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>The rapid expenditure of COVID emergency relief payments highlighted the critical importance of having a resilient instant payments infrastructure with nationw

by vxNsr 6y ago

>The rapid expenditure of COVID emergency relief payments highlighted the critical importance of having a resilient instant payments infrastructure with nationwide reach, especially for households and small businesses with cash flow constraints," The main issue with releasing cash as I understand it wasn’t that it wasn’t arriving fast enough; rather it was verifying the recipient was eligible and was who they say they were. The only way to solve that as I see it is with a national ID which I am more against the more I hear about the abuses that both democrats and republicans do with what little power they have to identify political enemies. Obviously ACH could be faster but when it comes to getting gov money back I just don’t see how the 2 extra days was the issue.

beaunative 6y ago
ACH could still be expedited even with the need to verifying identity. Technically it only need to demonstrate that the identity of receiver and the identity of the referred bank account are consistent, a national id won't be necessary. Fed is not technically a branch of the government.
- TheSoftwareGuy 6y ago
  The fed is absolutely an agency of the us government: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm >The Federal Reserve System is not "owned" by anyone. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 by the Federal Reserve Act to serve as the nation's central bank. The Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., is an agency of the federal government and reports to and is directly accountable to the Congress.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > fed is absolutely an agency of the us government It’s absolutely not a government agency but also absolutely not privately owned. It’s best thought of as a non-governmental entity that is strongly influenced—and sanctioned—by the government, but does not operate underneath it. This is why e.g. the Fed and Treasury negotiated how losses fell from the Main Street lending program. And if you visit a Fed, one of the first things their employees like to point out is that they’re NOT federal employees.
    - throw0101a 6y ago
      > It’s absolutely not a government agency but also absolutely not privately owned. The closest analogy is that it's a co-op: > Some observers mistakenly consider the Federal Reserve to be a private entity because the Reserve Banks are organized similarly to private corporations. For instance, each of the 12 Reserve Banks operates within its own particular geographic area, or District, of the United States, and each is separately incorporated and has its own board of directors. Commercial banks that are members of the Federal Reserve System hold stock in their District's Reserve Bank. However, owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company. The Reserve Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System. In fact, the Reserve Banks are required by law to transfer net earnings to the U.S. Treasury, after providing for all necessary expenses of the Reserve Banks, legally required dividend payments, and maintaining a limited balance in a surplus fund. * https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  It’s got nothing to do with that. ACH is a batch processing system written in COBOL in the 1970s. Nothing is going to get rid of the batch nature of the system except a new system based on asynchronous messaging. That’s what FedNow is.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    The issue with ACH isn't the batch nature, it's that banks on both sides of the transaction are allowed a fairly long amount of time (upwards of a business day) to decide whether to accept or decline the transaction. If they decide immediately, it can go faster, but they don't have to, and many banks have no incentive to work on processing faster. They could still use a batch processing system, and just process the batches once per hour, or half hour, or whatever. It would still be slower than some newly-designed instant payments system, but could potentially be more palatable within the current system.
    - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      > no incentive to work on processing faster Not sure I agree. How about the incentive to prevent customers using competing services like Venmo and others? Also the incentive to quickly receive funds into bank coffers so the bank can lend it faster. Presumably, increasing the ACH batch frequency would break something in the system or it would already have been done.
      - vxNsr 6y ago
        ACH is used either to get paid by an employee or to move money between accounts, neither of those things are that easy to do with Venmo, in fact zelle was created to compete with Venmo and it addresses that competition so nicely that many of my friends have moved to it.
Krasnol 6y ago
How is a national ID still a thread with all the data on voters which is already out there? You could have verified voters accounted this way too which would probably raise the amount of voters. You could even establish mail voting properly sending the documents to everybody who's eligible without a need to register. I don't understand that fear of a national ID in the US. It works in other countries and you have stuff like the Social Security Number too.
- kelnos 6y ago
  The GOP doesn't want more people voting; they hang onto power mainly through gerrymandering and various voter suppression measures.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    The GOP doesn't want more people voting; they hang onto power mainly through gerrymandering and various voter suppression measures. If you think this is unique to the GOP, you missed the last century of politics in Chicago.
    - vinay427 6y ago
      They weren't saying it was unique to the GOP, and your comment almost makes it sound like the two major parties are equivalent in this respect. At a national level, I think their point stands. I find this distinction actually relevant here given the current renewed interest in a higher nationwide standard for voting accessibility and representation. Also, consider that the states with independent redistricting commissions to mitigate or prevent gerrymandering are all historically left-leaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_commission
- kube-system 6y ago
  A national ID wouldn't change anything about voting in the US. The US national government doesn't run elections. Elections in the US are run by state governments, who already issue the IDs that most Americans use.
gizmo686 6y ago
We already have a national ID. It is called social security, and it is bad at its job because it was explicitly not supposed to be a national ID when it was created.
