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The problem may have more to do with Uganda and having a surveillance state than it has to do with National ID cards. Most European countries have them and the

The problem may have more to do with Uganda and having a surveillance state than it has to do with National ID cards. 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.

olyjohn 2y ago
I'm every state that I am aware of, you can get and ID card that is not a drivers license. So it's not really got anything to do with driving.
- deleted 2y ago
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mattmaroon 2y ago
The US functionally has it. Your driver’s license goes into a national database, as do your license plates and social security number. I can drive through Oklahoma (several states away) and their system will automatically read my plates at a toll road and a bill will arrive at my home. 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.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  We have it explicitly as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_passport_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_passport_card
  - joecool1029 2y ago
    I wouldn't FUD the passport card, it's a good alternative for age proofing that doesn't include home address information. Unless you like businesses collecting that information....
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      It’s not FUD! Personally, I don’t think it’s a negative thing at all.
- deleted 2y ago
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- rootusrootus 2y ago
  > I think states have dropped issuing the ones that don’t. Some have. Oregon, as a single example, will let you opt for a non-Real ID card.
  - jackson1442 2y ago
    Washington doesn’t even officially offer a RealID. Instead they have the “Enhanced ID” which functions as a passport card but does not have the security features required on a RealID (though it does have some additional features like RFID).
    - _caw 2y ago
      Can you expand on that? The Federal Government[0] seems to think the EDL[1] is a RealID. [0] https://www.dhs.gov/real-id https://www.dhs.gov/real-id [1] https://dol.wa.gov/id-cards/real-id https://dol.wa.gov/id-cards/real-id
      - joecool1029 2y ago
        All EDL's are RealID complaint, not all drivers licenses are. NJ issues 'not for Real ID purposes' drivers licenses still with the option to get the realid yellow star licenses DHS shows on your first link. They keep pushing back the enforcement date due to various ACLU and state lawsuits as well as COVID-19 backlog.
        bobthepanda 2y ago
        sure, but saying that EDLs are Real ID compliant directly contradicts the grandparent comment saying that WA does not issue a Real ID.
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      Not true. Proof of citizenship for Enhanced ID meets and exceeds the RealID requirement.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  > I can drive through Oklahoma (several states away) and their system will automatically read my plates at a toll road and a bill will arrive at my home. I’ve driven a car with USA license plates through tolls in Canada and gotten a bill at home. Also, passports have existed forever.
  - InCityDreams 2y ago
    Good history here (and, you're not incorrect) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport : modern passports 1920s. "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."
    - skissane 2y ago
      A lot has changed about passports even in my lifetime (I’m in my early 40s). I remember my mother showing me one of her old British passports, which had my younger brother on it. 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
- bigbacaloa 2y ago
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- notepad0x90 2y ago
  Think of the basic needs of a human being. Buying food and water, paying for shelter and living in a safe environment. For these things, proving one's identity should not be required, nor should a person be required to do business with a 3rd party (banks and credit cards) or have their activity tracked and surveilled. A person's right to exist and to pursue continued existence is inalienable and beyond the authority of a government or society to regulate. 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?
  - SiempreViernes 2y ago
    Funny how you describe the basic need as "the right to buy", what about those without enough resources to buy on their own such?
    - mattmaroon 2y ago
      Then you get into positive vs negative rights. We’re very much a negative rights society and you can’t square the two. Negative rights feel good because they don’t infringe on anyone else, whereas a positive right always does. Your positive right is someone else’s lack of a negative right, the opposite isn’t true. 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.
      - StockHuman 2y ago
        > Negative rights feel good because they don’t infringe on anyone else, whereas a positive right always does. 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.
- soco 2y ago
  From what the comments added to this, I would say the best (only?) privacy-favoring aspect in the States is that personal identification is in chaos. Not that you wouldn't have some identification features, but every little corner handles them differently. Nevertheless, the security organs seem to have found effective ways around this chaos, so I'd say that with or without national ID those who need to know know, and the only ones left in chaos are the regular people.
- blendergeek 2y ago
  > I think states have dropped issuing the ones that don’t. A lot of states still issue the non-federal ones. They are much cheaper and easier to obtain (at least where I live).
  - deleted 2y ago
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- seethishat 2y ago
  How much storage would you need to store every text message ever sent by everyone on earth indefinitely? Has anyone done the math on that? I'm not sure it's possible without some infinite storage system (that obviously does not exist).
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Show me a government that's lasted through hundreds of years of responsible careful balanced governance. 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.
- rdlw 2y ago
  The fact that a system may become perverted in the next several hundred years doesn't make it not worth using. Best of luck to my children's children, I hope they don't fuck it up too bad, but I'm not going to preemptively save them by not giving anyone power to govern in the present day.
  - Aerroon 2y ago
    >in the next several hundred years doesn't make it not worth using. 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.
    - gabaix 2y ago
      As citizen in France, we also had an old democracy. Under Nazi Germany occupation it took no time for the ruling party to oppress ennemies of the state. Jews were hunted down using the National n database of names and addresses. I do view technology as a double edged sword for the freedom of the people.
