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Australia is the same. Even accessing federal systems involves a baroque system of multi-credential attestation where you nominally have a single “GovId” but in

Australia is the same. Even accessing federal systems involves a baroque system of multi-credential attestation where you nominally have a single “GovId” but in practice you have to jump through a bunch of hoops on a per-agency basis. The GovId itself is a weird amalgam of “n-of-m” identity papers. This all happened because back in the early 2000s there was an attempt at a single “Australia ID” but geriatrics had their brains pickled in decades of anti-communist propaganda and voted against it. The logic is: “Only communist governments know who their citizens are.” Democracies apparently have to be ignorant and easily exploited by criminals falsely claiming pensions and other benefits using easily forged identity papers.

acdha 3y ago
> This all happened because back in the early 2000s there was an attempt at a single “Australia ID” but geriatrics had their brains pickled in decades of anti-communist propaganda and voted against it. This is similar to how the U.S. has a certain amount of opposition from Christian sects who believe any sort of national ID number would be the biblical mark of the beast. There’s a certain dark humor in the way privacy is used to complain about identification cards but that only leads to the semi-regulated private data brokers being used by everyone, including the government, with purchased access to far more data.
spacebanana7 3y ago
> geriatrics had their brains pickled in decades of anti-communist propaganda and voted against it. Isn’t the CCP’s behaviour still one of the best arguments against universal government ID?
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  I cannot fathom the error in logic that yields the conclusion that elected governments having a SQL table with a primary key constraint is somehow "the same thing" as the authoritarian abuses of power by a single-party communist dictatorship. A number on a piece of paper is not the root cause of secret police brutally cracking down on dissidents!
  - spacebanana7 3y ago
    The possession of power and the misuse of power are of course different things. But knowledge of the full population is particularly corrosive kind of power. It can reveal negative information - one can query for all people without a donation to political party, for example.
    - jiggawatts 3y ago
      Only if that data is in the same table. The primary key is just a number, and tells you nothing other than perhaps roughly when you were born (if it is sequentially allocated).
- arlort 3y ago
  No. In fact the entire thing that makes Chinese surveillance so bad is that they don't need an ID to identify you
  - spacebanana7 3y ago
    Universal government ID allows your identity to be very efficiently communicated between different public/private sector agencies. That's how your local CCTV camera catching you jaywalking could communicate to your bank that you should be fined.
salawat 3y ago
>The logic is: “Only communist governments know who their citizens are.” The logic is actually "That which I wish to control or destroy, I must first enumerate/name." A Government that exists only to administer (and not control the populace), has no need to know who all it's citizen's are. Merely to know who is involved in the limited processes being administered. Sadly, all common sense around that seems to have evaporated since 2001 in the U.S. It seems like only those of us left who experienced the pre-9/11 world are doing a terrible job at instilling a picture of a government that's not all "Big Brother is watching" in the younger generations. The gluttony of Law Enforcement and the IC for a Single Identification Number to unify and enumerate every flesh and blood person wandering around cannot be overstated.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  "You can't improve(manage) that which you can't measure." In practice, all government departments in all countries have databases with primary key identifiers in them. We can do this accurately and efficiently, or we can continue to insist on doing it inaccurately and inefficiently because of "Red Scare" propaganda. You are proposing that you prefer your government to be slow, inefficient, inept, and vulnerable to fraud and corruption. I prefer my government agencies to not waste my time, not confuse me with similarly named people, etc... This is a real problem that occurs every day, versus the slippery-slope arguments that derive from anti-communist hysteria. Here's a real situation: Identical twins with the same name, because "John Sr is the son of John Sr for ten generations, and he didn't want to give up the tradition just because he had twins." That's a real story from a public school system where the kids were living at the same address, attending the same school, were born on the same day, in the same hospital, etc... How would you disambiguate them? You would start with... assigning... a... unique... number perhaps?
  - salawat 3y ago
