The US is an odd case where there is no central government ID or identification base layer. There are many independent authorities that can issue an ID, none of which are universally provisioned or recognized by governments within the country. This creates enough edge cases that it is essentially required to be possible to bootstrap an identity from negligible formal documentation, which is also a rather large loophole.
> The US is an odd case where there is no central government ID or identification base layer.
As others have mentioned, the US Federal government issues passports and passport cards, yet it's entirely up to the agency that wants ID what IDs they will accept. I've been turned down for using a passport card for some Washington State government activities ("the card doesn't have a signature"), using a passport to buy an age-restricted item from a store ("we can't scan it"), and a passport card with the state's largest credit union ("too much fraud with passport cards").
Yet none of these are documented anywhere. Everyone just assumes you'll have a state-issued driver license and if you don't, well, you're obviously up to something nefarious. (Before anyone asks, I do have a state-issued enhanced identification card. It looks identical to a driver license, except it says "identification" on it. I've still been told "that's not a driver's license, I can't take that.")
I use a Federal ID when dealing with legal purviews of the Federal government, and a State ID when dealing with the legal purviews of State governments (which is most things). This is the only reliable scheme I've found. As a matter of Constitutionality, the States are largely required to recognize State IDs, but no one is required to recognize Federal IDs because there is no authority and as a practical matter many governments don't.
It doesn't help that some clerks are confused by the zoo of government issued IDs that exist in the US. IDs in the US are a mess, the legal barriers to making it possible to have an organized identity system are very high, and both the Democrats and Republicans are resistant to removing those legal barriers, so this situation is unlikely to change.
Real ID has more or less happened. States still issue IDs that don't meet those requirements, but at some point it's likely enough to actually become a requirement for using the ID to fly (instead of being delayed again).
The ID standardization parts mostly happened. The parts where the underlying State databases are shared with a central Federal government database did not.
There's a data sharing system, it isn't clear if it is entirely functionally equivalent to a centralized database, but it certainly goes in that direction if you compare it to not having a sharing system.
Australia is the same. Even accessing federal systems involves a baroque system of multi-credential attestation where you nominally have a single “GovId” but in practice you have to jump through a bunch of hoops on a per-agency basis. The GovId itself is a weird amalgam of “n-of-m” identity papers.
This all happened because back in the early 2000s there was an attempt at a single “Australia ID” but geriatrics had their brains pickled in decades of anti-communist propaganda and voted against it.
The logic is: “Only communist governments know who their citizens are.”
Democracies apparently have to be ignorant and easily exploited by criminals falsely claiming pensions and other benefits using easily forged identity papers.
> Democracies apparently have to be ignorant and easily exploited by criminals falsely claiming pensions and other benefits using easily forged identity papers.
How is centralized identity necessary or sufficient to solve this? If you have an ID card issued by e.g. your brokerage, it can use strong cryptography and be no easier to forge than any government ID. If you lost your card you could use any mechanism you could use in the event that you lose your government ID. Some of these methods have poor security properties but that's the same in both cases.
The only thing you get from centralization is non-consensual tracking.
> How is centralized identity necessary or sufficient to solve this?
To give you an idea of just how low the fruit is hanging, approximately 100K fake children "vanished" from Australia's welfare system when the government introduced a system where you had to list each dependent child's Tax File Number (TFN) to claim welfare benefits. (Prior to that, you just had to put down how many children you were claiming benefits for.)
If you can get ID papers from random brokerages, then how is the government to perform a simple uniqueness check across brokerages?
It always boils down to the same thing: Someone, somewhere has to have a table with a primary key on it.
> To give you an idea of just how low the fruit is hanging, approximately 100K fake children "vanished" from Australia's welfare system when the government introduced a system where you had to list each dependent child's Tax File Number (TFN) to claim welfare benefits.
The assumption here is that they're all fake rather than there being a non-trivial number of people who don't understand how to fill out the new forms, or aren't willing to admit to an association with an out-of-wedlock child on an official form even though the child is real and actually being supported etc.
> If you can get ID papers from random brokerages, then how is the government to perform a simple uniqueness check across brokerages?
Nobody other than the brokerage uses the brokerage's ID. That's what decentralized is. Children typically wouldn't have an ID from a brokerage anyway. The welfare agency would provide recipients with its own IDs. How does it establish uniqueness for this? The same way as the institution issuing a Tax File Number.
