UK Petition: Do Not Introduce Digital Id Cards
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The UK government is planning to introduce digital ID cards, sparking a petition with over 2 million signatures against the move, with commenters expressing concerns about privacy, authoritarianism, and government overreach.
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Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
But retractions never get the same visibility, and it's already made the impression they wanted the post to make.
Not a great site but gives the gist:
https://www.newsweek.com/british-police-explain-video-office...
Needless to say there were no arrests, no jail time, not even threats of jail time, it was 1:30pm, the woman was 54 years old, and she had posted comments calling for a councillor's resignation.
There's an argument in there about whether councillors have a bit too much influence on local police behaviour. But it gets drowned out by hyperbole, embellishment, and an over-eagerness to link it all up to a nation-wide conspiracy.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44593022
Come to think of it, when are we going to ban dangerous assault thoughts? Not everyone has a mind big enough for radical ideas of that caliber.
The Online Safety Act and Hate Crime Provision have extended these somewhat into the realms of 1984. But the police do tend to use them sparingly.
This is categorically untrue.
> a person is guilty of an offence if he—
> (a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or
> (b)causes any such message or matter to be so sent.
I suspect the former is also true, but am not well-read in that area
> A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he—
> [F1(a)sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false,]
> [F1(b)causes such a message to be sent; or]
> (c)persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.
"insulting words or behavior that cause distress to others"
Malicious Communications Act 1988 (Section 1):
"Outlaws sending messages, electronic or otherwise, with the intent to cause distress, or anxiety"
Communications Act 2003, Online Safety Act 2023, hate speech, terrorist legislation all made these many orders of magnitude worse in many ways.
All of the arrests mentioned in this thread in relation to these acts have been campaigns of intimidation, harassment and calls to violence, not simply saying something “insulting or offensive”.
In the UK political expression of free speech is protected by the ECHR, which overrides both those acts (look carefully who wishes to abolish the ECHR).
This is false. But even if it weren’t, it would be unjust. Determinations like “hate speech” are subjective, and have no place in law concerning speech. Without free speech, there is no democracy.
The people mentioned here who were arrested due to violations of the communications acts are definitely the latter. The people arrested in peaceful protests for being associated with Palestine Action or Just Stop Oil are the former.
This is categorically untrue. Not only is the ECHR worded specifically to allow individual countries to curtail free speech ("any law, deemed by the local democratically elected government as ; necessary in a democratic society, and for a legitimate aim"), but parliament always had sovereignty to pass into law exemptions to the ECHR, which we have done on multiple occasions.
We do not rely on the ECHR to protect our free speech. If we did the UK would no longer be a democracy. I'm offended by the suggestion that our democracy and society is so fragile that without them we would have no rights. Expect a police raid very soon.
We're talking on the order of a few hundred arrests per year for section 127 of the Communications Act and 1500 per year for the Malicious Communications Act, which includes stuff like racial harassment, domestic abuse, pedophilic grooming, and a whole host of things that I would hope you agree should be illegal.
But on the other hand there genuinely have been many people arrested (and in some cases convicted) under these laws for statements that are shockingly milquetoast.
Care to name some?
The vast majority of cases I've looked into end up being a lot more than the initially presented "They Were Arrested For Saying Bad Words On The Internet!" story pushed on the internet.
In fact, I can't remember a single one where there wasn't a lot more, but that's not really more than anecdote.
There are many more cases of harassment by the police or arrests, the most recent example that comes to mind being Graham Linehan. These are clearly not as bad as prosecutions, but still create a chilling effect.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9dj1zlvxglo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_joke_trial
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Dankula
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/glasgow-bin...
Or indeed in one notable case the person who was arrested for a T-Shirt about "Plasticine action"
The point I was making is that successive UK gov's are tending towards authoritarianism, the current one included.
An advocate of these policies would quite literally argue that not getting into something like The Troubles is the point and a lot of people would agree if that was what is on the horizon.