- vxNsr 6y ago
  Right ssn is part of the problem. It’s used as a national I’d despite being terrible for the job. I didn’t wanna make my comment too long, but I have a lot of issues w how SSN is used.
- mjevans 6y ago
  Alternately, every flipping service that demands you identify with a phone number (or billable credit card); which is being used as a proxy for an ID.
  - Shared404 6y ago
    > demands you identify with a phone number... I recently found jmp.chat [0] which provides an easy workaround for this. [0] https://jmp.chat https://jmp.chat
    - techsupporter 6y ago
      The problem with jmp.chat and Google Voice and all of their kin (all of those "disposable number" or "second line" apps on the various app stores) is the numbers provided by them are SMS-capable VoIP numbers and a significant minority of businesses will flatly refuse to allow users to use that type of numbers. T-Mobile's DIGITS service was fantastic for this, at least for doing SMS with a number not attached to the SIM you have inserted in your phone, but they blocked almost all short-code senders when the service entered production. What I do these days is give banks and businesses a mobile number attached to the second SIM in my iPhone. That number is on a prepaid carrier under a completely different name and address than mine. There's the non-zero chance that someday I'll have to "prove" who I am to that prepaid carrier and won't be able to prove that name. The odds of that are a lot lower than the odds of having my main number snatched from my mobile carrier just by an attacker knowing the last four digits of my SSN and persuading a customer service rep to swap SIMs on the "strength" of knowing this information.
foxfired 6y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Real ID act[1] is a national ID in every way but the name. [1]: https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/real-id-act-text.pdf https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/real-id-act-text.pdf
- vxNsr 6y ago
  Real ID is very worrying and I’m hopeful that it eventually goes away as it keeps getting delayed.
  - amiga_500 6y ago
    I just cannot understand how you guys accept bad cops, bad healthcare, bad employment rights, bad social mobility, bad education and bad banks, but apparently national id is where you draw the line. Why didn't you draw the line before all this other stuff that is far behind much of Europe? ------ can't reply directly to the GDP comment as some cry baby has flagged my post and then a free speech loving mod has shadow-banned me with "you're submitting too fast". ---- GDP comparison in $$ terms is a really uninformative comparison. Even between states inside the USA it doesn't work due to different land costs. --- social mobility: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-of-82-countries/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-... USA: 27th. Like the UK, the place you were supposed to break free from - anyone can make it!
    - XMPPwocky 6y ago
      Well, are we supposed to not resist this bad thing because there are other, worse things? That seems less than helpful.
      - amiga_500 6y ago
        I'm expecting you guys to give up on this, just like all the other stuff. Downvote away, but you've lost so many rights since the 1960s, with barely a peep.
geofft 6y ago
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.
- kelnos 6y ago
  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.
- hedora 6y ago
  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.)
  - 6y ago
throw0101a 6y ago
> […] a national ID which I am more against the more I hear about […] The US already has a de facto one AFAICT: the Social Security Number (SSN). Unique to every individual, assigned from birth (or whenever applied for), and which never changes for the life of the person until they die. > Many countries issued such numbers for a singular purpose, but over time, they become a de facto national identification number. For example, the United States developed its Social Security number (SSN) system as a means of organizing disbursing of Social Security benefits. However, due to function creep, the number has become used for other purposes to the point where it is almost essential to have one to, among other things, open a bank account, obtain a credit card, or drive a car. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identification_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identification_number
- greggyb 6y ago
  Unfortunately.... > Unique to every individual https://www.pcworld.com/article/3004654/a-tale-of-two-women-same-birthday-same-social-security-number-same-big-data-mess.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/3004654/a-tale-of-two-women-... > assigned from birth (or whenever applied for) Sort of. Mostly yes, but not for everyone. As social security and medicare are de facto insurance policies, there are populations in the U.S. which object to them, and are not required to register, and therefore do not have SSNs. The Amish are one group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Non-universal_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Non-uni... > and which never changes for the life of the person until they die. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Replacement_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Replace... Note that one valid, accepted reason for issuing a replacement is when a duplicate has been issues. And finally, as anyone who has ever worked in records management for a large institution that happens to receive SSN information, an SSN very explicitly is not a candidate primary key for an identifier of an individual. Everyone I've met who has tried has horror stories to tell. SSNs are not primary keys for individuals in the U.S.
- endogui 6y ago
  The SSN is not an ID but a number: anyone with your number can claim to be you for the purposes of transactions. The number is only tied to name and birthdate, maybe address if you are of the age to pay taxes. This enables a lot of fraud: I once saw someone apply for a rewards (credit) card in a US store with SSN and no photo ID ("Oh I left my drivers license at home, could you take a student ID?") Not sure how Europe handles this, but here in Korea phone numbers are tied to government-issued photo IDs. Sellers of phones have to fax ID scans to the central office for verification. Remote transactions such as signing up for a credit card require phone name + first half of ID + phone number 2FA at a minimum. As a result, I'm not aware of any cases of identity theft. US infrastructure is so broken.
CyberDildonics 6y ago
Why would there need to be any more ID systems in place for a payments system that just goes faster? What about bank transfers and business transfers? Why would there need to be a 'national ID' or any new system created?

