> Norway is a bit unusual in the way it handles ID No, it is the US and the UK which is a bit unusual in the way it handles government ID. A functioning democ

> Norway is a bit unusual in the way it handles ID No, it is the US and the UK which is a bit unusual in the way it handles government ID. A functioning democratic government needs to know who is a citizen and who is not, in order to guarantee their citizen's rights. It may be a right to education, owning property and if not anything else then at least the basic right to vote. All this require identity. You can not show up at the doorstep of the UK and demand a pension or unemployment benefits. You need to identify as a citizen with the right to this. You can not show up at the bank and demand money from an arbitrary account. You need to identify as the legitimate owner. > We’ve seen how they can be abused people in power seeking to persecute part of a population That's not it. All this information is available in government databases. It must be, and it is. It's just the identification that's handled differently in a select few countries. It's not as if these countries have stronger data protection laws, to explain the weaker forms of identification. In fact, you'd be forgiven to think it is the other way around. Somehow it is only society itself which should use weak forms of identification, the same objections are not raised against certificates and two factor authentication by banks. Having spend some time in one of the mentioned countries a number of years ago, my impression was that it is mostly a matter that this is a symbolic question of having a strong government. Contrary to popular belief, there are influential forces that desires an ineffective government, to bolster political ideas about the economy. Nowhere is this more obvious than in identification and taxation, perhaps the two most important mechanism of a modern Western democracy. This is probably not a coincidence.