5 ms·

> I'm thankful that the most egregious proposals of recent years - national I.D cards Maybe I'm not thinking very creatively but I don't see the problem with n

• gilgoomesh 13y ago
  National ID cards are generally associated with either: a) Enabling every company or organisation to learn everything about you. e.g. a bank can know about your health care or education because the one ID you gave them for your financial services actually unlocks access to all others. This is why discrete identifiers for each service is preferred, despite the hassle or redundancy. or b) If carrying the ID on you becomes mandatory, it becomes a reason to needlessly arrest young people who have committed no real crime (because no one carries a passport sized ID with them everywhere they go)
• rdtsc 13y ago
  A lot of it is cultural and propaganda related. Remember how we (well Americans) used to joke during the Cold War how in repressive regimes people had to carry papers and then at each checkpoint a guard would stop and ask "papers please". Americans have been proud to be the opposite of that. We are "free" people, we have "privacy" at work here, nothing or nobody restricts our freedom of actions. Government is all elected by the power of the people and they fear us, not us fearing them. Anyway that explains why that is a sore point, it tingles the cognitive dissonance nerve quite a bit. So now if you move from state to state, you have to get a new license and that becomes your ID. Coupled with your social security card. Coupled with all the crap Facebook, Google, and Choicepoint has on you. Coupled of course with NSA registering every number you call. All those things have raised eyebrows at various times, but well at we can say "we don't have government mandated papers to carry" and that is why when government mandated papers appear in conversation people get all upset. Nevermind that effectively all the privacy is lost and it doesn't really matter and it would probably make many things a lot simpler if we just one national "driver's license equivalent".
  • thaumasiotes 13y ago
    Being resident in China, I learned by some means that I was legally expected to have my passport on me at all times. Do I actually carry it around with me? Of course not; that would be a good way to lose it (which, unlike just not having it with you, will severely aggravate the government). Just the fact that you're officially supposed to carry papers with you doesn't indicate much.
  • eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Right. We Israelis have National ID cards and National ID Numbers, the number being printed on your driver's license if you choose to carry that instead. Both cards are small, fit inside any adult's wallet (and children aren't required to carry), and just overall tend to make dealing with any kind of officialdom massively easier than it was in the USA. Why? Because my National ID links to an Interior Ministry database about things like, for instance, my residential address. So rather than having to provide several different pieces of official documentation to prove local residency and some others to prove citizenship, I provide one card which then proves both residency and citizenship and entitles me to the services of my municipal government and the local branch of the Interior Ministry, while also unifying all official identity records under one number. Strangely enough, there have not been mass purges of Israeli Communists or anything. I should know, having been to a few party meetings.
• jezebel6 13y ago
  because it leads to restricting movement, ie interstate checkpoints