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> everyone asks why don't we just thing that looks like a national identity system Aren't passports national/federal identity systems?

• snowwrestler 5y ago
  But not mandatory. You don’t need to get a passport unless you want to travel internationally. The question is whether the U.S. federal government can require all U.S. residents to get, carry, and provide a national form of identification. To my knowledge it cannot, but I’m not handy with a case citation to prove it. Watching the rest of this thread to see what people turn up. Note that Social Security numbers are explicitly not intended to be such IDs, although many services do use SSN as a key to distinguish people from one another.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > But not mandatory. Even state IDs aren’t generally mandatory in theory, they are mandatory for specific purposes. Like most proposed national IDs. Like Passports. Like Real ID. Like EDL. Like Military ID. Like… > The question is whether the U.S. federal government can require all U.S. residents to get, carry, and provide a national form of identification. No, its not. Literally no one is advocating that. Its actually pretty well established that even states, while they can require you to use ID for a whole lot of purposes, but can’t mandate that you carry and produce one generally.
    • snowwrestler 5y ago
      Thanks