Comment by kube-system
4 years ago
The point is to authenticate residency, and while it’s not a great system, there also isn’t any better alternatives.
4 years ago
The point is to authenticate residency, and while it’s not a great system, there also isn’t any better alternatives.
If all this was for is to ensure you live at an address then the local government can offer a number of solutions to that. If they want mail, they can simply mail you a unique qr code which you could then scan and complete the process entirely online. Or at a minimum bring physically to an office.
A utility bill doesn't require proof of residency to get. Neither does a credit card statement. Infact if I were creative I could say I live anywhere and provide false documents of that. It is the legitimate use of this system that is difficult, not illigitimate use.
The system is not designed to be secure or to ensure residency, that's not it's purpose. Its purpose is to create further government control to suppress citizens rights to operate freeley in their own country. Specifically, to target low income individuals. These people creating the policies are not the same people whom are affected by them.
If I am U.S. born I have a right to operate in certain capacities as a citizen. Voting, owning land, and working are all rights unalienable. The fact this is not currently true is proof of the federal fascism we live in.
If you go to my local library and tell them you want a library card, but you don't have any ID, they ask you to give them your address. They send you a postcard, and when you bring it in, they'll give you a library card. No QR code necessary.
The USPS could function quite successfully as an ID system and a bank, were they allowed.
In fact postal services in many countries do function as banks. When I was a primary school student in South Korea, we all made a savings account at the local post office and learned about how banks work and the importance of saving money.
5 replies →
This is what California did for RealID when they made a mistake early on. Federal government didn’t recognize one of two forms of verification California used and California mailed a post card to those affected. Was able to just go online with the code and verify receipt of the card.
Most countries whose postal service offered banking stopped.
Know why?
1 reply →
I agree with everything you're saying, but disagree with the reason.
The US federal government has to be too loose about keeping track of citizens specifically to avoid looking too fascist. One of your many American rights is to have no ID at all. Protecting that right for two dozen people makes everything extremely complicated for the rest of us.
The federal government is not too loose in tracking citizens, and you cannot effectively operate in the U.S. without I.D of some form. Birth certificates and tax ID's are necessary for everything from school to work. Infact those that forgo it originally struggle as adults heavily to get those documents later, if at all.
1 reply →
> One of your many American rights is to have no ID at all.
Ha, if only. Everyone from FB to the NSA is keeping tabs on individuals in all aspects of life. There is no hiding in the US
The point isn't to prevent a skilled attacker. The point is to prevent casual lying and low-skill fraud. Most people who lie/cheat/steal do so because it's easy or because they're dumb. Your QR code idea will cost more money to implement and won't block skilled attackers either, as it doesn't take a genius to figure out a way to get mail from a mailbox you don't own.
Utility bills are the DMV's equivalent of a cheap lock. A smart attacker can pick the lock, and a determined attacker can cut it off. But the majority of thieves are walking around looking for unlocked car doors instead.
Do you really think DMV asks for a copy of a utility bill because it's a good way to suppress your rights? I would think that there are plenty of more effective ways to do so, if that were actually their goal.
Do you think low skilled fraud doesn't have access to a printer? If it cannot be implemented properly, then it shouldn't be done at all. It doesn't matter what good intent it may have had, in effect it is a suppression of individual rights. This entire process would be grounds for a civil war in the 1800's. Yet today we think being a citizen isn't enough to have rights. You have to be apart of a socioeconomics nomic class of people to have those rights.
The DMV complies with whatever regulations are imposed on them. Those rules are created by legislators whom are entirely disconnected from their constituents and are paid for their votes.
2 replies →
> it doesn't take a genius to figure out a way to get mail from a mailbox you don't own
iirc stealing other people’s mail by tampering with a mailbox is a ~~felony~~ federal crime. If they threw out the mail and you went through their trash it might be different. I anal though.
3 replies →
>they can simply mail you a unique qr code which you could then scan and complete the process entirely online. Or at a minimum bring physically to an office.
How is that any different than bringing any other piece of official mail that you receive at your home address?
Because it actually validates your address. Plenty of “official mail that you receive at your home address” can be accessed (or produced) without access to the listed address, but you can't spoof knowing information that you never received.
2 replies →
When you move to a new state, I suppose you don't fill in a bunch of forms to register yourself as a resident in the state then? So that when DMV and other institutions ask for residency they could just check back in the states records (or have you bring a copy of the state's residency certificate) ?
The state surely must know how to tax you, and thus they need to know who you are and that you're a resident in the state... It seems the information inevitably must be there already so why try to imitate that with a bunch of random tokens such as bills sent to an address where they could go straight to the source?
Just curious.