by vxNsr 6y ago

beaunative 6y ago

ACH could still be expedited even with the need to verifying identity. Technically it only need to demonstrate that the identity of receiver and the identity of the referred bank account are consistent, a national id won't be necessary. Fed is not technically a branch of the government.

TheSoftwareGuy 6y ago
The fed is absolutely an agency of the us government: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm >The Federal Reserve System is not "owned" by anyone. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913 by the Federal Reserve Act to serve as the nation's central bank. The Board of Governors in Washington, D.C., is an agency of the federal government and reports to and is directly accountable to the Congress.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > fed is absolutely an agency of the us government It’s absolutely not a government agency but also absolutely not privately owned. It’s best thought of as a non-governmental entity that is strongly influenced—and sanctioned—by the government, but does not operate underneath it. This is why e.g. the Fed and Treasury negotiated how losses fell from the Main Street lending program. And if you visit a Fed, one of the first things their employees like to point out is that they’re NOT federal employees.
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    > It’s absolutely not a government agency but also absolutely not privately owned. The closest analogy is that it's a co-op: > Some observers mistakenly consider the Federal Reserve to be a private entity because the Reserve Banks are organized similarly to private corporations. For instance, each of the 12 Reserve Banks operates within its own particular geographic area, or District, of the United States, and each is separately incorporated and has its own board of directors. Commercial banks that are members of the Federal Reserve System hold stock in their District's Reserve Bank. However, owning Reserve Bank stock is quite different from owning stock in a private company. The Reserve Banks are not operated for profit, and ownership of a certain amount of stock is, by law, a condition of membership in the System. In fact, the Reserve Banks are required by law to transfer net earnings to the U.S. Treasury, after providing for all necessary expenses of the Reserve Banks, legally required dividend payments, and maintaining a limited balance in a surplus fund. * https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/about_14986.htm
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
It’s got nothing to do with that. ACH is a batch processing system written in COBOL in the 1970s. Nothing is going to get rid of the batch nature of the system except a new system based on asynchronous messaging. That’s what FedNow is.
- kelnos 6y ago
  The issue with ACH isn't the batch nature, it's that banks on both sides of the transaction are allowed a fairly long amount of time (upwards of a business day) to decide whether to accept or decline the transaction. If they decide immediately, it can go faster, but they don't have to, and many banks have no incentive to work on processing faster. They could still use a batch processing system, and just process the batches once per hour, or half hour, or whatever. It would still be slower than some newly-designed instant payments system, but could potentially be more palatable within the current system.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    > no incentive to work on processing faster Not sure I agree. How about the incentive to prevent customers using competing services like Venmo and others? Also the incentive to quickly receive funds into bank coffers so the bank can lend it faster. Presumably, increasing the ACH batch frequency would break something in the system or it would already have been done.
    - vxNsr 6y ago
      ACH is used either to get paid by an employee or to move money between accounts, neither of those things are that easy to do with Venmo, in fact zelle was created to compete with Venmo and it addresses that competition so nicely that many of my friends have moved to it.

