Comment by delfinom
3 years ago
National IDs in the US are never coming because the evangelical base of the GOP literally oppose it for being the "mark of the beast".
>Here we go. CBDCs are next, and also national Digital IDs
No, this is a long term replacement for ACH, a function that the Federal Reserve was already carrying out.
I see it as an almost total impracticality to transition from our current system to a centralized national identity document.
There is no central database of:
* Citizenship
* Births
* Drivers Licenses
* Marriages
* Deaths (SSA death reporting is voluntary and customary by funeral homes -not required)
* Education history
* Criminal Records
* Firearm Ownership
* Property Ownership
* Vehicle Ownership
The only thing the feds or even the state government has a certain idea of is, how much you made in a given reporting period - not that reporting periods always overlap in any meaningful way. There is no requirement (as far as I can tell) to even request a social security number - most parents do, because they want to claim their children on their taxes.
Now, many of those records do exist - they exist at the county, state or local level in some manner or fashion - and of course, its not standardized either, sometimes its at the county, sometimes the state, sometimes at the county or state for the same record type based on year. (e.g. Marriages from 1902-1962 are in county records, and 1962 to current in state, or the other way around.)
Trying to link all of this data in a meaningful way, would be a monumental task that would likely require a vast amount of manual data matching - and it would still be wrong 40% of the time.
They could do an audit and census approach as a one off to get all this started. For a national ID though wouldn't you only need drivers license / property data / marriage data / criminal data / citizenship / births?
Not sure you need firearm / vehicle / education history for an ID system
It'd be a gargantuan project to do so, just trying to match property data alone would be massive.
We already use social security numbers for everything (insurance, credit, etc.). It's pretty much a national ID, just a shitty one.
The way they got SSNs through is by promising that it would be illegal to use them for identification. The only remnant of that is that it (still?) remains illegal to refuse services to people who refuse to give their social security numbers, although if you do it you'll break customer service.
> it (still?) remains illegal to refuse services to people who refuse to give their social security numbers
I'd love to read this, for anyone more familiar with the legislation/where to find it.
"Can I see your social security card, please? The one that says 'Not to be used for identification' on it?" lol
USG has issued national ID documents for more than 200 years. They're called passports.
Between passports, SSNs, state IDs, your birthday, homeowner records, and metadata like addresses/phone numbers/employers, it's already trivially easy for any actor to fingerprint you anyway. Even the private sector does this for cheap. To say nothing of biometrics like facial recognition, which ironically, the government sometimes tries to protect you from (like in Illinois, where it's banned).
It's so weird to me that people are afraid of the government knowing who you are when like every private company asks for the same kind of information all the time, and data brokers gobble that up and resell it all the time (including to government), and nobody bats an eye.
Everyone who is sufficiently against national ID must never have left the United States, then? Correlation or causation, I wonder.
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nothing about singling out people for various reasons and depriving them of basic services? read history much?
The government already has the power to do this — just ask any trans person in the South
> The government already has the power to do this — just ask any trans person in the South
Any citations on every trans person in the South being singled out for denial of services by the government? Because that sounds like inflammatory nonsense.
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They don't need a national id to do that. Lmao
Case in point, the no fly lists, they literally don't care if they just ban all the John Smiths.