Americans have no national identity card. The closest thing is a Social Security number, which has no security or biometric features.

https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus

And it's a good thing, and personally I would love it if we could stop having even SSNs.

Yep. I would oppose any sort of National ID card whether it has biometric security or not. Passport is about the only thing that is a Federal level ID and accepted everywhere as an ID.

I would want states to have their own ID system where an average citizen can vote for policies that make a difference. I am also against cross-state data sharing (Driver's license) and such.

My state engages in actually illegal data sharing and retention that violates state law. Nobody does anything about.

Who watches the watchers? The people who comprise "the system" rig the system in their favor and cover for each other.

I could accept identifying with a passport, since the costs alone means it would not be supported in most cases, but only if it was associate with a strict requirement that the passport number or any other number/qr/barcode was hidden, and if it was illegal to save copies of even the image of the passport with the numbers hidden.

So I'm guessing you're saying: Nothing > ssn , and Nothing > public key cryptography.

Are you also saying: Ssn > public key cryptography? And if so, why?

Yes, yes, no.

See my other comment: people should be in charge of their identity, NOT the government.

Like penis circumcision, SSN is voluntary. Typically parents enroll the child for giggles or whatever.

And no, passport application does not require SSN.

This is completely wrong. The IRS requires children to have an SSN to qualify their families for tax credits, and SSNs are required for most employment. Even if you are a member of a group that does not have to pay into social security, you still need an SSN so that the SSA and IRS can track that you are exempt.

> I would love it if we could stop having even SSNs

Why?

I guess the general premise is that any national ID number, SSN or otherwise, is liable to be used in all the wrong ways by untrustworthy institutions both inside and outside the government, damaging privacy and opening you up to exciting forms of fraud against your name (/ ID number); it is often treated as a secret, but it is not a secret at all.

— Unfortunately, with enough computers and enough tracking information, bad actors can often do the same thing without a number, anyway, and you can get different kinds of fraud.

The case that a universal identifier, or even some authoritative list of people, has a benefit that exceeds its cost, has never been made. It’s simply “one of those things”

"The invention of permanent, inherited patronyms was, after the ad­ministrative simplification of nature (for example, the forest) and space (for example, land tenure), the last step in establishing the necessary preconditions of modern statecraft. In almost every case it was a state project, designed to allow officials to identity, unambiguously, the ma­jority of its citizens. When successful, it went far to create a legible peo­ple. Tax and tithe rolls, property rolls, conscription lists, censuses, and property deeds recognized in law were inconceivable without some means of fixing an individual's identity and linking him or her to a kingroup. Campaigns to assign permanent patronyms have typically taken place, as one might expect, in the context of a state's exertions to put its fiscal system on a sounder and more lucrative footing. Fearing, with good reason, that an effort to enumerate and register them could be a prelude to some new tax burden or conscription, local officials and the population at large often resisted such campaigns."

— James C Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

(Thanks shoo — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29885742)

The problem with SSNs is that places treat it like a secret, when it's an identifier. They were not designed to be a secret, and obviously are a pretty terrible secret at this point in time. What with the fact that probably every person older than 18 has had theirs leaked at some point in time.]

If places would just stop treating them as a secret, it wouldn't even matter.

Until the existing system is reformed with something like the GDPR, nobody should support increasing the technical strength of identification.

Currently, the only way you can prevent surveillance companies from unaccountably creating permanent records on you is to avoid feeding them your personal information in the first place. There is absolutely no recourse or even legal concept that prevents "ID.me" from using the data you're basically forced to give them here, for any purpose they later desire. Until there are real data protection laws that allow for the creation of trust through accountability, auditing, and right of deletion, then opposing anything that benefits the surveillance industry is the only way we can protect ourselves.

What public key cryptography?

I guess OP, like me, is from a country where we have a digital signature installed in our computers or a physical smart card+reader with which you can make many official legal procedures on our local governments. I just got mine from Spain, and I was "late" (but very necessary since I don't live there anymore) and I'm applying literally today for my card in Japan.

There isn't anything like that in the US.

I'm taking a leap of logic here and guessing you're suggesting a blockchain solution to national identity would have solved this problem?

Many European countries have public key encryption integrated into their national ID card system. No blockchain needed.

Thanks for brightening my day! Honestly- I can use the laughs today.

Yes it would.

Repost of my comment from yesterday: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29982395)

As technically interesting as using a card to sign stuff may be, I don't want that to be the government responsibility, as it then opens the door for it to be used in ways that limit our freedoms: a system that's too perfect can uniquely identify you, in ways that prevent disassociation (ex: the place of birth on the passport is of great interest to some totalitarian places, while only citizenship should matter..) So for me, the ideal ID system is decentralized, self-declarative, and the weight of the proof depends on the length of history, not on "who" says it's true: there should be many such services where you could declare a name and an address and anything else you wish (phone, email...)