Krasnol 6y ago

How is a national ID still a thread with all the data on voters which is already out there? You could have verified voters accounted this way too which would probably raise the amount of voters. You could even establish mail voting properly sending the documents to everybody who's eligible without a need to register. I don't understand that fear of a national ID in the US. It works in other countries and you have stuff like the Social Security Number too.

kelnos 6y ago
The GOP doesn't want more people voting; they hang onto power mainly through gerrymandering and various voter suppression measures.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  The GOP doesn't want more people voting; they hang onto power mainly through gerrymandering and various voter suppression measures. If you think this is unique to the GOP, you missed the last century of politics in Chicago.
  - vinay427 6y ago
    They weren't saying it was unique to the GOP, and your comment almost makes it sound like the two major parties are equivalent in this respect. At a national level, I think their point stands. I find this distinction actually relevant here given the current renewed interest in a higher nationwide standard for voting accessibility and representation. Also, consider that the states with independent redistricting commissions to mitigate or prevent gerrymandering are all historically left-leaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_commission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redistricting_commission
kube-system 6y ago
A national ID wouldn't change anything about voting in the US. The US national government doesn't run elections. Elections in the US are run by state governments, who already issue the IDs that most Americans use.

gizmo686 6y ago

We already have a national ID. It is called social security, and it is bad at its job because it was explicitly not supposed to be a national ID when it was created.

vxNsr 6y ago
Right ssn is part of the problem. It’s used as a national I’d despite being terrible for the job. I didn’t wanna make my comment too long, but I have a lot of issues w how SSN is used.
mjevans 6y ago
Alternately, every flipping service that demands you identify with a phone number (or billable credit card); which is being used as a proxy for an ID.
- Shared404 6y ago
  > demands you identify with a phone number... I recently found jmp.chat [0] which provides an easy workaround for this. [0] https://jmp.chat https://jmp.chat
  - techsupporter 6y ago
    The problem with jmp.chat and Google Voice and all of their kin (all of those "disposable number" or "second line" apps on the various app stores) is the numbers provided by them are SMS-capable VoIP numbers and a significant minority of businesses will flatly refuse to allow users to use that type of numbers. T-Mobile's DIGITS service was fantastic for this, at least for doing SMS with a number not attached to the SIM you have inserted in your phone, but they blocked almost all short-code senders when the service entered production. What I do these days is give banks and businesses a mobile number attached to the second SIM in my iPhone. That number is on a prepaid carrier under a completely different name and address than mine. There's the non-zero chance that someday I'll have to "prove" who I am to that prepaid carrier and won't be able to prove that name. The odds of that are a lot lower than the odds of having my main number snatched from my mobile carrier just by an attacker knowing the last four digits of my SSN and persuading a customer service rep to swap SIMs on the "strength" of knowing this information.

