3 ms·

Why is this a thing? Why not sign it with a proper digital certificate? In my country we can sign documents with our id card.

ceejayoz 7y ago
The USA doesn't have a national ID card.
- bagacrap 7y ago
  Passport
  - tecleandor 7y ago
    Not everybody has a passport. A Passport costs more than a hundred dollars. Not everybody is eligible to a passport. For having a passport you need nationality, and you need to be able to have contracts with non national persons.
    - PeterisP 7y ago
      Your comment about nationality seems interesting - it's a fundamental human right to have nationality (https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Pages/Nationality.aspx); https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Pages/Nationality.aspx); what do you mean by "non national persons" ? The common mass cases e.g. illegal immigrants are not non-national persons, they're just nationals of some other country. There are certain edge cases that result in stateless people, but the general solution for that is for states to work to assign nationality, it's definitely reasonable in many countries to not be able to have standard contracts with such people until they get their identity documents issued.
      - tecleandor 7y ago
        I might live in in a country I'm not a national, so I don't have a local passport. Illegals often cross borders without papers, so they don't have any passports to sign anything. Sorry I'm brief, but I'm super busy today :P
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    https://blogs.voanews.com/all-about-america/2018/01/18/record-number-of-americans-hold-passports/ https://blogs.voanews.com/all-about-america/2018/01/18/recor... > That means 42 percent of Americans hold a passport, a growth of 15 percent since 2007. In 1990, only four percent of Americans had one.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    That's not actually not an ID card dumb as it seems. It's an IOU that says that a collection of documents that are enough to prove your identity to the government were produced to an agent. It's a cert. Assuming the "standard path" in the US the pieces of your ID are your birth record, any court ordered name changes (like if you got married), your social security card, and a previous cert that ties the name to a photo. I know it's pedantic but god damn it's annoying as hell that a passport doesn't actually prove anything or else you could always do $old_valid_passport + $valid_photo = $new_passport but nope. Sometimes you hit special cases that drop you into having to prove your identity from your ID documents all over again.
- fl0wenol 7y ago
  Some Americans have CACs, which will do the trick. But that's a narrow circumstance.

ceejayoz 7y ago

The USA doesn't have a national ID card.

bagacrap 7y ago
Passport
- tecleandor 7y ago
  Not everybody has a passport. A Passport costs more than a hundred dollars. Not everybody is eligible to a passport. For having a passport you need nationality, and you need to be able to have contracts with non national persons.
  - PeterisP 7y ago
    Your comment about nationality seems interesting - it's a fundamental human right to have nationality (https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Pages/Nationality.aspx); https://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Pages/Nationality.aspx); what do you mean by "non national persons" ? The common mass cases e.g. illegal immigrants are not non-national persons, they're just nationals of some other country. There are certain edge cases that result in stateless people, but the general solution for that is for states to work to assign nationality, it's definitely reasonable in many countries to not be able to have standard contracts with such people until they get their identity documents issued.
    - tecleandor 7y ago
      I might live in in a country I'm not a national, so I don't have a local passport. Illegals often cross borders without papers, so they don't have any passports to sign anything. Sorry I'm brief, but I'm super busy today :P
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  https://blogs.voanews.com/all-about-america/2018/01/18/record-number-of-americans-hold-passports/ https://blogs.voanews.com/all-about-america/2018/01/18/recor... > That means 42 percent of Americans hold a passport, a growth of 15 percent since 2007. In 1990, only four percent of Americans had one.
- Spivak 7y ago
  That's not actually not an ID card dumb as it seems. It's an IOU that says that a collection of documents that are enough to prove your identity to the government were produced to an agent. It's a cert. Assuming the "standard path" in the US the pieces of your ID are your birth record, any court ordered name changes (like if you got married), your social security card, and a previous cert that ties the name to a photo. I know it's pedantic but god damn it's annoying as hell that a passport doesn't actually prove anything or else you could always do $old_valid_passport + $valid_photo = $new_passport but nope. Sometimes you hit special cases that drop you into having to prove your identity from your ID documents all over again.
fl0wenol 7y ago
Some Americans have CACs, which will do the trick. But that's a narrow circumstance.