skissane 2y ago
> Countries without national ID cards are not especially more privacy minded 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)
- deleted 2y ago
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- gerdesj 2y ago
  Feel free to substitute UK for Australia for your entire comment! I remember my mum getting a shitty on about ID cards in the UK back the '80s. We were living in West Germany at the time and the locals had them. The debate in the UK was ... desultory. 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)
darby_nine 2y ago
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archsurface 2y ago
Not just the purpose of identity verification - identity verification at any time, anywhere, whatever you're doing.
abdullahkhalids 2y ago
I don't see any example in the article, in which some bad action by the Ugandan government could only have been done due to the existence of the national ID card. 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.
- viraptor 2y ago
  On the other hand, have you ever tried to do something even slightly unusual with paper documentation? It's not just convenient to have it digitised, it's close to necessary unless you want to spend months of your life chasing (for example) the right way to translate and certify the validity of an entry of your change of name in an old printed volume of The Gazette in the UK. Because they had a "YOLO, just let the solicitor know you changed your name, or not, who cares" system.
  - username332211 2y ago
    I'm not sure this has as much to do with paper documentation as with the fact the UK has no unique identifier for it's citizens. In that situation, name changes should be a pain. Just as much as it's a pain to deal with any other database without primary keys.
    - ljf 2y ago
      Indeed - people sometimes think that the National Insurance number is our identifier - but the forget you can use many names with that, and people get by just fine. 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.
- surfingdino 2y ago
mrtksn 2y ago
Ah yes, in UK/USA they like to think that they have their privacy protected and fighting the overreaching government by not having a national ID cards and then go ahead and build giant surveillance agencies that spy on them all the time. 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.
- dfawcus 2y ago
  In the UK, it has little to do with privacy per-se, but that we know they will be abused. That being part of the national character which rears is ugly little head from time to time. 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 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.
aaa_aaa 2y ago
A society can work without a centralized id system. Carry your id, save copies in a vault for verification if you want. Current id systems are just tools for surveillance and control, sugar coated with state welfare.
- viraptor 2y ago
  What do you mean without a centralised id system? Whose id are you going to carry then? How many entities will you end up with issuing them? How many types will an arbitrary place that needs to check your id accept?
  - Spivak 2y ago
    This is such an odd comment given that this is literally how the US has always and still does work, and also how passports will continue to work. 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.
    - viraptor 2y ago
      They're not really decentralised - more delegated, right? Can any state decide to not allow another state's driving licence? What about birth certificate? They're documents valid/expected at federal level.
sjducb 2y ago
Occasionally a bad government will come along. 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.
- junto 2y ago
  Fun fact. Post-Nazi Germany recognized that centralized records storage was one of the main reasons a rogue state had been able to target Jews, “undesirables, and bohemians (woke) during the holocaust. 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.
  - sjducb 2y ago
    > 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. 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)
longerd2 2y ago
We had smart eIDs with proper PGP once :')
mytailorisrich 2y ago
> Most European countries have them and they are as uncontroversial as passports. > 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.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >In the UK people are free to go about their lives with no ID 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.
- GeoAtreides 2y ago
  >n 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. 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.
nkrisc 2y ago
> tying your existence as a citizen to your ability / willingness to drive a large piece of metal around. 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.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  > 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 :)
  - nkrisc 2y ago
    Depends where you live. I had a state ID for a little while when I was a young adult because I didn’t get my driver’s license right away. I used public transit and didn’t have a car anyway.
gddgb 2y ago
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solatic 2y ago
It's similar in many ways to "leaderless" organizations: getting rid of people with formal management titles doesn't mean you don't have managers, it means that it's not clear who the leaders are and that it's impossible for the organization to guarantee an orderly transfer of leadership when the shadow leaders eventually leave. "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?
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  Also, this is very very important for people in the US to realize: Not having a "Social credit score" bureau doesn't mean the US doesn't have a social credit score! It only means the US government has to pay market rate for the service! 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
t0bia_s 2y ago
E-shops are good proof of working system without need of identify yourself by ID. Your could order anything by fake name on fake adress and waste time and money of delivery system, yet it is not happening. Btw, ID's was mandatory first time by Hitler during WWII. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_identity_card https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_identity_card

olyjohn 2y ago

I'm every state that I am aware of, you can get and ID card that is not a drivers license. So it's not really got anything to do with driving.

deleted 2y ago
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mattmaroon 2y ago

The US functionally has it. Your driver’s license goes into a national database, as do your license plates and social security number. I can drive through Oklahoma (several states away) and their system will automatically read my plates at a toll road and a bill will arrive at my home. 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.