> This all happened because back in the early 2000s there was an attempt at a single “Australia ID” but geriatrics had their brains pickled in decades of anti-communist propaganda and voted against it.
This is similar to how the U.S. has a certain amount of opposition from Christian sects who believe any sort of national ID number would be the biblical mark of the beast. There’s a certain dark humor in the way privacy is used to complain about identification cards but that only leads to the semi-regulated private data brokers being used by everyone, including the government, with purchased access to far more data.
In the US, significant fractions of both the Democrat and Republican parties are against anything that resembles a single national ID, for different longstanding reasons. And the legal hurdles are high enough that it would require both parties actively working together to effect material change, so even if one of them had a change of heart it wouldn't matter.
I cannot fathom the error in logic that yields the conclusion that elected governments having a SQL table with a primary key constraint is somehow "the same thing" as the authoritarian abuses of power by a single-party communist dictatorship.
A number on a piece of paper is not the root cause of secret police brutally cracking down on dissidents!
The possession of power and the misuse of power are of course different things.
But knowledge of the full population is particularly corrosive kind of power. It can reveal negative information - one can query for all people without a donation to political party, for example.
>The logic is: “Only communist governments know who their citizens are.”
The logic is actually "That which I wish to control or destroy, I must first enumerate/name."
A Government that exists only to administer (and not control the populace), has no need to know who all it's citizen's are. Merely to know who is involved in the limited processes being administered.
Sadly, all common sense around that seems to have evaporated since 2001 in the U.S. It seems like only those of us left who experienced the pre-9/11 world are doing a terrible job at instilling a picture of a government that's not all "Big Brother is watching" in the younger generations. The gluttony of Law Enforcement and the IC for a Single Identification Number to unify and enumerate every flesh and blood person wandering around cannot be overstated.
"You can't improve(manage) that which you can't measure."
In practice, all government departments in all countries have databases with primary key identifiers in them.
We can do this accurately and efficiently, or we can continue to insist on doing it inaccurately and inefficiently because of "Red Scare" propaganda.
You are proposing that you prefer your government to be slow, inefficient, inept, and vulnerable to fraud and corruption.
I prefer my government agencies to not waste my time, not confuse me with similarly named people, etc...
This is a real problem that occurs every day, versus the slippery-slope arguments that derive from anti-communist hysteria.
Here's a real situation: Identical twins with the same name, because "John Sr is the son of John Sr for ten generations, and he didn't want to give up the tradition just because he had twins." That's a real story from a public school system where the kids were living at the same address, attending the same school, were born on the same day, in the same hospital, etc...
How would you disambiguate them? You would start with... assigning... a... unique... number perhaps?
The US did not require any data crunching from IBM or anyone else to genocide the Indians.
The entire line of thought is straight up propaganda from weird Christians who have a really weird cult belief that some id number is the mark of the beast and saw a great opportunity to lie about the holocaust (plenty of jews were murdered using no better data than "Wilhelm says he saw them praying last Saturday").
You can see the same stupidity in the talking point from 2nd amendment maximalists that the jews were only genocided because they gave up rights to own guns, or something to that effect, as if a population experiencing genocide would have qualms about illegal firearms.
If you think the lack of records-keeping is protection against genocide, or has ever prevented one in the history of the world, then I have some bad news for you.
>How would you disambiguate them? You would start with... assigning... a... unique... number perhaps?
Yep. That's how. Now lets see what inevitably gets built once you do that.
Now do you that mapping to a Federal system, which maps that ID to a set of tables including a map to every other every other organization's ids relevant to that individual such that one can essentially completely hose someone via the "Sanction this individual in particular where (subquery). This system has already been built in the Financial sector, it's called OFAC. More advanced integrations are in progress. Look up "Fusion Centers".
Do I think that's a worthy trade in case that gets in the wrong hands? Fuck no.
Should those same systems be free to be "privately built and transacted for business purposes" in a way that utterly sidesteps prohibitions against the Government directly building that dataset themselves, resulting in 3rd party SaaS queries through Data Brokers? See LexisNexis, Palantir, or any of the Credit Bureaus or other data brokers. Also telecoms selling location data. Or automotive manufacturers feeding telematics to insurers or Law Enforcement.
