5 ms·

There are many governments which lack either the physical capacity or the political interest to provide persistent and meaningful legal identity to their citize

There are many governments which lack either the physical capacity or the political interest to provide persistent and meaningful legal identity to their citizens. Sometimes they use this to prevent their citizens exercising their democratic rights. The impact of this is that their citizens lose the ability to create or enforce legal contracts. Take property, for instance. Families from Syria to Haiti to Sri Lanka have been living on and off the same land for centuries then along comes a war or natural disaster and they are forced off their land with no legal way of proving - once their communities are destroyed or distributed - their ownership of title. There are numerous cases where the lack of a fundamental right to legal identity is a cause of tremendous hardship to people. In the poorest countries it is a recognised and well-researched cause of perpetual poverty. It's not building a new nail, it's giving people full and persistent access to the hammer that was always their's but was never in their possession.

peterwwillis 12y ago
It comes down to 'legal identity'. 'Legal' meaning 'of the law' specifically applies to an identity that is created by, and upholds, laws relating to identity. A legal identity is only useful if it is administered by the government, since it's the government that makes the laws. Democratic rights are rights given by the government. Only the government can give or take away democratic rights. Similarly, rights that are based on identification are based on government-issued identification, because if a 3rd party controlled the ID process, they could just print up whatever IDs they wanted and subvert the government's laws. It seems like some people think that just because your government is oppressing you, you have some recourse. You don't. They will continue to oppress you until you fight them and force them to do what you want. Trying to create an alternative market for what you want will just be labeled illegal and subsequently destroyed. That's what a "black market" is: goods and services that the government doesn't want you to have. This ID would just create a new black market for identification, and would be completely useless in terms of dealing with property laws, voting, unemployment, and any other government service.
- Turukawa 12y ago
  You're coming at this from a very specific perspective related to your experience of government and services. I'm glad you live in a place where you can trust these sorts of fundamental services. This paper was not written for people like you. Look at something like M-PESA in East Africa. It allows a person to have the equivalent of a bank account and transact with others without having any form of state recognised identity - only a mobile phone. That this is so successful is largely as a result of the complete inadequacy of the local banking system and the regional governments' inability to provide meaningful identity to their citizens. Consider vaccination programs. Aid agencies responding to the Haiti earthquake in 2010 struggled to place young children back with their parents because no-one carried identity and the state - which had been barely functional before - was entirely non-functional. As reported in The Economist at the time, agencies carried out mass vaccinations against cholera but some people were vaccinated multiple times and others were missed entirely because there were so many agencies all running around like headless chickens. Again, a simple distributed identity system would have permitted a better response. Or the other example from the linked paper ... in rural communities in the world's poorest countries, people's identities are vouchsafed entirely by that community. Community-based lending programs (as popularised by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh) are successful precisely because individuals lack identity or their own independent credit record. Micro-lenders offer loans to these community groups rather than individuals and so the individual builds up no credit record of their own. If they ever need to move (because of drought, joblessness or whatever) they lose the reference and identity they have built in that community. They cannot take it with them. In the presence of a motivated and functioning state, sure, maybe this isn't needed. Unfortunately, billions of people don't have that luxury.
  - peterwwillis 12y ago
    For non-government purposes this ID can be useful. But it is not a replacement for legal ID. It's worth pursuing for edge cases, but let's not pretend it will protect people. This whole thing is an attempt at a technological fix for a non-technological problem. It's not practical to 'route around' bad or missing government. The logistics behind each one of these issues goes far beyond having a simple ID.

peterwwillis 12y ago

It comes down to 'legal identity'. 'Legal' meaning 'of the law' specifically applies to an identity that is created by, and upholds, laws relating to identity. A legal identity is only useful if it is administered by the government, since it's the government that makes the laws. Democratic rights are rights given by the government. Only the government can give or take away democratic rights. Similarly, rights that are based on identification are based on government-issued identification, because if a 3rd party controlled the ID process, they could just print up whatever IDs they wanted and subvert the government's laws. It seems like some people think that just because your government is oppressing you, you have some recourse. You don't. They will continue to oppress you until you fight them and force them to do what you want. Trying to create an alternative market for what you want will just be labeled illegal and subsequently destroyed. That's what a "black market" is: goods and services that the government doesn't want you to have. This ID would just create a new black market for identification, and would be completely useless in terms of dealing with property laws, voting, unemployment, and any other government service.

Turukawa 12y ago
You're coming at this from a very specific perspective related to your experience of government and services. I'm glad you live in a place where you can trust these sorts of fundamental services. This paper was not written for people like you. Look at something like M-PESA in East Africa. It allows a person to have the equivalent of a bank account and transact with others without having any form of state recognised identity - only a mobile phone. That this is so successful is largely as a result of the complete inadequacy of the local banking system and the regional governments' inability to provide meaningful identity to their citizens. Consider vaccination programs. Aid agencies responding to the Haiti earthquake in 2010 struggled to place young children back with their parents because no-one carried identity and the state - which had been barely functional before - was entirely non-functional. As reported in The Economist at the time, agencies carried out mass vaccinations against cholera but some people were vaccinated multiple times and others were missed entirely because there were so many agencies all running around like headless chickens. Again, a simple distributed identity system would have permitted a better response. Or the other example from the linked paper ... in rural communities in the world's poorest countries, people's identities are vouchsafed entirely by that community. Community-based lending programs (as popularised by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh) are successful precisely because individuals lack identity or their own independent credit record. Micro-lenders offer loans to these community groups rather than individuals and so the individual builds up no credit record of their own. If they ever need to move (because of drought, joblessness or whatever) they lose the reference and identity they have built in that community. They cannot take it with them. In the presence of a motivated and functioning state, sure, maybe this isn't needed. Unfortunately, billions of people don't have that luxury.
- peterwwillis 12y ago
  For non-government purposes this ID can be useful. But it is not a replacement for legal ID. It's worth pursuing for edge cases, but let's not pretend it will protect people. This whole thing is an attempt at a technological fix for a non-technological problem. It's not practical to 'route around' bad or missing government. The logistics behind each one of these issues goes far beyond having a simple ID.