Spooky23 2y ago
We have it explicitly as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_passport_card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_passport_card
- joecool1029 2y ago
  I wouldn't FUD the passport card, it's a good alternative for age proofing that doesn't include home address information. Unless you like businesses collecting that information....
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    It’s not FUD! Personally, I don’t think it’s a negative thing at all.
deleted 2y ago
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rootusrootus 2y ago
> I think states have dropped issuing the ones that don’t. Some have. Oregon, as a single example, will let you opt for a non-Real ID card.
- jackson1442 2y ago
  Washington doesn’t even officially offer a RealID. Instead they have the “Enhanced ID” which functions as a passport card but does not have the security features required on a RealID (though it does have some additional features like RFID).
  - _caw 2y ago
    Can you expand on that? The Federal Government[0] seems to think the EDL[1] is a RealID. [0] https://www.dhs.gov/real-id https://www.dhs.gov/real-id [1] https://dol.wa.gov/id-cards/real-id https://dol.wa.gov/id-cards/real-id
    - joecool1029 2y ago
      All EDL's are RealID complaint, not all drivers licenses are. NJ issues 'not for Real ID purposes' drivers licenses still with the option to get the realid yellow star licenses DHS shows on your first link. They keep pushing back the enforcement date due to various ACLU and state lawsuits as well as COVID-19 backlog.
      - bobthepanda 2y ago
        sure, but saying that EDLs are Real ID compliant directly contradicts the grandparent comment saying that WA does not issue a Real ID.
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    Not true. Proof of citizenship for Enhanced ID meets and exceeds the RealID requirement.
- Spooky23 2y ago
lotsofpulp 2y ago
> I can drive through Oklahoma (several states away) and their system will automatically read my plates at a toll road and a bill will arrive at my home. I’ve driven a car with USA license plates through tolls in Canada and gotten a bill at home. Also, passports have existed forever.
- InCityDreams 2y ago
  Good history here (and, you're not incorrect) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passport : modern passports 1920s. "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."
  - skissane 2y ago
    A lot has changed about passports even in my lifetime (I’m in my early 40s). I remember my mother showing me one of her old British passports, which had my younger brother on it. 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
bigbacaloa 2y ago
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notepad0x90 2y ago
Think of the basic needs of a human being. Buying food and water, paying for shelter and living in a safe environment. For these things, proving one's identity should not be required, nor should a person be required to do business with a 3rd party (banks and credit cards) or have their activity tracked and surveilled. A person's right to exist and to pursue continued existence is inalienable and beyond the authority of a government or society to regulate. 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?
- SiempreViernes 2y ago
  Funny how you describe the basic need as "the right to buy", what about those without enough resources to buy on their own such?
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    Then you get into positive vs negative rights. We’re very much a negative rights society and you can’t square the two. Negative rights feel good because they don’t infringe on anyone else, whereas a positive right always does. Your positive right is someone else’s lack of a negative right, the opposite isn’t true. 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.
    - StockHuman 2y ago
      > Negative rights feel good because they don’t infringe on anyone else, whereas a positive right always does. 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.
soco 2y ago
From what the comments added to this, I would say the best (only?) privacy-favoring aspect in the States is that personal identification is in chaos. Not that you wouldn't have some identification features, but every little corner handles them differently. Nevertheless, the security organs seem to have found effective ways around this chaos, so I'd say that with or without national ID those who need to know know, and the only ones left in chaos are the regular people.
blendergeek 2y ago
> I think states have dropped issuing the ones that don’t. A lot of states still issue the non-federal ones. They are much cheaper and easier to obtain (at least where I live).
- deleted 2y ago
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seethishat 2y ago
How much storage would you need to store every text message ever sent by everyone on earth indefinitely? Has anyone done the math on that? I'm not sure it's possible without some infinite storage system (that obviously does not exist).

