increased. People's hesitation at giving out their identifying info is basically the only thing holding back every single medium or large business from demanding even more of it.
This hasn't stopped a lot of negligent businesses from performing a fake authentication process that skips actually verifying the physical document and having people enter various fields from the ID card for some kind of dog and pony show, but the point remains there is still nothing to revoke.
The absence of such digital authentication methods is also a big problem in the way photo IDs are commonly used in the US ("take a photo of it, or maybe a video and wiggle it around a bit").
But it seems orthogonal to revocation, which would help when presenting a lost/stolen ID physically, e.g. to open a bank account or apply for credit card. (Not that that seems to be the most common way identity fraud is actually done these days in the US, so the lack of digital authentication seems to be the worse problem here.)
Other than taking the physical document, what is there to revoke? The state unilaterally declares Bob Smith's name is no longer Bob Smith? The state declares that one of Bob Smith's names is no longer #12345678?
I think your point is that physical IDs could be augmented with an online digital revocation method - every issued ID could have a serial number, for which there could be an online database to look up whether that specific issued credential has been reported lost or stolen. But that seems like just another give away to banks (etc) of one more talking point to hassle their own victims with - "When we were defrauded by someone presenting your ID, you had not yet reported it stolen, which [somehow] means that you are responsible for covering our losses". Never mind the Kafkaesque situation of someone being suddenly told that the document they're carrying is no longer valid due to some unknown-to-them happenings (this is already bad enough with things like car registrations).
Really, the biggest problem with identity-based fraud continues to be aligning the incentives, such that the negligent institutions that get defrauded can no longer externalize the damage they caused onto everyone else. The extreme hassle of us having to clean up the banks' messes is the only reason this is a subject of popular concern.
The state revoking the statement "license #12345678 is a valid credential for Bob Smith".
> I think your point is that physical IDs could be augmented with an online digital revocation method - every issued ID could have a serial number, for which there could be an online database to look up whether that specific issued credential has been reported lost or stolen.
Yes, that's exactly what some ID-issuing entities already do! That's why e.g. US Department of State strongly advises against traveling with a passport previously reported lost or stolen [1].
I don't think this is commonly available to non-governmental ID-validating entities such as banks in the US, but it arguably ought to be.
You raise a very good point on banks potentially attempting to shift liability to customers for any resulting fraud – that's something that would have to be legally clarified before such a system is made available widely.
That, and the fact that banks would still not want to miss out on the significant volume of online account openings, which would actually require a digitally-verifiable credential (the "photo of ID" pattern is truly absurd), are probably the primary reasons for why this does not exist yet in the US (with a healthy dose of historical distrust in government institutions and some immigration-related state vs. federal disputes sprinkled on top).
[1] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
"#12345678" as I used it was the "driver's license number". This isn't a serial number for the issued credential, but rather a numeric name for the given person. Adding a serial number for each issued credential such that there can be an online revocation protocol might make sense, but it's not what we have now.
Banks, and especially online banks, are definitely optimizing for account opening convenience rather than caring about fraud. They could most certainly require a notarized form to open an account (which requires verifying an ID in person), they'd just rather not because it would interrupt some new customers signing up. Which is why I say the main regulatory reform we need starts with making them fully cover the damage they've opted for. If they continue to make the same tradeoff that's fine - as long as they stop harming the public with the backscatter.
Also as I said in my original comment, we need a privacy law like the GDPR before it makes sense to support any smoother systems of authentication. The existing identification systems are already being abused so routinely and thoroughly by the surveillance industry, so this isn't an abstract concern. As things currently stand there are virtually no regulations on creating surveillance dossiers, so the more friction keeping businesses away from frivolously asking for ID (and then backhauling your activity), the better.
There's also a barcode on the back that looks high-entropy enough that it could at least contain a URL, and maybe even a digitally signed statement by the issuing authority.
Between these two things alone, it should be possible for an issuing authority to publish a document number revocation list that verifiers can query in a privacy-preserving way (i.e. without the issuer learning who's checking somebody's license when)
> the more friction keeping businesses away from frivolously asking for ID (and then backhauling your activity), the better.
Is it, though? Banks and even random places like Airbnbs still regularly ask me for a photo of my driver's license for all kinds of purposes, so arguably this is the worst of both worlds: Pervasive data collection without actual security against fraud.
