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You asked about holding the government accountable for not providing secure IDs. Doing that is a political question and we've had attempts to for thinkgs like R
by rtkwe 2y ago
You asked about holding the government accountable for not providing secure IDs. Doing that is a political question and we've had attempts to for thinkgs like RealID, they don't because there's a significant block that don't want them to for all sort of reasons ranging from legitimate to paranoid.
> Japan solves this by having the registry in your town of birth, other countries have this registry centralized -- perhaps the U.S. would be best served by state-wide registries, though since migration across state borders is unregulated, I bet that would be very difficult to maintain.
You're just describing birth certificates here. The US has those... very very few people don't get them. Getting access to them was an important part of Keirans's method of stealing Mr. Woods's identity. They will inevitably get lost or destroyed so you have to have some method of bootstrapping someone's identity and Keirans exploited that system through research.
It was designed around a time when it wasn't easy to acquire massive amounts of information about someone so it's not surprising that it starts to come apart a little bit in our digital panopticon.
- Jolter 2y agoI am not describing birth certificates. I’m describing a registry of residence. That’s another thing the U.S. does wrong. If you hold a birth certificate for a child, what does that prove? It’s just an officially issued statement that a particular person was born to these particular parents. It’s completely useless as an authentication mechanism of identity. The problem is not that birth certificates can be re-issued when lost. The problem is that they are trusted to mean anything about that person that possesses it.
- rtkwe 2y agoNothing you said made it sound any different from a birth certificate. What proves that you are the person living at that address and that you are the one that should be allowed to update that information? Just having a list of where people nominally live is meaningless by itself. The US has that information in loads of places, it's just not treated as the ground truth. Also that system doesn't seem to work that great, the numbers I'm finding show Japan has about 3 million identity theft victims a year. Lower than the US but only slightly lower per capita. The biggest problem in this instance isn't that his identity was stolen it was that he wasn't believed, partially because he was homeless, seems to have some mental health problems per the article and they're a maligned group in the US, and the courts and prosecutors didn't take the relatively simple step of requesting DNA evidence to resolve the situation.
- fc417fc802 2y ago[dead]