    >How would you disambiguate them? You would start with... assigning... a... unique... number perhaps? Yep. That's how. Now lets see what inevitably gets built once you do that. Now do you that mapping to a Federal system, which maps that ID to a set of tables including a map to every other every other organization's ids relevant to that individual such that one can essentially completely hose someone via the "Sanction this individual in particular where (subquery). This system has already been built in the Financial sector, it's called OFAC. More advanced integrations are in progress. Look up "Fusion Centers". Do I think that's a worthy trade in case that gets in the wrong hands? Fuck no. Should those same systems be free to be "privately built and transacted for business purposes" in a way that utterly sidesteps prohibitions against the Government directly building that dataset themselves, resulting in 3rd party SaaS queries through Data Brokers? See LexisNexis, Palantir, or any of the Credit Bureaus or other data brokers. Also telecoms selling location data. Or automotive manufacturers feeding telematics to insurers or Law Enforcement. Worthy trade for the risk? ?Hell no. You can have a world where nightmare abuses of these types of systems are outright impossible, or you can have a world that's incrementally more efficient, but you must accept these abuses being realizable. That's an XOR there. There is no escaping it. Certainty of abuse has probability 1. How do I know? Because I've been tempted to do as much before, and I know that I am an uncharacteristically extreme example of someone that thinks something through before committing to it, and it's only by doing so that I've managed to avoid implementing that very thing. 98% of people will not hold themselves to at least the the rigor I have. There are people far too pragmatic to be bothered by such things as ideals or edge cases; which is necessary to deal with when you're talking about enabling top down practicable social targeting systems. We are not special. It will not be different this time. Our nature is not such that we can safely discount these sorts of things. The enemy is among us, and they are us. I don't fear communists. I fear the paperclip maximizing zealots among us who will sacrifice everything in pursuit of thrir goal. I've been one of them. I will not subject those down the road to a working Panopticon. I will not build that lever. I'm sorry. I will consign you to a fate wherein you suffer from an occasional bureacratic mixup, but you will never once need worry that some madman is sitting on the button that causes you to lose access to everything instantly. That will allow a faceless bureaucracy to control your access in real time. To know your every move, all the time. I'd rather you be free. That you be unmanageable. That the mechanisms of external social coercion not be perfect. For without those spaces, there is no room for freedom. Only not currently having your chain jerked. Know that if ever you are subdued by the machinations of the technophile, it will not have been I that forged those chains. Just because you can build something, doesn't mean you should. Just because you can measure something, doesn't mean you should build the yardstick. It does not follow that something you can't currently measure must have a measure built, and then as a consequence of it's measurability then be managed. Those that seek power will beseech you to build these things for them. It is your job to see these things for what they are, and learn to be able to say "No."
jandrewrogers 3y ago
In the US, significant fractions of both the Democrat and Republican parties are against anything that resembles a single national ID, for different longstanding reasons. And the legal hurdles are high enough that it would require both parties actively working together to effect material change, so even if one of them had a change of heart it wouldn't matter.
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> Democracies apparently have to be ignorant and easily exploited by criminals falsely claiming pensions and other benefits using easily forged identity papers. How is centralized identity necessary or sufficient to solve this? If you have an ID card issued by e.g. your brokerage, it can use strong cryptography and be no easier to forge than any government ID. If you lost your card you could use any mechanism you could use in the event that you lose your government ID. Some of these methods have poor security properties but that's the same in both cases. The only thing you get from centralization is non-consensual tracking.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  > How is centralized identity necessary or sufficient to solve this? To give you an idea of just how low the fruit is hanging, approximately 100K fake children "vanished" from Australia's welfare system when the government introduced a system where you had to list each dependent child's Tax File Number (TFN) to claim welfare benefits. (Prior to that, you just had to put down how many children you were claiming benefits for.) If you can get ID papers from random brokerages, then how is the government to perform a simple uniqueness check across brokerages? It always boils down to the same thing: Someone, somewhere has to have a table with a primary key on it.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    > To give you an idea of just how low the fruit is hanging, approximately 100K fake children "vanished" from Australia's welfare system when the government introduced a system where you had to list each dependent child's Tax File Number (TFN) to claim welfare benefits. The assumption here is that they're all fake rather than there being a non-trivial number of people who don't understand how to fill out the new forms, or aren't willing to admit to an association with an out-of-wedlock child on an official form even though the child is real and actually being supported etc. > If you can get ID papers from random brokerages, then how is the government to perform a simple uniqueness check across brokerages? Nobody other than the brokerage uses the brokerage's ID. That's what decentralized is. Children typically wouldn't have an ID from a brokerage anyway. The welfare agency would provide recipients with its own IDs. How does it establish uniqueness for this? The same way as the institution issuing a Tax File Number.