How would this be any worse if the ID verification was at least more secure, if not hopefully also more private (which is more likely with a digital signature than with a photo of a license in any case; how would you anonymize the photo of something inherently identifying)?
The point is that an SSN/name pair is not a mechanism of authentication. Many companies are negligently using it in place of one because they don't actually care about fraud, having pushed most of the damage onto the public. Then they invented the nonsensical concept of "identity theft" to enshrine how they wish things worked, as a further fuck you to the public. So no, further entrenching anything about that broken approach is a horrible idea. Revoking a social security number makes as much sense as revoking someone's natural name.
We need a national ID without a national registry. The simplest (from a legal perspective) might be a national clearinghouse that polls states' registries.
I'd say a big difference would be some system where there is no central registry at all vs. a system where one does exist. But a pseudo-central vs. central system hardly seems like a different solution.
Perhaps one benefit of a segmented or partitioned system is that it can be 'disconnected', but that would also mean that if you need to interact with anything non-local that is now also not possible. And the other way around it would do the same thing (i.e. "depeering" a partition) where you wouldn't be able to verify any identity within that partition.
The difference between centralisation and decentralisation. States can fight back against the federal government's requests in a way that is simply not feasible for almost any person.
> a pseudo-central vs. central system hardly seems like a different solution
Under this model, the e.g. TSA wouldn't be allowed to keep a copy of your ID. It would have to poll for it anew each time.
Looping back to the above: the TSA making this promise to us is almost meaningless. The TSA making this promise to the states could create real problems for it if it were found to be breaking the law.
> that would also mean that if you need to interact with anything non-local that is now also not possible
Correct.
I don't understand this idea. Usually there is more variance in the behavior of lower-level governments, while higher-level governments will be closer to the mean. If there is a real risk that the federal government will abuse its power in a certain way, many state governments must already be abusing their powers that way. And the same also holds between state governments and local governments.
The smaller the administrated population, the more likely the government is either really great or really bad. But because the government can more easily do harm than good, lower-level governments are worse on the average.
It can be argued that while the average state/local government is worse than the federal government, your government is special. But that is only plausible if there are persistent cultural differences between your area and the rest of the country. And I don't mean differences in political opinion but in things like corruption and respect to the rule of law. That could happen if there is little immigration from other areas to your area, or if immigrants must live there for a long time and prove that they fit in before they gain full rights.
Which is why the sanest level of government is usually the one corresponding to citizenship.
The point is in shattering that power. If it's all at the federal level, there is nobody who can realistically check its mis-use. While at the state level, mis-use will be (a) contained and (b) checkable.
For better or for worse, Americans have a strong distrust of government in our civic DNA - the more centralized, the more distrust. The very design of our country's government is intended to distribute power as much as feasible, while doing only the bare minimum of activities at a national level. This design has been eroded over time (the 20th century in particular did a huge number on it), but many Americans still hold that vision dear. Thus, any proposal of "let's do a centralized X" is automatically controversial in the US in a way which it simply would never be in many other countries.
> Pretty every other developed country has one.
This sort of argument is not a good reason for anyone to do anything, but it's especially not a good reason for countries to base their national policies on.
That's where you see states that ban abortion and force religious views into education for instance, to take one extreme, and they sure don't want a ruling entity to tell them they can't do so. Same applies to any subject, including identifying people (I'm pretty sure there's a sizeable number of people who don't want any official ID at all, even limited to their town, under no circumstance)
Basically, where some countries/federations will strive for unity and common values, the US keeps an idea of letting extremes run around in their own pockets of land and sometimes sit in the country's driver seat.
That's close but not quite right. The idea is that by solving matters as locally as possible, it lets people with strongly held opinions on the government coexist more easily. One person thinks abortion is a fundamental right everyone should have, another thinks it's tantamount to murder and a moral abomination. Neither is budging, so instead of having half the country at each others' throats as they try to force their views on everyone, it can be better to let them solve these issues locally. Then we have a better chance at getting along as a whole, because we can each find a community where our values are upheld and "live and let live".
That's the idea, at any rate. There are various flaws we see in practice, and perhaps the idea is untenable in this day and age. But it's fundamentally an attempt to gain unity where otherwise there would only be division. And of course it's also tied to a strong cultural mistrust of government (especially centralized government), as I mentioned in my other post.
