I say this as someone who would strongly support a federal mandatory national ID system (and the ACLU, generally)
Oh, I doubt it's a left-right thing. I'm pretty lefty these days, and I oppose a national ID. Some minority groups, like say Jewish folks, might carry bad connotations about putting everybody in a big database so we can keep track of (and categorize) them.
But, of course, there's not much preventing the local government from sharing the info with the Feds.
It's something so unlikely to come up in day-to-day interactions that it's not really that important. I'm sure if I got stopped in, say, France, and had no passport to show, they wouldn't exactly lock me up on the spot, they'd find a way to accommodate me.
I still only have a really vague understanding of what happens if a cop in the US wants me to identify myself and I refuse. If I'm not suspected of a crime, obviously, I can just walk away. I'm not really sure what I'd do if I was arrested for cause and refused to identify myself.
For amusement's sake, I really enjoy his videos on geography, such as (his first video ever) this one on the UK (which I guess might need updating soon?):
or this one on Scotland:
or my favorite geographical video, on the Vatican:
That said, they're all pretty great, so I'd just start with this list of all his videos in ascending order:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10&index=1&list=PLq...
Somewhat different, is the Hello Internet [2] podcast, which is by Grey and Brady Haran who you might know from the Numberphile youtube channel [3]. It's basically the 2 of them chatting about random stuff, but I find it very entertaining.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO1mTELoj6o
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrObZ_HZZUc
Later on, I did a brief stint working for the federal gov't. In that setting, they used the SSN as our employee IDs. It was on all the personnel forms, and often seen on "list of people in the department" spreadsheets. Of course in order to comply with some law, these forms would also have a footnote explaining why they needed the SSN.
From these experiences, I have a very hard time actually thinking of the SSN as the sort of "secure password" everyone else wants to insist that it is. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of an alternative.
If my SSN & other personal details get out, it's my problem. If the SSN & personal details of half the country leak out, it's somebody else's problem.
Whose I'm not sure, but it would seem like banks. At this point, virtually all potential credit applicant's details have been leaked, and I believe it's the banks that ultimately lose when they issue credit to a fraud. So if you're the bank, hopefully right about now you're starting to think you need a much better method to authenticate credit applicants.
But... in this case, the overall cost may be high enough that there's a competitive advantage in not needing to charge this particular fee, and that will force the industry to do something about it. Maybe.
I'm not from the US. The first time i had an american friend explain me the SSN thing, I thought they were crazy, for the exact same reasons.
It is idiotic, as you say.
Here in my third-world country there isn't any number or code that I need to keep secret and I need to hand over to other companies at the same time.
We do have an specific identifier. Each person has an ID card, with an ID number. The ID number is not secret at all and used for many things everywhere. By the way, we don't have anything like a "social security card". Even kids have this ID card, their parents can (and ought to) request one for each kid.
This ID number has nothing in common with your birthday or anything. It is mostly a sequential number.
All aggregations are done using this (unique) ID number. So financial companies submit payment data associated to your ID number. So later credit scores can be computed as well.
The difference with this ID number versus the SSN is that our ID number is not used as a password of any sort.
How do companies or government institutions check out if you are who you say you are? They can take a look at your ID card. And usually they do have fingerprint scanners and signature scanners to check against the government's central ID registry.
By the way, last year we issued the Electronic Id Card, this one has a security certificate (public-private key cryptography) associated with it, and each person chooses (and keeps secret) a password. This password never needs to be revealed to anyone. With this password one can do digital signatures of any document, etc.
Nowadays SSNs are generally issued at birth, particularly since the IRS wants one for each dependent listed on the tax return. I believe this has been the case for at least twenty or thirty years; certainly my card dates from when I was born.
> This ID number has nothing in common with your birthday or anything. It is mostly a sequential number.
If it's a sequential number requested near birth that would mean that most people with the same birthday have similar numbers, doesn't it?
In practice it is not requested near birth. It is sequential to the time you asked for an ID card, so people who asked for one in the same timeframe get a close number
That ID number is public and allows government & any companies/organisations you show it to immediately verify that they are dealing with a specific person, instead of having to spend time figuring out which specific person named "John Smith" they are dealing with. Having this number simply makes life more quicker and convinient. It also allows to remove any pointless duplications for cards.
For some examples: separate medical insurance card was discontinued, you can verify medical coverage by a simple number query. Same with drivers licences, they still exist in a separate physical forms for foreign trips, but but not inside the country. There is no separate libary cards, I don´t have to carry a separate card for my gym or various retailers.
I can verify myself online quickly and securely. I can digitally sign documents and contracts and email them. Honestly, I´m having hard time imagining my life without it. I´m aware that all proposals for national identification methods in the US have failed thanks to fears of "mark of the beast" and big brother, but it seems pretty silly to me. All that data already exists and can be cross referenced. Making average person waste more time and money by having such massive inefficiencies in the system seems rather silly in these times.
There is a big difference: that ID is being used as a username whereas our SSNs are (usually) used as passwords.
For online verification(banking, contracts, taxes, voting etc) you need both physical card and PIN at the same time.
Otherwise it works just as any other normal ID.
Some even have federated systems where you can later ask the financial institution to hand out a 2FA crypto token that you can use to identify yourself to other institutions over the Internet without ever showing up in person.
If you switch to dozens up separate IDs, the entire system will get bogged down as everyone forgets all their ID #s
How about using something like an ID card with attached chip that can be used to digitally sign things? Works great in Belgium.
I get it, most people aren't always rational about these things.
The sentiment goes something like this:
- Conservatives gave up on minorities, historically stated that the less they vote, the better - Conservatives push the narrative that voting fraud is a big problem, and that the liberals are doing it (many high profile member's of Trump's family/cabinet are registered to vote in many states simultaneously)
- They push for Voter ID laws and push back against weekend voting days, as it makes it harder for hourly/poor/minority voters to show up and vote.
So it would probably be a great idea, but since conservatives consider non-white franchising is an existential threat to their cause, they'll probably scream "state's rights" and block it from happening.
Secrecy (and privacy) aren't sustainable, and relying on them will just end up hurting people.
Identity must be solved, not through secrecy, but through transparency.
If AI overcomes us, it will be (in part) because we failed to adapt to this reality.
The primacy of the SSN in American society is idiotic. It's a "secret" that you have to hand out to dozens of different organizations. I've long thought that we should phase this out by committing to publish all SSNs (and the associated info, obviously, so it's not just a list of most 9-digit numbers...) which would force all these companies to stop treating it as confidential.
The system is dumb and works poorly, but worked will enough that there was no impetus to fix it. Some people got affected by breaches, and it sucked for them, but it was always a small enough group that most people didn't care.
Now that a majority of people's "secret" info is no longer confidential, maybe they'll realize they can't rely on it anymore.
OK, the odds of this actually coming to pass are not great. But I can hope.