this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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3/? So here's my biggest beef with the EFF article. In school I was taught the most convincing arguments are made with synthesis - you have to both support your thesis and interrogate your antithesis. You may notice I haven't done that myself... guilty as charged.
I see the EFF has a lot of one-sided arguments for why you should oppose national ID systems... in fact they just tell you outright to oppose them. But I'm not easily convinced by a series of negative arguments with nearly zero analysis of the purported benefits of national ID's. This is the closest I think the article has:
...Maybe I'm just a certain kind of jaded or I'm just part of the wrong demographic, but whenever I see 9/11 being invoked, it's like a magic spell. It's such a universally terrible event that we can put it next to anything and taint it by association. "After 9/11, many video games began to feature 3D photo-realistic graphics." It's correlative, not causative. What else happened around 2000, 2001? Home computers became widely accessible? Google redefined the search engine? Yes, 9/11 is contextually important to the United States because it catapulted the PATRIOT Act through the legal process like a hot knife through butter. But was it also the catapult for "many other governments?" Or was computing power and data collection becoming more accessible, facilitating the collection of more information to increase the accuracy or security of preexisting national ID systems?
In fact the entire article reads as if it was written only for an American audience, and specifically a FUD-driven American audience. In the sidebar are short paragraphs talking (again, only negatively) about national ID systems in Argentina, France, India, and Kenya. Why is there no mention of Estonia, or Malaysia?
I'll admit this is personal, but I am not easily convinced by arguments that only focus on stopping something from happening, especially after it has already happened. And EFF's American-centric arguments ignore the fact that de-facto ID's are a problem elsewhere in the world. "Ireland's Public Services Card is not considered a national identity card by the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection (DEASP), but many say it is in fact becoming that, and without public debate or even a legislative foundation." It's a form of American exceptionalism, as if we have nothing to learn and nothing to gain from seeing how other countries operate and determining if/how we could apply their systems, or improve on their systems, at home.
Yes, the article presents a lot of problems with a National ID system. So... let's solve some of them? "Administration of ID programs are often outsourced to unaccountable companies." Social Security isn't, so maybe we can create a public bureau to issue and administrate a freely available national ID. "Historically, national ID systems have been used to discriminate against people on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion and political views." Alright, let's write and enforce laws that prohibit discrimination based on protected classes.
If we abdicate our ability to investigate and analyze complex problems, we don't make the problem go away. We just invite less scrupulous actors to attempt to solve that problem and exploit a lot of people along the way. We don't have a national ID system? The credit bureaus will co-opt the SSN. We don't have a virtual public square? Elon Musk will take Twitter and twist it into his image. Every problem we ignore, the ones where we eschew imperfect solutions in pursuit of ideological purity, is an opportunity to a grifter. If you don't trust the government to make a national ID... do you trust the free market more?
What's the cost of a national ID system? Privacy. Some freedoms. The government gets to collect more data about you. Build models of where you've been, what you bought, who you associate with.
What's the cost of not having a national ID system? A private interest can do all those same things, For profit.
4/4 As God as my witness, I promise this is the last one. I just want to provide the links I used to formulate this... if we want to be generous we can all it a screed. I don't mind.
https://fxb.harvard.edu/2015/11/12/a-brief-history-of-national-id-cards/
https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/iq/204657-national-id-functions-worldwide/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_identity_card_policies_by_country
https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/26/3384416/social-security-numbers-national-ID-identity-theft-nstic
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/voting-rights-national-id-card/619772/
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/sovereign-citizens-movement
Oh god... I didn't even get to talk about how I got sovereign citizen vibes from the EFF article, but I don't have the energy left to elaborate or edit it in... it just reads like libertarian concern mongering, that's all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_document
EDIT: aaaand there it is: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/31/23853618/x-privacy-policy-update-biometrics-job-history
This thread is talking about a US-based law, so I shared EFF's perspectives on national IDs in the US. For a more international view, check out Why ID https://www.accessnow.org/campaign/whyid/ -- which they've signed along with dozens of other civil society organizations.
It's true that there are potential upsides of national ID systems as well as downsides. But as that Why ID letter says, "the scalability of digital identity programmes also makes their harms scalable. It is far from being proven that most digital identity programmes have brought additional benefits to users, without placing them at risk." You're right that private implementations have similar issues -- data brokers and tech companies are as careless with data as government agencies are, and just as eager to abuse people's privacy. But there are also some big differences: a national ID is mandatory, and the government has much more of an ability to put you in jail or deny you your rights.