acdha 3y ago

> This all happened because back in the early 2000s there was an attempt at a single “Australia ID” but geriatrics had their brains pickled in decades of anti-communist propaganda and voted against it. This is similar to how the U.S. has a certain amount of opposition from Christian sects who believe any sort of national ID number would be the biblical mark of the beast. There’s a certain dark humor in the way privacy is used to complain about identification cards but that only leads to the semi-regulated private data brokers being used by everyone, including the government, with purchased access to far more data.

spacebanana7 3y ago

> geriatrics had their brains pickled in decades of anti-communist propaganda and voted against it. Isn’t the CCP’s behaviour still one of the best arguments against universal government ID?

jiggawatts 3y ago
I cannot fathom the error in logic that yields the conclusion that elected governments having a SQL table with a primary key constraint is somehow "the same thing" as the authoritarian abuses of power by a single-party communist dictatorship. A number on a piece of paper is not the root cause of secret police brutally cracking down on dissidents!
- spacebanana7 3y ago
  The possession of power and the misuse of power are of course different things. But knowledge of the full population is particularly corrosive kind of power. It can reveal negative information - one can query for all people without a donation to political party, for example.
  - jiggawatts 3y ago
    Only if that data is in the same table. The primary key is just a number, and tells you nothing other than perhaps roughly when you were born (if it is sequentially allocated).
arlort 3y ago
No. In fact the entire thing that makes Chinese surveillance so bad is that they don't need an ID to identify you
- spacebanana7 3y ago
  Universal government ID allows your identity to be very efficiently communicated between different public/private sector agencies. That's how your local CCTV camera catching you jaywalking could communicate to your bank that you should be fined.

salawat 3y ago

>The logic is: “Only communist governments know who their citizens are.” The logic is actually "That which I wish to control or destroy, I must first enumerate/name." A Government that exists only to administer (and not control the populace), has no need to know who all it's citizen's are. Merely to know who is involved in the limited processes being administered. Sadly, all common sense around that seems to have evaporated since 2001 in the U.S. It seems like only those of us left who experienced the pre-9/11 world are doing a terrible job at instilling a picture of a government that's not all "Big Brother is watching" in the younger generations. The gluttony of Law Enforcement and the IC for a Single Identification Number to unify and enumerate every flesh and blood person wandering around cannot be overstated.