Florida is 22.6M people. That's not very "local" if you ask me.
States' rights are a concept that people value for its own sake, and are not automatically an attempt "to make it seem like the civil war was justified".
Literally this article.
(Not saying it's consistent with our various national registries. But it's not some dumbshit concern.)
> every other developed country has one
American culture is uniquely individualistic. Our First Amendment, for instance, remains unique despite having hundreds of years of precedence.
It’s much simpler to eat the cost of a national registry and avoid all sorts of logistical challenges of coordinating across 50 States’ and 5 territories IT systems and disparate standards on record keeping.
For elections they need to keep track of each person’s status: EU citizens might be able to vote in local election in another EU country, but not national ones, so they have to record this type of information.
These three things are different: you can live in a country, pay taxes in another, and vote in a third. I guess states are just good at keeping records.
To prove you live, you would do it the same way as in the US/UK if I understand correctly, with whatever evidence you have. Rental contract in your name, utility bill, property deed, ... If you live with your parents and don't have anything in your name, they need to write a signed attestation you live there. And so on. It's not uncommon for the police to knock on your door and check if you actually live where you claim to if they have a doubt.
It's an absurd system. Why should you need to prove to the government you live anywhere? How much money is wasted sending policemen to knock on doors? And how does your absence at a given random moment prove anything at all about where you reside?
Locals are generally surprised, in my experience, when I tell them that Australia has no system of registered permanent abode at all. If you have a driver's licence, and you move, you probably want to update your address with the motor bureau, which you generally do online with no documentation at all. No one verifies your new address or particularly cares about it, because the only thing it affects is where you get sent mail (it has no legal consequences like council tax, as it does in the CR, etc). Other than that it's your business what address you give where. No one will ever demand you prove your 'registered address of permanent abode' because no such thing exists.
It fits into a broader pattern where everyone in Europe must have some kind of 'status' recorded. What's your registered place of permanent abode? What's your status with the mandatory state health insurance? For tax purposes, are you 'employed' or 'self-employed' or 'student' or 'retired'? Are you registered for self-employment with the social security bureau? There's generally no grey areas, and if you somehow fall outside the norm, they truly don't know what to do with you.
You have not experienced Europe until you've had a civil servant glower at you because there's no drop down box for what you're telling them, and this is very much something they want you to know is your fault. Can't you just be normal?
I think in countries where the majority of tax receipts come from income tax, they care a lot more about where you live than in countries like the US (and Australia apparently?) where they rely more in property taxes.
I don't understand your point what high speed rails have to do with privacy.
They are not required for trains and buses.
I don’t travel by train these days so I have no idea whether that has happened again.
I agree, which is why we should dismantle the TSA immediately. They provide negative value to this country.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-opens-terrorist-...
Millions of Americans face risk of a toxic ‘bomb train’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/01/2...
Less than a year ago, a disastrous train derailment sent a massive plume of dangerous chemicals billowing over East Palestine, Ohio, startling the town of nearly 5,000 residents and onlookers nationwide.
Now, a new report warns that more of these catastrophes may loom: At any given moment, more than an estimated 3 million people are unknowingly at risk, as toxic trains full of a highly combustible and carcinogenic chemical used to make plastic move between Texas and New Jersey....for now.
There should always 3 steps in accessing a secure system (eg bank account): Identity, Authentication, Authorization.
Just because there is a unique identifier that is known publicly, it does not imply that the person presenting that identifier is the actual entity to which that identifier was issued. The identifier is just an identier, it does not prove anything. It is not really all that different than your name. Just knowing your name should not give me access to anything.
To prove the entity presenting the identifier is actually the entity to which the identifier belongs you have to do authentication. And authentication does have to rely on some sort of secure exchange of secrets (ie not of publicly available information). These should be secrets known only to the correct entity and to the entity performing authentication (and authenticator need not even be the same organization that issued the identifier in the first place)
And once you've matched the entity to the identifier, then the last step: does that entity with that identifier have the authorization to perform whatever task they're asking to be done? Not every entity has the equivalent of root access to everything they have legitimate access to.
Identity, Authentication, Authorization.
3 different steps, with 3 different sets of constraints.
The problem in the US is most organizations never perform any even vaguely valid authentication validation. SS#, phone number and an address or two (all public data, if you're willing to pay one of the credit bureaus) and you can get access to most random person's accounts.