Worthy trade for the risk? ?Hell no.
You can have a world where nightmare abuses of these types of systems are outright impossible, or you can have a world that's incrementally more efficient, but you must accept these abuses being realizable. That's an XOR there. There is no escaping it.
Certainty of abuse has probability 1. How do I know? Because I've been tempted to do as much before, and I know that I am an uncharacteristically extreme example of someone that thinks something through before committing to it, and it's only by doing so that I've managed to avoid implementing that very thing. 98% of people will not hold themselves to at least the the rigor I have. There are people far too pragmatic to be bothered by such things as ideals or edge cases; which is necessary to deal with when you're talking about enabling top down practicable social targeting systems. We are not special. It will not be different this time. Our nature is not such that we can safely discount these sorts of things.
The enemy is among us, and they are us. I don't fear communists. I fear the paperclip maximizing zealots among us who will sacrifice everything in pursuit of thrir goal. I've been one of them.
I will not subject those down the road to a working Panopticon. I will not build that lever. I'm sorry. I will consign you to a fate wherein you suffer from an occasional bureacratic mixup, but you will never once need worry that some madman is sitting on the button that causes you to lose access to everything instantly. That will allow a faceless bureaucracy to control your access in real time. To know your every move, all the time. I'd rather you be free. That you be unmanageable. That the mechanisms of external social coercion not be perfect. For without those spaces, there is no room for freedom. Only not currently having your chain jerked. Know that if ever you are subdued by the machinations of the technophile, it will not have been I that forged those chains.
Just because you can build something, doesn't mean you should.
Just because you can measure something, doesn't mean you should build the yardstick.
It does not follow that something you can't currently measure must have a measure built, and then as a consequence of it's measurability then be managed.
Those that seek power will beseech you to build these things for them. It is your job to see these things for what they are, and learn to be able to say "No."
Maybe the US is just particularly broken? It is not like countries with robust, state-run ID systems are all some sort of dictatorial or even data hellscape.
From my point of view it's a theoretical gamble. Canada, the U.S.'s neighbor to the north, already abised their OFAC equivalent against people protesting the actions of their Federal Government. Whether you agreed with why the people were protesting, think about that really, really, hard*. Your access to every asset cut off for what amounts to a political issue. At no other time in history, has such an action been possible in so short a time. At no point in time has one sitting in a chair on the other side of the country can completely change your life situation with a tap of the enter key.
We only have these systems implemented currently in places like finance or immigration, or National Civil Service, but by and large, most people are relatively ignorant of the increasingly broad reach of these systems, while at the same time, these systems grow to become more and more attractive targets for both hostile subversion, or just those seeking a means to power.
Historically, we had in built safeties to these sorts of systems because they consisted largely of individual human beings. Each component weighing in in such a way where even the most extreme individual at the top setting off the action potential would on average be damped. Either by non-cooperation of constituent parts (conscientious objection), dropping of signal (not enough people or resources to execute).
With computerization, we're removing more and more of that damping; we're entering a phase of civilization where we're increasingly in danger of our technological capability outstripping our civilizational capability to introspect all the links in the chain for one, and to restore things. It ain't a case of "a man can't do much damage in 4 years" anymore.
Propaganda is a very effective tool. People internalise it to the point that it becomes a part of their personal identity, and it becomes a part of the ambient societal discourse. It's like the air you breathe. You don't even realise that you're breathing until someone tells you that you are.
Conversely, it is trivial to identify foreigners influenced by propaganda. You see the effect, but are not subject to the cause. It's like seeing a fish in a body water. You immediately think to yourself: "There's a fish in the water", but the fish doesn't think it's swimming in water. If you could ask it somehow, it would ask: "What is water?"
PS: There are quite a few topics like this where if you ask any American, you get some specific propaganda in response, but if you ask literally anybody else on the entire planet -- the other 96% of the human population -- you'll get slow blinking and maybe a "wtf!?" instead.
All three of them are very heavily propogandised for decades now by very-well funded lobby groups... in the US. Elsewhere people are like: "No, the Saudis did!", "Illegal!", "Wat!?", and "Of course!"
Sigh. I'm fully aware the propaganda of which you speak. Thank you very much. Yes, I know it's origins. No, it is not the stem of my dislike of these systems. Please stop trying to reduce it to "crazy American Red Scare mumbo jumbo".