jiggawatts 3y ago
"You can't improve(manage) that which you can't measure." In practice, all government departments in all countries have databases with primary key identifiers in them. We can do this accurately and efficiently, or we can continue to insist on doing it inaccurately and inefficiently because of "Red Scare" propaganda. You are proposing that you prefer your government to be slow, inefficient, inept, and vulnerable to fraud and corruption. I prefer my government agencies to not waste my time, not confuse me with similarly named people, etc... This is a real problem that occurs every day, versus the slippery-slope arguments that derive from anti-communist hysteria. Here's a real situation: Identical twins with the same name, because "John Sr is the son of John Sr for ten generations, and he didn't want to give up the tradition just because he had twins." That's a real story from a public school system where the kids were living at the same address, attending the same school, were born on the same day, in the same hospital, etc... How would you disambiguate them? You would start with... assigning... a... unique... number perhaps?
- salawat 3y ago
  >How would you disambiguate them? You would start with... assigning... a... unique... number perhaps? Yep. That's how. Now lets see what inevitably gets built once you do that. Now do you that mapping to a Federal system, which maps that ID to a set of tables including a map to every other every other organization's ids relevant to that individual such that one can essentially completely hose someone via the "Sanction this individual in particular where (subquery). This system has already been built in the Financial sector, it's called OFAC. More advanced integrations are in progress. Look up "Fusion Centers". Do I think that's a worthy trade in case that gets in the wrong hands? Fuck no. Should those same systems be free to be "privately built and transacted for business purposes" in a way that utterly sidesteps prohibitions against the Government directly building that dataset themselves, resulting in 3rd party SaaS queries through Data Brokers? See LexisNexis, Palantir, or any of the Credit Bureaus or other data brokers. Also telecoms selling location data. Or automotive manufacturers feeding telematics to insurers or Law Enforcement. Worthy trade for the risk? ?Hell no. You can have a world where nightmare abuses of these types of systems are outright impossible, or you can have a world that's incrementally more efficient, but you must accept these abuses being realizable. That's an XOR there. There is no escaping it. Certainty of abuse has probability 1. How do I know? Because I've been tempted to do as much before, and I know that I am an uncharacteristically extreme example of someone that thinks something through before committing to it, and it's only by doing so that I've managed to avoid implementing that very thing. 98% of people will not hold themselves to at least the the rigor I have. There are people far too pragmatic to be bothered by such things as ideals or edge cases; which is necessary to deal with when you're talking about enabling top down practicable social targeting systems. We are not special. It will not be different this time. Our nature is not such that we can safely discount these sorts of things. The enemy is among us, and they are us. I don't fear communists. I fear the paperclip maximizing zealots among us who will sacrifice everything in pursuit of thrir goal. I've been one of them. I will not subject those down the road to a working Panopticon. I will not build that lever. I'm sorry. I will consign you to a fate wherein you suffer from an occasional bureacratic mixup, but you will never once need worry that some madman is sitting on the button that causes you to lose access to everything instantly. That will allow a faceless bureaucracy to control your access in real time. To know your every move, all the time. I'd rather you be free. That you be unmanageable. That the mechanisms of external social coercion not be perfect. For without those spaces, there is no room for freedom. Only not currently having your chain jerked. Know that if ever you are subdued by the machinations of the technophile, it will not have been I that forged those chains. Just because you can build something, doesn't mean you should. Just because you can measure something, doesn't mean you should build the yardstick. It does not follow that something you can't currently measure must have a measure built, and then as a consequence of it's measurability then be managed. Those that seek power will beseech you to build these things for them. It is your job to see these things for what they are, and learn to be able to say "No."

jandrewrogers 3y ago

In the US, significant fractions of both the Democrat and Republican parties are against anything that resembles a single national ID, for different longstanding reasons. And the legal hurdles are high enough that it would require both parties actively working together to effect material change, so even if one of them had a change of heart it wouldn't matter.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> Democracies apparently have to be ignorant and easily exploited by criminals falsely claiming pensions and other benefits using easily forged identity papers. How is centralized identity necessary or sufficient to solve this? If you have an ID card issued by e.g. your brokerage, it can use strong cryptography and be no easier to forge than any government ID. If you lost your card you could use any mechanism you could use in the event that you lose your government ID. Some of these methods have poor security properties but that's the same in both cases. The only thing you get from centralization is non-consensual tracking.

jiggawatts 3y ago
> How is centralized identity necessary or sufficient to solve this? To give you an idea of just how low the fruit is hanging, approximately 100K fake children "vanished" from Australia's welfare system when the government introduced a system where you had to list each dependent child's Tax File Number (TFN) to claim welfare benefits. (Prior to that, you just had to put down how many children you were claiming benefits for.) If you can get ID papers from random brokerages, then how is the government to perform a simple uniqueness check across brokerages? It always boils down to the same thing: Someone, somewhere has to have a table with a primary key on it.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  > To give you an idea of just how low the fruit is hanging, approximately 100K fake children "vanished" from Australia's welfare system when the government introduced a system where you had to list each dependent child's Tax File Number (TFN) to claim welfare benefits. The assumption here is that they're all fake rather than there being a non-trivial number of people who don't understand how to fill out the new forms, or aren't willing to admit to an association with an out-of-wedlock child on an official form even though the child is real and actually being supported etc. > If you can get ID papers from random brokerages, then how is the government to perform a simple uniqueness check across brokerages? Nobody other than the brokerage uses the brokerage's ID. That's what decentralized is. Children typically wouldn't have an ID from a brokerage anyway. The welfare agency would provide recipients with its own IDs. How does it establish uniqueness for this? The same way as the institution issuing a Tax File Number.