The value after a few weeks would be close to nil, so you could decide to "increase it" by having several people vouch for you (strength in numbers) instead of relying on a "who" (public notary).

Or you could totally decide that you care about your freedom/independence/whatever and NOT ask for any vouching. It may be hard, but after a few years of reliably receiving mail and orders at that address, it would acquire some serious weight - a bit like you tend to trust online accounts that have been open for some year.

Among many other things, this would also allow anyone the opportunity to "change" easily: want a new name/move to a new address/etc: create a revocation certificate for the old, sign it with the new, boom you inherit the credential history!

It's just a quick idea, but it shows how IDs could be more like URLs (multiple competing services, and you could have a few at the same time, why not!) by moving away from the current system that's a direct descendant of the census (give the lord a list of people to tax them) and the passport (limit freedom of movement during the war)

At the core, I believe people should be in control of their identity, not governments or states.

While I have long dreamt of public-key cryptography in place of a SSN, I don't think blockchain adds any value on top of that (except filling out a buzzword bingo square).

(Among other issues) I really don't want my identity to become someone else's speculation device and would strongly prefer preventing that if at all possible. Companies selling personal data back and forth as a commodity is already bad enough.

> a system that's too perfect can uniquely identify you, in ways that prevent disassociation (ex: the place of birth on the passport is of great interest to some totalitarian places, while only citizenship should matter..)

Isn't this all information they already have (and would presumably keep)? Ultimately, it's the governing body that's dealing out these keys to access data they already have about you. What data is stored is completely separate from how that data is stored.

If you don't want birthplace on the passport, that's totally separate from SSN vs public keys vs blockchain.

> the ideal ID system is decentralized, self-declarative, and the weight of the proof depends on the length of history, not on "who" says it's true

It would need to also be public, no? Otherwise, it boils back down to "who says it's true".

> moving away from the current system that's a direct descendant of the census (give the lord a list of people to tax them)

If you don't want to be taxed, that's also a separate issue.

> If you don't want birthplace on the passport, that's totally separate from SSN vs public keys vs blockchain.

Not really. If you don't put it there, it can't be collected. A blockchain solution should NOT have provision for fields you don't want out there, like say religion.

> Isn't this all information they already have (and would presumably keep)? Ultimately, it's the governing body that's dealing out these keys to access data they already have about you. What data is stored is completely separate from how that data is stored.

Information gets stale, so what's already out there become less relevant as time goes.

Also, if you don't put everything in a nice convenient form inside a all-in-one document that's ripe for harvesting, you're making the job harder. That's the goal.

> It would need to also be public, no? Otherwise, it boils back down to "who says it's true".

Hence, blockchain

> If you don't want to be taxed, that's also a separate issue.

I tried to explain the origin of the current systems. I'm all for taxes at the point of origin (ex: wage, capital gains) without exposing more information than what's strictly required to do the job.

> a system that's too perfect can uniquely identify you,

Isn't this a basic requirement of any ID system?

> Isn't this a basic requirement of any ID system?

And now you understand my core opposition to government run ID system.

Think of it like SSH keys: you want them to allow access, and therefore one-way verification. You don't want a bijective system that would allow you to be uniquely identified. So you can have 1 key per system you access.

Most uses of ID are compatible with that usecase: one ID to allow you to pay taxes, one ID to allow you to travel, one ID to prove you have a license to drive, etc.

There's absolutely no need to merge them - except for the convenience of tracking you and adding new usecases easily, without the government shouldering the burden of rolling a new ID AND having people use it.

If there was no cost having an ID that could serve for the sort of purposes you mention, I might agree with you.

But I have no desire to see a society in which zero-cost (or effectively zero-cost) ID systems are the legal requirement for those purposes. As a result, issuing and maintaining the records associated with physical world forms of ID have real costs associated with them, and I would question the benefits to society (even with "privacy" in mind) of replicating that per-potential-ID-category.

[ EDIT : Also, I would think that the way browser fingerprinting works would dissuade you from believing that one-ID-for-X and one-ID-for-Y is going to stop you from being uniquely identified. ]

If you had an ID system that allowed you to get multiple unconnected IDs, what would prevent someone from getting 10 million of them and casting 10 million votes in an election? Or even just having 2 or 3 and claiming stimulus checks or welfare or disability or whatever?

Doesn't the government have to be able to uniquely identify you to even have a chance at providing services equally to everyone?

1. it remains to be seen, 2. should it happen, it would be illegal and expose the perpetrators to jail time

Overall, I'm not so sure the status-quo is worth the tradeoff, especially when accumulated at the population level (10 000 people commiting stimulus check fraud is what, 0.01% of the population?)