Comment by toomuchtodo
9 months ago
> If we were going to do something, we’d make government ID include an NFC token for PKI purposes since public keys can’t be compromised in the same way, but nobody is jumping to pay for that, especially in a country where you have so many people prone to wild conspiracy theories (I am especially amazed by the guys who freak about a national ID as big brother but never say a word about the credit reporting industry) and the enduring “Mark of The Beast” religious fears.
Login.gov gets us pretty far until NFC can get baked into credentials. Would love to see passport cards evolve into this [2], but again, lots of work and political will to make that happen. In the meantime, remote and in person proofing to bind IRL gov credentials to digital identity must do.
(As of December 31, 2023, over 111 million people have signed up to use Login.gov to date, with over 324 million sign-ins in 2023; this is ~1/3rd US population; no affiliation)
[2] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/need-pa...
I still don't get why people are calling these "religious fears". The parable from the book is because the problem is very old, but the problem is exactly the same as it ever was: If a central authority gives everyone a serial number then it will be used to track them by powerful institutions, which is a tool of oppression. This is the massive mistake we made with social security numbers, and their inherent insecurity is actually mitigating the damage there because it makes people much more hesitant to divulge it.
You do not want to make it easier for every carnivorous for-profit corporation and wannabe apparatchik to pressure every citizen to cough up an identifier that can be used to track their every move.
> I still don't get why people are calling these "religious fears
That’s what the people making those claims are talking about. If you haven’t talked with paranoid religious extremists before, it’s eye-opening: they are literally saying that a mandatory government ID will serve the beast mentioned in Revelations.
That’s not the only concern or group raising it by any means but I mentioned it because governments have to consider edge cases - if you make SSN a required field you have to figure out how to avoid turning away children from those households. If you’re building a website to sell t-shirts, that’s fine but if its government services you might be breaking the law and especially might be harming people who need help (a 17 year old who ran away from that house might have trouble getting the ID they need to live independently).
> a central authority gives everyone a serial number then it will be used to track them by powerful institutions, which is a tool of oppression.
It’s only a tool of oppression if you have a government prone to abuse and without constraints. If that’s true, since the computer age the distinction increasingly useless. The Stasi paid clerks to move paper around and if you’re comparing IDs by hand having a single number is a huge timesaver. In 2024, however, all not having one means is that they use software to link them – the context for this story is the huge industry doing that for all kinds of data, and they don’t mind having to link a couple of different identifiers. Faced with an oppressive government, we should be calling for legal restrictions and accountability for leaders. Not having a unique identification number is like wearing a breastplate into battle after the invention of the machine gun.
> It’s only a tool of oppression if you have a government prone to abuse and without constraints.
Untrue for three reasons.
One, it's a spectrum, and where you are can change. While the current US government is pretty bad, they're not rounding up citizens based on their race and throwing them into internment camps right now. But they have in the past, so let's not leave them anything that helps them if they decide to Be Evil again eh?
Two, there are different governments. Suppose the federal government is bad but not heinously bad and the Colorado government is pretty good but the Mississippi government is corrupt and racist and oppressive. Create the system federally and you're handing it to Mississippi officials to abuse, whereas they couldn't create their own because free travel between the states is constitutionally protected.
Three, it's not just governments. Create something like this and corporations will use it. Then all you need is for the government to fail to stop them, which is the status quo.
> In 2024, however, all not having one means is that they use software to link them – the context for this story is the huge industry doing that for all kinds of data, and they don’t mind having to link a couple of different identifiers.
The single identifier is what enables them to be linked -- it's why the surveillance apparatus keeps pushing it on us. Without it you have to speculate and will commonly get it wrong. If someone is signed into Google and then signs into their bank, does that mean they're the same person, or just two people who use the same computer?
If you pull an old PC off a skid destined for the recycler and use it exclusively for buying things on Amazon (which inherently has your shipping address), and use a different machine for social media which you never use for Amazon, a single identifier would still force you to associate the two no matter what measures you use to separate them.
It is important to preserve the ability to keep them separate.
Also notice the form of your argument: Things are currently bad so it's fine to make them worse in a way that's sticky and hard to undo. Maybe instead we should make things better?
3 replies →
>I still don't get why people are calling these "religious fears".
People are calling these "religious fears" because they are fears very often based on religion. People who fear the Mark of the Beast aren't simply worried about being tracked by powerful institutions, they're looking for prophetic signs of the antichrist and Satanic one world government that their holy book says will lead to the second coming of Christ and Armageddon. Even though it was really talking about Nero Caesar. You can't separate the fear from the religion.
>You do not want to make it easy for every rapacious for-profit corporation to pressure every citizen to cough up an identifier that can be used to track their every move.
Then ban cellphones. Those are far more useful as a means of surveillance and control than any serial number in a database. They're also held in the hand and to the head, and used to buy and sell goods, which conforms far more closely to the mark of the beast than, say, RFID chips or SSNs or serial numbers on currency. Which the mark of the beast people were all against, in their time.
Unless you want to go full Kaczynski and run off into the woods to live off the grid, you can't avoid having identifiers attached to you. Your birth certificate, vaccination history, criminal record, credit score, address and phone number, the license plate on your car. Even the cookie that leaves you logged in to Hacker News. Governments and corporations already know who you are and where you are. Are there massive negative externalities to having our identities controlled by forces we have no agency over? Absolutely. But fearing every number as a slippery slope to a global satanic dystopian hellscape isn't reasonable. Unfortunately that's the context in which many people have this conversation, and that needs to be recognized.
> People who fear the Mark of the Beast aren't simply worried about being tracked by powerful institutions, they're looking for prophetic signs of the antichrist and Satanic one world government that their holy book says will lead to the second coming of Christ and Armageddon.
This is the "weak man" version of the argument. It goes in the book because the (relatively wise and experienced) authors wanted to warn people of the dangers of a real problem. Nutters read metaphors as literal and then people who want to discredit the argument point to the least credible of the nutters as the proponents. But you don't have to believe in The Devil to believe that authoritarians exist and have provably caused great pain and oppression throughout history.
Isaac Newton was a Christian but you don't have to believe in God to believe in gravity.
> Then ban cellphones.
The problem here isn't so much "cellphones" the abstract concept in which you have a portable computer with a network connection, as the current implementation of cellphones which are in actual fact implemented as tracking devices. Which, okay, let's also make cellphones that are actually controlled by their owners and don't act as mass surveillance devices. Sounds good.
> Unless you want to go full Kaczynski and run off into the woods to live off the grid, you can't avoid having identifiers attached to you.
There is a difference between "you have a social security number which the social security administration uses exclusively for social security and no one else uses for anything" and "you have a social security number which every corporation and bureaucracy uses as the primary key in a database to correlate everything you do in your entire life". The kind of ID systems people keep proposing are the ones that do the second one, and that's the bad one.
The problem with login.gov is that nobody can use it outside of the US government. I can't use my login.gov account to attest my identity to my bank.
So my bank will continue to use my SSN as proof of identity for loans.
Not yet, but we’ll get there.
https://beeckcenter.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/1...
Yeah, I love login.gov and especially how they embraced things like WebAuthn faster than entire industries like finance but I can only imagine how much screaming there would be if usage became a requirement outside of government.