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

Show me a government that's lasted through hundreds of years of responsible careful balanced governance. 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.

rdlw 2y ago
The fact that a system may become perverted in the next several hundred years doesn't make it not worth using. Best of luck to my children's children, I hope they don't fuck it up too bad, but I'm not going to preemptively save them by not giving anyone power to govern in the present day.
- Aerroon 2y ago
  >in the next several hundred years doesn't make it not worth using. 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.
  - gabaix 2y ago
    As citizen in France, we also had an old democracy. Under Nazi Germany occupation it took no time for the ruling party to oppress ennemies of the state. Jews were hunted down using the National n database of names and addresses. I do view technology as a double edged sword for the freedom of the people.

skissane 2y ago

> Countries without national ID cards are not especially more privacy minded 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)

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gerdesj 2y ago
Feel free to substitute UK for Australia for your entire comment! I remember my mum getting a shitty on about ID cards in the UK back the '80s. We were living in West Germany at the time and the locals had them. The debate in the UK was ... desultory. 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)

darby_nine 2y ago

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archsurface 2y ago

Not just the purpose of identity verification - identity verification at any time, anywhere, whatever you're doing.

abdullahkhalids 2y ago

I don't see any example in the article, in which some bad action by the Ugandan government could only have been done due to the existence of the national ID card. 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.

viraptor 2y ago
On the other hand, have you ever tried to do something even slightly unusual with paper documentation? It's not just convenient to have it digitised, it's close to necessary unless you want to spend months of your life chasing (for example) the right way to translate and certify the validity of an entry of your change of name in an old printed volume of The Gazette in the UK. Because they had a "YOLO, just let the solicitor know you changed your name, or not, who cares" system.
- username332211 2y ago
  I'm not sure this has as much to do with paper documentation as with the fact the UK has no unique identifier for it's citizens. In that situation, name changes should be a pain. Just as much as it's a pain to deal with any other database without primary keys.
  - ljf 2y ago
    Indeed - people sometimes think that the National Insurance number is our identifier - but the forget you can use many names with that, and people get by just fine. 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.
surfingdino 2y ago

mrtksn 2y ago

Ah yes, in UK/USA they like to think that they have their privacy protected and fighting the overreaching government by not having a national ID cards and then go ahead and build giant surveillance agencies that spy on them all the time. 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.

dfawcus 2y ago
In the UK, it has little to do with privacy per-se, but that we know they will be abused. That being part of the national character which rears is ugly little head from time to time. 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 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.

aaa_aaa 2y ago

A society can work without a centralized id system. Carry your id, save copies in a vault for verification if you want. Current id systems are just tools for surveillance and control, sugar coated with state welfare.

viraptor 2y ago
What do you mean without a centralised id system? Whose id are you going to carry then? How many entities will you end up with issuing them? How many types will an arbitrary place that needs to check your id accept?
- Spivak 2y ago
  This is such an odd comment given that this is literally how the US has always and still does work, and also how passports will continue to work. 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.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    They're not really decentralised - more delegated, right? Can any state decide to not allow another state's driving licence? What about birth certificate? They're documents valid/expected at federal level.

sjducb 2y ago

Occasionally a bad government will come along. 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.

junto 2y ago
Fun fact. Post-Nazi Germany recognized that centralized records storage was one of the main reasons a rogue state had been able to target Jews, “undesirables, and bohemians (woke) during the holocaust. 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.
- sjducb 2y ago
  > 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. 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)

longerd2 2y ago

We had smart eIDs with proper PGP once :')

mytailorisrich 2y ago

> Most European countries have them and they are as uncontroversial as passports. > 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.

Barrin92 2y ago
>In the UK people are free to go about their lives with no ID 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.
GeoAtreides 2y ago
>n 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. 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.

nkrisc 2y ago

> tying your existence as a citizen to your ability / willingness to drive a large piece of metal around. 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.

wkat4242 2y ago
> 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 :)
- nkrisc 2y ago
  Depends where you live. I had a state ID for a little while when I was a young adult because I didn’t get my driver’s license right away. I used public transit and didn’t have a car anyway.

gddgb 2y ago

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solatic 2y ago

It's similar in many ways to "leaderless" organizations: getting rid of people with formal management titles doesn't mean you don't have managers, it means that it's not clear who the leaders are and that it's impossible for the organization to guarantee an orderly transfer of leadership when the shadow leaders eventually leave. "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?

mrguyorama 2y ago
Also, this is very very important for people in the US to realize: Not having a "Social credit score" bureau doesn't mean the US doesn't have a social credit score! It only means the US government has to pay market rate for the service! 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

t0bia_s 2y ago

E-shops are good proof of working system without need of identify yourself by ID. Your could order anything by fake name on fake adress and waste time and money of delivery system, yet it is not happening. Btw, ID's was mandatory first time by Hitler during WWII. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_identity_card https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_identity_card