Comment by mikkupikku
14 days ago
Federal IDs are a political landmine for reasons mostly unrelated to privacy. The American public doesn't understand privacy issues, unless maybe you frame it as "ThE NUmBer OF ThE BeASt" oooo-oo spooky! Otherwise, most Americans just get stupified and say they have nothing to hide.
My point in all of this is that we should not delude ourselves by theorizing about ways this could be implemented in a privacy preserving way, because even if that's technically possible, its unlikely for things to work out that way.
America and the "if you're doing nothing wrong you have nothing to hide" / "police don't need body cameras" duality. You really cannot trust the typical person to be attempting cognition.
America doesnt have ID because big businesses and their lobbyists need cheap undocumented labor.
That's the biggest part of it. But there is also grassroots opposition to anything that could be made into or even just rhetorically support the feasibility of voter IDs. And the party which would want voter IDs is also the party which is most spooked about beast numbers and antichrists...
Either way you slice it, almost nobody in America is seriously pushing for a proper federal ID, which is why we're all still abusing SSN cards for this crap.