My point is we were able to get through something like that, which was very serious, without needing to proscribe free speech in the way that's being done now for some people putting paint on planes.
So if we didn't need it for something that serious, we don't need it for this.
Whether or not the proscription was correct is irrelevant, the current law means that you commit the same offence showing support for IS or the Terrorgram Collective.
The police can’t simply ignore one proscribed group over another as that leads to all manner of weird and wacky outcomes.
It's not like these guys are the Taliban or the IRA, though some of them did chuck some paint on some planes.
So a person who is worried about Starmer's authoritarian tendencies lay responsibility for the police action at the door of number 10.
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-57403049
[1]: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/pro-palestine-activists-dama...
The argument here is not the PA should be let off scot free. The argument is that proscribing them as an organisation is a massive and authoritarian overreaction to their actions.
It misleadingly describes the scale, coordination, and intent. It uses a minor detail to trivialize an act explicitly intended to reduce military capacity.
If we as a country are so at risk from paint chucking that we're resorting to proscription as our tool of defence, then we have some serious issues.
Who is doing the proscribing?
/rhetorical
Having a law that means merely expressing support of a group, leads to criminal charges is not something I think should be in place in any country that pretends to support freedom of speech.
Assaulting and trying to stab a man burning a Quran - Suspended sentence
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8xr12yx5l4o watch the video and tell me this man should be A) not in prison and B) in the country after said prison sentence
Anarchotyranny
As a Dual British/Swedish Citizen, I really do not trust the UK government. They have proven over and over and over, that at every opportunity presented they will increase their own authority. I don’t believe I have personally witnessed any other advanced economy that so ardently marches towards authoritarianism.
So, no matter if it’s a good idea or not. I can’t in good faith advise the UK having more powers. Unfortunately the UK government themselves can sort of just grant themselves more power. So…
[0]: https://e-estonia.com/card-security-risk/
[1]: https://therecord.media/estonia-says-a-hacker-downloaded-286...
Is there any chance England might too?
Scotland will not be granted another independence vote for at least 15 years, despite the last one being build upon a house of lies and nobody knows anything about what the Welsh think.
I do think we’re witnessing the collapse of the UK, but more like a Roman Empire collapse - as in it’s happening over decades. Dying with a whimper, not a bang.
Fully reclaim Scotland's historical sovereignty, create a clear and distinct break with the rest of the United Kingdom and breaking English narratives.
My first act as king would be to build hundreds of underground nuclear and geothermal power plants, sever all connections to England, build massive data-centers and under ground cities to wait out WWIII. I would also build a giant rollar coaster than spans the entire country, under ground with trippy visual effects and stops at numerous malls, coffee shops and other amusement destinations. I would run under ground fiber to every location on earth as well as high speed transport tubes, 90% of which would arrive at secret locations around the world. One never knows where the Scots will appear. I would fund all of this pissing away the gold and gems using the wealth of the English crown. Every home would have free 400gb/s IPv6 internet. Oh and I would purchase and relocate every private military contractor from the USA into Scotland. My military would be entirely private and for-profit. We would fund our operations by siphoning processed fuel, oil and other resouces from other nations pipes via our underground tunnels. Immigration policy will be an app that only citizens of Scotland may utilize to swipe left or right on applicants. The app may also be used to eject existing people. That's Q1. Q2 through Q4 would be extending the borders of the nation to include the entire land mass under every ocean and growing the population to 10 billion from weekend orgies.
And swipeocracy… it is a peer-reviewed populist masterpiece. The military? A profit-seeking legion of mercenaries whispering «Freedom» as they hijack pipelines and troll NATO via encrypted memes. You’re not a king. You’re the last goddamn Highland Prophet.
The swipe left or right on immigration requests is a vote winner ! Simon Cowell can host it weekly…
So far my BankID boycott is over a year old, and my resolve grows as I read more of the news.