I have spent decades watching the ways human beings interact with and use computers. I've made it my life's work to pick apart technological systems and how they have been applied to societal problems, and what the various outcomes are.
It is a fact that automation which removes dependence on other humans acts as a power multiplier to it's owner. It is a fact that as we remove more individual actors from things, decisions will be skewed more and more to the extremes of the component actors of the system. It is a fact that since the industrial revolution, and the introduction of industrial business machines, the acts of artifice and processes we are capable of creating have become more and more capable of facilitating industry fuelled process pipelines capable of generating great casualties. The last century having some very shining examples of how things can go wrong, and the bloody U.S. from 2016-2020 having gone through it's first brush with a certifiable psychopath in the Chief Executive seat.
I have had the everloving shit scared out of me, and much of my naive techno-optimism knocked out of me. I've now had a shining example of "what could a smart psychotic, amoral person do with this system" added to my "should I make this system?" calculus.
I look at cases of "everything is just fine..." non-U.S. posters entertain, and I just end up affixing "for now. Your psychopath in charge just hasn't come up yet.
India has it's Modi. China jas Xi. Putin's saber rattling again. Britain is chasing itself through fear into becoming what Orwell had nightmares of more and more every year. I listen to elders who think that "oh, just trust everyone else", that I then half to clean up the mess of afterward when their implicit trust in others ends up being violated.
I wish my misgivings were as easy to cure as innoculation to Red Scare propaganda. That was easy. I saw through that before getting out of middle school. This is much harder. My generation hasn't faired well in managing to build trust or emotional stability which scares the crap out of me for the odds of not leveraging technical advancement to unmake something beautiful that ultimately I still believe, or try to believe in. I love the American Experiment. I want to believe we are by and large good, virtuous, and comparatively enlightened people capable of maintaining a government that places as a priority maintaining a state of Liberty without degenerating into a mess social control mechanisms laying around waiting for the sufficiently motivated and intelligent psychopaths to pick up and orchestrate.
So again, sorry to bust your bubble. I could write volumes on this topic, but I don't feel like letting this degenerate into rambling anymore than it already has.
In the USA, non-citizens (legal permanent residents aka "green card" holders) can't get passports. They can get state-level drivers licenses but only citizens can get passports from the centralized-level Federal government.
> In the USA, non-citizens (legal permanent residents aka "green card" holders) can't get passports.
Is there a reason they can't get a passport from their country of citizenship?
Plus, passports are fully standardized, at least the biometric ones are. It's possible to read and verify the data on a biometric passport entirely offline using open source applications that implement the documented processes.
Green cards are effectively entry-only passports (from the perspective of the US).
You can enter the country by land with just the GC with no passport. Additionally, if you arrive by air and you have global entry they don't look at your passport at all, just the GC.
> In the USA, non-citizens (legal permanent residents aka “green card” holders) can’t get passports.
Yes, but legal permanent residents (and some other legally resident aliens) also have federally-issued ID, and its not optional the way passports are for citizens. (For LPRs, the Permanent Resident Card, for others the Employment Authorization Document or Immigrant Visa.)
Yes but they definitely have centralized id - the 'Alien Registration Card' itself. Technically, lawful permanent residents are supposed to carry it at all times.
A passport is an ID. However, it is not mandatory and some State governments do not recognize it as a valid ID for legal purposes. In the US, the power to issue authoritative IDs resides with the individual States, not the Federal government, which creates many interesting edge cases.
I don't believe this is true, and the reason I don't is that this question nerdsniped me and I looked up every state and found that they all, every one of them, including the ones that made me click into PDFs to verify the fact, accept passports as identification in order to obtain Real ID drivers licenses.
Hah, thanks, I sort of suspected as much, weird as US id stuff is. Like if you'd told me 20+ years ago that the federal government can't get states to standardize their ids even in full anti-terrorism super saiyan mode, I'd have thought that was bullshit too.
I recognize that percentage-wise, dissapointingly few US citizens have passports. I suppose it's more linked to economic status than anything else.
But I was merely rebutting the parent's statement that there is no centrally issued ID in the USA, in the context of ironic use for a base layer for "decentralized" identity.
It's too bad the article focused on that nonsense instead of, what good is a decentralized identity -- if it can't assert your actual physical identity.