In the US, no, you don't need to fill out any forms to register yourself as a resident. The closest is probably moving your drivers license registration, which many people wait years to do after moving. Other than that, you generally prove residency by showing (as GP mentioned) bills mailed to you, or a copy of your lease.
You're responsible for filing your own state taxes based on when/how/where you worked.
> The closest is probably moving your drivers license registration, which many people wait years to do after moving.
Most states do require by law that you do this in a very short period of time after moving. (Although yes, it is not uncommon for people to violate this)
6 replies →
I hope you mind me not asking but while I know on some general level how things work in the US the details are infinitely interesting the deeper I think about this.
You're responsible for filing your own state taxes based on when/how/where you worked.
This seems like having so many knots left untied, considering how much importance one might expect to be placed for a fundamental question such as residency.
The obvious case is that it seems like people could just move into a state and never tell anyone and omit paying taxes. While there must be mechanisms to prevent or curb this, it still probably applies to a non-trivial minority of so-inclined people already? Not an option for people who want to settle, of course, but for certain people, living some months or years anonymously in a particular state might be a viable opportunity.
Do counties / cities / towns also lack similar logging of identity? How can they offer public services to people if they really don't know who the people are, and most importantly, if the people are residents or not? Does everyone just keep showing their utility bills? How do they deal with the various John Smiths moving from place to place -- inevitably to addresses where another John Smith was living before as there will be collisions without an unique identity? Or does the driving license become the de-facto proof of residence once people move it over, and the driving license has a unique number to differentiate between individuals regardless of name and address?
I mean, for the state government there's an inevitable and pragmatic need for uniquely identifying the people who live in the state and if there's no central registry then this need will be approxximated by various mechanisms so that the society can function at all.
Conversely, let's say the government does track down residents who nobody officially knows about. If the state government really doesn't know who lives in that state how could they impose liabilities such as taxes onto people whose identity and location and length of official residence they don't know? If I move in with my friend who lives in another state at which point can I still say "I'm just visiting, no taxes me for, thank you" and if the state were to disagree how would they go about establishing I was a resident after all? How would I prove I'm still actually a resident in the old state (if I were) vs how could they prove I'm no longer a resident in the old state (if I weren't)? What is the mechanism that prevents me from living in two states and claiming always in one that I'm resident in the other state?
> check back in the state
I wish, but I don't think each of many departments talk or share individual's personal data between them, unless its collections or something. Like, DMV would not have access to one's tax status or details, and tax one's might not know one's driving license details. I wish the willpower & technology increases to make it happen.
But given how easy it is to foil, I don't understand what it "authenticates".
If you wanted to truly authenticate residency or at the very least prove that someone has access to the mailbox, sending them a one-time auth code per mail would be a better idea rather than relying on third-party services where people may use paperless billing for convenience.
I explicitly said it was not good authentication. :)
Mailing someone a code would be more secure but, to the parents point, would be even more onerous of a process for people to comply with.
Some comments above suggested above that this is an intentionally burdensome process, but to the contrary, bringing in a bill is one of the least burdensome ways to authenticate residency.
> bringing in a bill is one of the least burdensome ways to authenticate residency
My problem with this is how is the recipient supposed to authenticate said bill. Now we're talking about bringing a paper bill vs a printed one (or "faking" a paper bill by creasing/folding the printed one), but the real threat is fraudsters completely making up a fake bill to begin with. Unless the recipient has a relationship with the company that issues the bills, there is no way for them to verify whether the bill is real in the first place, making the whole endeavor pointless and only inconveniencing legitimate users.
1 reply →
Requiring people to print out a paper and fold it as if it had been in an envelope doesn't authenticate anything but access to a printer and some imagination. Just removing the requirement would be a better alternative.
I am referring to the requirement to produce a utility bill. Not the silly front-line bureaucratic interpretative variations thereof.
That's false. Many other countries have implemented simpler, more accurate, and less discriminatory systems.
> The point is to authenticate residency, and while it’s not a great system, there also isn’t any better alternatives.
"No-one important enough is bothered, so we haven't had to try to fix it" is a far cry from "there [aren't] any better alternatives". We're HN; that's not the hacker ethos.
RealID requirements were written in the past and exist in the present. While it would be great to have another solution, one doesn’t exist. Happy to hear a proposal, however. I, personally, haven’t been able to come up with a more equitable idea.
Why do you need to authenticate it in the first place? If people are discovered lying somehow, send them to jail. Otherwise, trust that people will be honest.
Fraud is not nearly the problem people think it is...
They could pay Google and Apple to tell them where you sleep, based on your phone GPS anyway.
>there also isn’t any better alternatives.
Of course there is. It's having a central resident registry like is common in most countries other than the US.
That is not an alternative for the DMV. There is no central registry and they can't create one.