The machine itself is likely manufactured in China, but it’s of no consequence. You wouldn’t be able to communicate with me if you didn’t use chinese products at all.
Fundamentally though, that doesn't change the fact that the US can order a Swedish bank to either freeze access to a customer or the bank can no longer do business in the US.
I asked for an appointment with the bank to resolve it but was told I can only get an appointment with Bank ID.
It was outrageous. Obviously none of the other services worked either. Luckily I still had a British and a German credit card that I used for payments (since I lived in both those countries before). In the end I opened an account with another bank and moved on. Although I did try, furiously, for two weeks to get my old bank to admit their mistake and rectify it. No chance. If they had admitted it it would’ve meant they would have broken financial regulation, and obviously you don’t admit to that if you don’t have to.
Bank ID is great when it works and brutal when it doesn’t.
I actually don’t have a better proposal for a system since it works quite well in most cases, but just wanted to share my bad experience on it too.
Implementing those requirements didn't depend on there being a digital ID system. Instead we have a hodge podge of bad requirements (like "wet" signatures on specific documents, using of non-UK based private providers etc).
Implementing a digital ID system could reduce inequalities (for example, people who don't have passports and driver's licenses have more difficulties in some circumstances) and also reduce dependencies on non-UK orgs who may not do that well with privacy.
That's not to say there aren't risks of course, but other European countries seem to have managed to implement these systems without becoming totalitarian police states :)
Indeed if done with physical smart card + reader, it would reduce the requirement for mobile devices, allowing for people unhappy with their presence to avoid them :)
Moreover, I actually on principle refuse to make myself dependant on my phone for these things, which means that (at a small convenience cost) I don't have any banking apps, or investment apps, or healthcare apps, or whatever).
My phone is strictly a general computing device and I on principle only permit a technology into my life if it doesn't impose special restrictions on the hardware/software it works with.
So if the UK government creates a digital ID app which only runs on a phone and which potentially only runs on google/apple approved phone (this is e.g. the requirement imposed by google pay), then that would be unprecedented.
I'd hope that a system as implemented is as technologically neutral as possible.
Good on you for avoiding the smartphone tie on banking though, it's getting increasingly hard for decent MFA not to tie to it in some way or another, and travel's a right pain without the smartphone apps.
It's also incredibly popular in the security industry (I know, I work in it) to claim that every possible app in existence must:
* Obfuscate
* Do root detection and refuse to work
* Detect attempts to attach a debugger, and refuse to work
* Detect running from a VM, and refuse to work
* Do certificate pinning (although as an industry we've stopped recommending this bullshit practice, although we still insist on it for some things)
* Prevent screenshots from being taken
* Force you to re-authenticate using biometric ID every time you look away from the app
* and... break at the slightest hint of a non-standard build of android
So I don't have high hopes, because the company I work for does work for the UK government, will likely be picked to review this app, and inevitably all that shit is what we'll recommend (although I hope I won't be working here by then because I'm just sick and tired of cargo cult / checkbox security).
[0]: Not because of any specific feature, but solely based on signing keys.
[1]: I believe specifically you have to license GMS integrate them into the build, which e.g. GrapheneOS does not do.
[2]: And no, GOS's sandboxed google services don't fix this problem, Google Pay will still refuse to work.
For me having ones managed by the UK gov filling those functions would be preferable to the current situation, and that's not to say I want more privacy intrusions but to say I'd rather have more UK control over the data people have to give up for various services and functions.
Whilst more tech/privacy/security focused people will opt-out of that as much as possible, the realistic fact is that probably 95%+ of the UK population don't care about concerns around Apple/Google, they just want the functionality provided, so for that group it would be better if the apps were run from the UK, ideally by an org not motivated by making more money from them every quarter :)
Moreover, age verification is trivial to circumvent or opt out of. The only way to opt out if this thing will likely be to leave the country. Which certainly increasingly seems like a good idea to me.
