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> If you are an American who has traveled internationally you have at least two distinct federally issued IDs, which can get out of sync and cause a huge headac
by bmitc 4y ago
> If you are an American who has traveled internationally you have at least two distinct federally issued IDs, which can get out of sync and cause a huge headache.
What IDs are you referring to and what’s the headache? Presumably one ID is a passport. From your first sentence, I would assume the second ID is a social security number, but how does it become “out of sync” with a passport?
- iudqnolq 4y agoThey could mean name changes
- Godel_unicode 4y agoI know people who have spent literally years trying to correct misspellings and incorrect DOB issues with State and SSA. Get a passport as a minor, change your name as an adult, realize SSA has your wrong bday, descend into bureaucracy hell as now both name and DOB don’t match.
- bmitc 4y agoAs far as I can tell, birth certificates are issued by states and name changes are done through states, so it isn’t clear to me how a name is a federally issued ID or even an ID. While I am sure the bureaucracy surrounding such discrepancies is enormous, I’m not for sure I understand how it relates to a discussion about national IDs. A passport is effectively an optional national ID, so none of these issues would be solved by a national ID.
- proser 4y agoIt's worse than that. Birth certificates are issued at the country level.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoExcept where they aren’t.
- bmitc 4y agoI think you have a typo and mean county?
- ghaff 4y agoAnd I'm guessing it varies by state how local the issuing authority is given that counties are barely a thing in some locales.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoHuh? A name is something which is on a federal ID, obviously it is not in and of itself a federal ID. The Social Security Administration (SSA) issues IDs at the federal level, which are applied for using state or county issued birth certificates (as well as other ways). They sometimes make clerical errors. Those errors can propagate into other federal identity databases, such as the taxpayer record system operated by the Internal Revenue Service or the passport database operated by the Department of State. The linkages between these systems are fragile or nonexistent, and if you are not careful about manually propagating changes between them you can end up in an inconsistent state which requires court action to rectify. Passports are often used in lieu of social security cards because people are (correctly!) leery about using their SSN directly. I know people who have no intention of traveling internationally who have gotten passports because it’s extremely convenient to have a federally issued photo id.
- halpmeh 4y agoIf you change your name, which is somewhat common for women to do after marriage.
- bmitc 4y agoA name is not a government ID. And aside from mistakes, what is the issue? If you change your name, get a new passport.
- halpmeh 4y agoIf you change your name, you need to update your information with social security and with the state department. That's how the two IDs can get out of sync. E.g. if someone was like "please bring your social security card and passport for verification" you could potentially have a name mis-match if you only updated your passport but didn't update your social security.
- ghaff 4y agoI haven't had an actual social security card for many decades since having a wallet stolen. And never needed it.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoThe fact that you do not physically possess your social security card does not mean that the federal government did not issue you one. So you Have it, you simply don’t have it on you. You haven’t needed it since it’s such a bad ID that if you know the number you often don’t need to possess the paper.
- ghaff 4y agoI've never been asked to present the paper over multiple decades and have never bothered to try to get a replacement.
- landemva 4y agoSSN is optional on the passport application. I simply leave that line blank. In fact, getting an SSN is optional and voluntary.