foxfired 6y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Real ID act[1] is a national ID in every way but the name. [1]: https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/real-id-act-text.pdf https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/real-id-act-text.pdf

vxNsr 6y ago
Real ID is very worrying and I’m hopeful that it eventually goes away as it keeps getting delayed.
- amiga_500 6y ago
  I just cannot understand how you guys accept bad cops, bad healthcare, bad employment rights, bad social mobility, bad education and bad banks, but apparently national id is where you draw the line. Why didn't you draw the line before all this other stuff that is far behind much of Europe? ------ can't reply directly to the GDP comment as some cry baby has flagged my post and then a free speech loving mod has shadow-banned me with "you're submitting too fast". ---- GDP comparison in $$ terms is a really uninformative comparison. Even between states inside the USA it doesn't work due to different land costs. --- social mobility: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-of-82-countries/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-... USA: 27th. Like the UK, the place you were supposed to break free from - anyone can make it!
  - XMPPwocky 6y ago
    Well, are we supposed to not resist this bad thing because there are other, worse things? That seems less than helpful.
    - amiga_500 6y ago
      I'm expecting you guys to give up on this, just like all the other stuff. Downvote away, but you've lost so many rights since the 1960s, with barely a peep.

geofft 6y ago

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.

kelnos 6y ago
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.
hedora 6y ago
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.)
- 6y ago

throw0101a 6y ago

> […] a national ID which I am more against the more I hear about […] The US already has a de facto one AFAICT: the Social Security Number (SSN). Unique to every individual, assigned from birth (or whenever applied for), and which never changes for the life of the person until they die. > Many countries issued such numbers for a singular purpose, but over time, they become a de facto national identification number. For example, the United States developed its Social Security number (SSN) system as a means of organizing disbursing of Social Security benefits. However, due to function creep, the number has become used for other purposes to the point where it is almost essential to have one to, among other things, open a bank account, obtain a credit card, or drive a car. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identification_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_identification_number

greggyb 6y ago
Unfortunately.... > Unique to every individual https://www.pcworld.com/article/3004654/a-tale-of-two-women-same-birthday-same-social-security-number-same-big-data-mess.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/3004654/a-tale-of-two-women-... > assigned from birth (or whenever applied for) Sort of. Mostly yes, but not for everyone. As social security and medicare are de facto insurance policies, there are populations in the U.S. which object to them, and are not required to register, and therefore do not have SSNs. The Amish are one group. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Non-universal_status https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Non-uni... > and which never changes for the life of the person until they die. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Replacement_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#Replace... Note that one valid, accepted reason for issuing a replacement is when a duplicate has been issues. And finally, as anyone who has ever worked in records management for a large institution that happens to receive SSN information, an SSN very explicitly is not a candidate primary key for an identifier of an individual. Everyone I've met who has tried has horror stories to tell. SSNs are not primary keys for individuals in the U.S.
endogui 6y ago
The SSN is not an ID but a number: anyone with your number can claim to be you for the purposes of transactions. The number is only tied to name and birthdate, maybe address if you are of the age to pay taxes. This enables a lot of fraud: I once saw someone apply for a rewards (credit) card in a US store with SSN and no photo ID ("Oh I left my drivers license at home, could you take a student ID?") Not sure how Europe handles this, but here in Korea phone numbers are tied to government-issued photo IDs. Sellers of phones have to fax ID scans to the central office for verification. Remote transactions such as signing up for a credit card require phone name + first half of ID + phone number 2FA at a minimum. As a result, I'm not aware of any cases of identity theft. US infrastructure is so broken.

CyberDildonics 6y ago

Why would there need to be any more ID systems in place for a payments system that just goes faster? What about bank transfers and business transfers? Why would there need to be a 'national ID' or any new system created?