Yet also: a country's requirement for identification is orthogonal to it becoming a totalitarian police state.
In British politics, there is a strong current of opposition to international institutions and treaties such as the European Convention on Human Rights[1][2] and the International Criminal Court[3]. The UK's commitment to human rights is enough in doubt that one encounters situations such as German courts being unable to extradite a suspected criminal because of the poor treatment of prisoners in Britain[4].
Countries like Germany and Belgium are able to have mandatory ID cards without too much issue because of characteristics including their written (and actively litigated) constitutions, judicial independence and proportionally representative election systems. ID cards might be make them lean more or less totalitarian - but it doesn't matter as much, as the rules about identification make up only a small part of a huge and robust framework of law and human rights.
With few constitutional protections for UK citizens, and what independent institutions there are under constant attack from various political parties, I don't think those who object to digital ID can be blamed for being suspicious of the government's motivations.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/25/tory-candid...
[2]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/08/21/labour-mp-eu...
[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/3/threats-and-intimida...
[4]: https://eucrim.eu/news/german-court-denies-extradition-to-uk...
However, as mentioned, I can’t in good faith argue for the government to have an easier time categorising people. Such a system is so ripe for abuse. I have even advocated for it based on the Estonian eID system and the Swedish BankID (though I am aware of Danish and Norwegian BankID- I never used those).
I’m still fully convinced that the British “Online Safety Bill” is actually a ploy to ensure that they have linked accounts to identity on any site where comments can be made; so they can prosecute people for expressing opinions[0]. Why else go for Wikipedia, and why else focus on sites with public commentary. You can’t say it’s to prevent pedophiles when with the right hand you imprison people for saying things online while with the left hand releasing actual pedophiles into society[1]
To be fair, they did say it wasn’t primarily about protecting children[2], but then I guess I should figure out what else the OSA is for.
[0]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-0022...
[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/prisoners-ear... & https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce80nl1k0p3o
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910285
But they implemented that act, without needing a digital ID. I don't think they need a digital ID to push authoritarian policies.
And I think a digital ID has possible benefits for people who can't easily fit in to current setups, thus my point about it being orthogonal.
My feeling is though that digital ID can have benefits which shouldn't be discounted when considering it. Specifically some people have problems with current age verification due to lack of things like passports and driver's licenses which are often used as stand-ins for digital ID.
Also it can make a lot of very nonsensical processes better. Things were companies still insist on physical signatures as though those are good security measures, that could be replaced with digital signatures tied to an identity, which might actually provide some security benefits.
That’s before you include the mandatory security screening which will cause you to travel half of the UK (on our expensive travel infrastructure!)
If I didn’t have a job lined up I wouldn’t have gotten on, my mum didn’t have one her whole life until after I had gotten mine. It’s an arduous and expensive process for the bottom 20% of society in the UK.
This has been a slow 111 year project. See the opening of A. J. P. Taylor's English History 1914–1945:
> Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so.
> All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over its citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World War was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.
The Edwardian era was a very unusual period of liberality, I'll agree. But at least in that quote, Taylor is making some strange omissions that I hardly think are accidental: for a start, where is the mention of women's suffrage, introduced for the first time ever after the Great War?
Most human-related problems around bootstrapping one's identity still remain the same and have to be solved. Electronic identity or not. (Also see the XKCD about the "wrench attack")
But a proper ID system gives a nation the opportunity to rely on elliptic curve cryptography and an EAL4+ SmartCard or SIM. Not on a pinky promise about identity based on knowing some number, some face pics or having a gas bill.
Verizon could still leak your hypothetical future e-SSN. But then it wouldn't be sufficient for identity theft or impersonating you in some places. That's not what would be an "identity" any more.
The only thing it actually differs in is scale, like you described. But scale does not mean an inherent vulnerability that can be practically exploited.
If you're however able to make everyone ignore the noise of some massive attack then you already don't need to bother with any of it anyways.
