What's the concern about national ID and political enemies?
First, your life is already pretty bad if you don't have either federal or state ID at all. It's hard to drive, it's hard to fly, it's hard to get a paycheck. (You can live off the land in the middle of nowhere and avoid contact with the outside world, but you're not much of a political enemy for anyone if you do.)
So, your data is already in some sort of database, and if the authorities want to make your life bad, they can do it whether or not you happen to be carrying an ID on you. They've got facial recognition databases that are plugged into all of the various state IDs.
And you don't have to be compelled to carry your ID with you. This can be solved by saying, if you want certain government services, you have to have an ID. We do this for the very simple government service of public roads, and it doesn't seem like that's been a step down a slippery slope. I think it's important that we not live in a "Papers, please" society, but I don't think that's a necessary consequence of a national ID program.
What's the concern about national ID and political enemies?
Because America has seen what happens when it's used in other countries.
The HN crowd is mostly too young to remember these sorts of things, or to have learned about them in school. But it's a very short ride from "What's the big deal with national IDs?" to "SELECT * FROM 'residents' WHERE 'religion' = 'jewish' ORDER BY 'national_id';"
I answered that objection already, I thought. If you want to find every Cohen in the country, you can do so from state driver's licenses, birth certificates, voter registration data (which is public!), tax records, E-Verify, social security, whatever. If you want to find everyone who's traveled to a "terrorist" nation in the last few years, USCIS already has that data.
Sure, the government rounding up people by religion is bad and worth protecting against. I do not follow the argument that blocking a national ID actually protects against this in any meaningful way.
(Also, uh, don't put a religion field in your national ID?)
But the government already has all the data about you. Just in lots of places and kind of disorganised I guess.
I see that having an ID number for everyone would better help to organise the data and let the government offer better services. Like.. when one deparment has asked for my address then it stores it somewhere, and when some other department needs it, then it gets it from the database, and doesn't have to ask for it again, and again and again on every interaction.
Right - the problem with "the government shouldn't be too competent so that it can't competently do harm" (which my gut wants to agree with) is that the parts that do good are unloved and unfunded and the parts that do harm will figure out a way to make it happen, usually because the harm benefits someone in power and the good does not.
I think it's about propaganda and "symbols". Americans view the concept of a national ID as a symbol of federal government oppression.
I completely agree that a national ID would not enable the US government to do anything that it can't already do. But enough people in the US react to this sort of thing emotionally, not logically.
Technically we already do have a national ID: the passport. But relatively few Americans actually hold passports (when compared to, say, Europeans), and the federal and state governments would get a lot of push-back if they required passports for common things like banking. Hell, there are enough un- and under-banked people in the US due to other socioeconomic barriers; adding another would not be great.
The issue is that the only practical reason to have a national id is to implement a “papers please” society.
The same can be said for databases that keep logs of facial recognition and license plate camera feeds.
(Both are widely deployed in the US, but don’t seem to be usable in cases involving crimes against individuals. I think they’re reserved for “terrorism”, victimless crimes, etc.)
This thread started off with a very practical reason to have a national ID - the ability to authenticate who receives COVID relief checks. My question was in response to someone who believed that this was a legitimate purpose for a national ID and was nonetheless concerned about them.
First, your life is already pretty bad if you don't have either federal or state ID at all. It's hard to drive, it's hard to fly, it's hard to get a paycheck. (You can live off the land in the middle of nowhere and avoid contact with the outside world, but you're not much of a political enemy for anyone if you do.)
So, your data is already in some sort of database, and if the authorities want to make your life bad, they can do it whether or not you happen to be carrying an ID on you. They've got facial recognition databases that are plugged into all of the various state IDs.
And you don't have to be compelled to carry your ID with you. This can be solved by saying, if you want certain government services, you have to have an ID. We do this for the very simple government service of public roads, and it doesn't seem like that's been a step down a slippery slope. I think it's important that we not live in a "Papers, please" society, but I don't think that's a necessary consequence of a national ID program.