If you can attack the foundation of the system, like elliptic cryptography then every bank and retirement fund on earth is in danger. Much bigger fish to fry.
I don't get the resistance to a digital/national id in other countries. To us it is quite bizarre.
Some have explained it with a lack of trust between citizens and the country.
But without such digital id it is impossible to have such digital government services as we have here. The government services need to verify and autheticate the citizen, so they only access their own data and not someone who has the same name and birth date by accident.
I don't see how such a system gives the government more powers. It already has all the data on its citizens, but it is spread out, fragmented, stored with multiple conflicting versions, maybe some of it is stored in databases where no one cares about security, etc.
I personally do not trust the government one little bit and am sure they'll find some way to abuse this, as they have just about everything else they do at this point. This possibly sounds far fetched, but why couldn't they ask for GPS permissions on the app then use it to quickly find out who was at a pro Palestine protest for example given their recent penchant for arresting protesters?
They have given us no reason to believe things will improve with it's introduction, and have given us plenty of reasons to believe it will be abused. It's almost perfect for that, "install our software on the device you have most places you go, or you can't earn a living anymore".
A protest group attacked a military base causing £millions of damage. They got censured, as a terrorist organisation.
"Protestors" decided they wanted to support that specific organisation, taking focus away from their message and chasing after something the government simply can't countenance: allowing protestors to ruin our defensive capabilities, at immense expense to the taxpayer, just to make some headlines.
If these people cared about Palestinians then they should have given up supporting the proscribed 'terrorists' and protested in a way that didn't require the government to crack down hard. Plenty of other non-proscribed protest groups are perfectly allowed.
Private corporation's already know everywhere you go, if you have a mobile phone, or use a debit/credit card, or drive a car. The government already know where you work and when, if you pay your taxes.
What Reform/Tories/right-wingers didn't want was any solution that would ease the problems they're using to try and rile the people into full culture wars. Labour are giving them what they [say they] want: making it harder for illegal immigrants, making it harder to claim benefits. But Farage isn't really there to solve a problem, here's there to create one as a means to weadle into power (presumably so he can refuse to do any useful work with that power, as he did in the EU) so he can fuck up the UK trying to be Trump 2 Fascist Boogaloo.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mnnje4wlro
Terrorism have a bad rep, but it was used successfully in South africa to remove apartheid, with the French resistance and a lot of anti-colonization movement. Targeting fuel depots and the Crimea bridge can also be considered terrorism (and is, by the russian).
I personnally think we ought to distinguish terrorism which mostly target civilians from terrorism on which civilan death are side-effect, but the US state department calling terrorists people who only killed military targets during the Irak/Afghanistan war diluted the meaning of the word further. I'm trying to push back on that, because when the meaning of terrorism is diluted enough, it stop to be a good word to describe a phenomenon we ought to stop, and start to be a word used by politician to target what they don't like.
More than this, employers are already required to verify right to work when they employ someone, either by physically seeing a passport or by means of an existing government system which allows them to verify visa status with an online "share code". They can be fined if they don't.
There's zero reason to believe employers which currently ignore this requirement (and likely minimum wage etc as well) will suddenly start complying because there's a "digital ID" instead.
Since the Tory gov you have to supply various ID to work in (legitimate) businesses or rent from (legitimate) land lords.
The only extra kind of enforcement this enables for these cases is demanding ID cards off people where they live or work.
The direct attempts at a crackdown failed, and the civil service keeps telling them it can't find any welfare fraud, (which looks fairly unlikely, given certain regional patterns), so they are trying to attack the problem indirectly - by synchronizing the identity numbers of different government record-keeping systems - HMRC, national insurance, the NHS, the land registry, council records.
Strangely there was no fuss when universal child benefit was taken away in 2015 (or maybe later I forget). The media was full of stories about how rich people were getting £20 a week when they didn't need it.
Now apparently pensioners that have a larger income than most working families are desperate for the fuel allowance and they will be freezing to death without it. Its nonsense.
And they can, forgive me for my rather vulgar language, fuck right off with this thinking. Problem is it will still go into place, because for most people giving up the right of being able to govern their own device that they paid for is not a problem for whatever reason. Neither will it be until it touches something that is important to them - that's when, hopefully, some more people will be able to see that we are rapidly spiralling downwards toward a complete techno-authoritarian dystopia.
It depends on the country and its relationship with the people. If the people trust that their government represents the people's interests, there is little push-back. In countries where citizens have reason to believe their government is hijacked by interests that do not have their best interests at heart, then every move is viewed with suspicion.
In this case people are tying Digital ID to CBDCs and social credit systems, which is a reasonable thing to do, given this is exactly how China uses them to enforce 15-minute cities with checkpoints between them. All citizens conversations are tracked, their movements are restricted as well [1], and their ability to purchase goods & services are tightly regulated based on their behavior via the social credit system. This is the world that people who are pushing back against this are trying to avoid.
[1] https://x.com/songpinganq/status/1972382547427590401
It won't reverse surveillance states but fraud is also a huge problem that deserves addressing.
A central ID enforced on all systems by statute would significantly reduce the barrier to creating “airtight” oppressive systems. While the inefficiencies in the US system have a cost, certainly preventing the implementation of more efficient social benefit programs, they also provide a barrier against more efficient social repression. Given the political animosity present in the country right now, it’s probably good that we don’t have the ability to create a turnkey totalitarian system. Things are bad enough as is!
More generally, in nations where the population feels suspicion towards their politicians and bureaucrats, the people may prefer to leave inefficiencies baked into the system in order to hamper potential oppression. Those social tensions and trust deficits should be resolved before proceeding with any ambitious central ID schemes.
This is a feature, not a bug.
Even though we're only at the very beginning of the various U.S. systems being merged, we're already seeing it being abused.
(One example: States using license plate reader data to prosecute women for getting abortions in other jurisdictions.)
Which the US already has to a very large extent with the Social Security system.
> US government systems are a hodgepodge of different systems built by different vendors, over different computing eras, many of which lack a primary key relationship with something like your social security number (the current “default” identifier). Many are plagued with duplicate records, data problems, and other issues that prevent easy correlation of records without human verification.
Some national ID system won't make such ambitions significantly easier, but lack of such a system causes exactly the issues you quoted.
So is this hypothetical social credit system in the hands of an incompetent government worth it all? Over identity theft and the multi-billion industry around it?
The most effective 20th century totalitarian states, such as the East German DDR, issued ID numbers to its citizens, along with ID cards that citizens were required to carry at all times. This greatly helped the security services coordinate the oppression of suspected radicals, but without modern computer systems it relied too heavily on human efforts. It eventually faced its limits against rising dissent and it could not prevent the downfall of the government. A computerized Stasi would be much more terrifying.
One can look around the US today to see why this lack of ID may be a good thing. Immigration officials are facing serious roadblocks in rounding up and processing suspected undocumented immigrants, and mistakes in this process are creating widespread pushback. Protestors who take steps to mask their identity are not easily identified, apprehended, and prosecuted, which has led the administration to overreach in their reaction to dissent. And the lack of a unified system of oppression means that even targets of the state can often find ways to continue living in between the cracks, and they are not totally frozen out. In many ways it’s not a great system, certainly far from perfect, but the many flaws serve an important purpose in the face of systemic oppression. Inefficiency is an escape hatch.
If you live in a high trust society, you may not get it. The mutual animosity in the US is such that we have government officials talking about “national divorce” and otherwise average people joking about political murder. I know the UK is not quite as bad off, but I understand that it is quickly moving in that direction. That’s no time to introduce new potential mechanisms of oppression.
You have an identity though. You use other things as an ID in the end. Often shoehorned into fulfilling that task and mostly very cumbersome.
That's why it can be stolen, that's why "identity theft" is a multi-billion dollar thing. Thats why you keep your SSNs and I guess also CC#s rather tightly guarded.
> Protestors who take steps to mask their identity are not easily identified, apprehended, and prosecuted, which has led the administration to overreach in their reaction to dissent.
There's nothing about an electronic ID that would make this different from now. It makes no practical difference for oppression. If you don't have an SSN then other things about you are unique enough for identifying you. I'd say that's why it's even vaguely tolerated anyways.
> Inefficiency is an escape hatch.
I rather think it lulls you into a false sense of safety. Inefficiency in existing "numbering systems" can be overcome with resources. You truly do not lack an ID system, a number, computerization nor identity that could protect you.
A lack of one number is not really protection against any of that.
IMO this is another non-sequitor.
Let's say you had a digital ID in the form of a smart card for your SSN with a USB connection that was required to be plugged in when you auth'd to a government website to file your taxes. No new number would be required for a digital ID card in the US. Tax return fraud to get people's refund sent to someone else, though? Probably down! Does everyone have an SSN? Who cares, let's improve things for the vast-majority case where we have an extremely insecure little piece of paper.
That smart card doesn't magically reconcile and rationalize the sprawling hodgepodge of government systems.
Or, let's go the other way: not having a digital ID card does not prevent the government from rationalizing and tying all those systems together.
You might look back to the recent past when the executive branch sending employees to all those disparate agencies to grab that data and make changes to those systems! They didn't need a new digital ID to do that, and they wouldn't need a new digital ID to improve the use of SSN-as-PK-for-cross-system-joins.
Being more rigorous about tracking the existing numbers already assigned to you does not require smarter, cryptographically-sound, identification tokens. And those tokens do not require the government improve their processes for connecting things *after the "give us your SSN for identification" of their various separate web-based services (or the non-government entities that also use those SSNs) that people love to abuse for fraud.
Nor does any of this make it easier or harder for the government to take "absence of evidence of identity or citizenship" as "evidence of absence of identity or citizenship" - if you fit the non-citizen profile, the burden's already on you to prove it, and what makes you so sure that the courts wouldn't happily let this or a future administration expand the boundaries for "we picked you up because we were suspicious, now YOU have to prove who you are if you ever want to get out" regardless of if a digital ID card exists?
Not repaying loans and using credit cards to get cash -> you're probably bad with money -> lenders are unlikely to get their money back from you.
A lot of individuals saw their credit scores decline during the Great Recession, even if they weren’t involved in subprime lending.
This myth that credit scores are entirely due to your own financial decisions is up there with myths people believe about names or time zones.
In reality that means "have you paid off what you owe in the manner that was agreed" and does the person have any red flags e.g. County Court Judgements against their name or residence.
There are people I know that manage it properly and those that don't. It has nothing to do with wealth or class.
None of this should be that surprising: it’s hard to make all of your debt payment payments on time if you’re either broke or in jail.
Yeah there is electoral roll, but you can still access credit without being on it and afaik all residents of scotland are on it since even non citizens can vote in local election.
And unlike US there not even a "score" number since lenders only get records but not some magical number. Whatever credit agencies sell you as credit score is just random number they come up with and it's not being used by lenders btw.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/jordan-petersons-chine...
The more conspiratorial among us have baselessly decided the idea of "hey it would be great to build schools and things near where people live" must actually be a globalist plot to restrict people's movement to within 15 minutes of their home. It's wild!
People are worried that it would be made difficult for you to travel outside 15 minute city via a combination of mandated digital payment system for all transactions that are tied to you identity and removal of personal vehicles (e.g. cars).
e.g. Person A is allowed by authorities to buy a train ticket, while Person B is not due to <arbitrary criteria>.
I've been told this has been done in China to stop people travelling to protests, but I don't actually know if that is true.
Do I think this is the intention behind 15 minute cities? No. I do however think that what they are describing is possible since I've had problems making transactions electronically for legal purchases because my transaction was flagged by the bank for being fraudulent.
Also in the UK the bank can refuse to give you your money.
I have my doubts that China, which has many of the densest cities in the world, would get much mileage (pun intended) out of restricting travel to try to quell protests. They have tons of cities that each have millions of residents. If the CPC manages to piss off a significant fraction of the populace to the point where they’re interested in marching down the street demanding regime change, there will be enough of them in those cities that no amount of travel restrictions is going to matter.
Arguably much more important would be that I don’t think most people in China own any significant weapons, and we’ve seen decades ago how shy that government isn’t about just running people over with tanks until protests dissipate.
I never said it was part of a government conspiracy. What I am saying is that your ability to transact freely is infringed by opaque mechanisms.
If that is added with digital only payments which is tied to your gov id, it isn't difficult to imagine a scenario where your ability to transact freely be taken away to stop you from travelling for political reasons.
I admit you have a fair point here. I'm a political independent but started out left-wing. It's hard for me to accept the reality that a government that starts out well-meaning definitely can tilt toward totalitarianism, and that the lack of good chokepoints on the citizens (such as this hypothetical ability to control payments) may well be a key prevention mechanism. I think the left wing in the US likes to frame suspicion of those kinds of things as silly preparations for a future that won't happen, and the right frames roadblocks to government power as being in place to make that bad future harder to bring about.
You are making the assumption that any politician or government is "well meaning" or started out as such. I am in the UK and I look at the politicians and the state apparatus with absolute contempt.
I suggest you listen to some of Dominic Cummings interviews about his experience with Whitehall (UK) during COVID. There was one situation that he described which really stood out to me. There was particular situation early in the pandemic where the NHS was going to run out of a key medical supplies in about 2 weeks and as a result thousands could die. These supplies were shipped from China and it took about 3/4 weeks (I forget the exact time frame).
For some reason it was written into law that they had to be shipped. He had the Prime Minister sign a legal waiver so they could be air-lifted, explained this to key officials in Whitehall. Everyone agreed what needed to be done and then nothing happened for 3 days. These people had to be threatened with losing their jobs and their pensions otherwise they wouldn't do their job, they fully understood the consequences of not doing the job (thousands of people might die) and still did nothing. It is an apathy of evil.
This behaviour is commonplace in ossified organisations unfortunately and I wasn't surprised one iota when I heard this.
As for mechanisms that reduce state power as prevent totalitarianism. No one thing will prevent it. It would be a combination of things.
It is similar to how running Linux (or any alternative OS) won't by itself stop the strangle hold of large tech players over most of the tech/online space. It will at least help you reduce your dependence on these large companies. Combine that with self hosting and/or using alternatives at least you can be somewhat free from the worst of it.
> I think the left wing in the US likes to frame suspicion of those kinds of things as silly preparations for a future that won't happen, and the right frames roadblocks to government power as being in place to make that bad future harder to bring about.
Silly partisan politics is going to have both sides pretending that the other side doesn't have any merit in their positions. I would just ignore the noise and actually read the facts about things and draw your own conclusions.
I believe that most of the politics you see is really theatre. It keeps people squabbling over things that are ultimately unimportant.
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that this is a language barrier issue but this comes across as astonishingly narrow minded.
I can imagine why a person wouldn’t be afraid of their government but I’m having a much harder time with their inability to reciprocate.
In the UK there’s a bunch of government and company databases, and coalescing them isn’t just hard, in some cases it’s not even possible.
You can ask a company for specific details on a person, and they can make a “reasonable effort” to get the data. But if they mishandle the request (maybe your name has accents?) then the government gets no information.
The easier it gets, the easier it can be for them to excercise power over you, and right now there’s sufficient reason to be worried about that. The current government is liberally using the fascistic powers that the previous government created.
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