Comment by skrebbel 6 hours ago
This is the part of the argument I don’t get. A digital ID system like the one in NL is basically just a login system. It’s oauth for public services, not too different from “sign in with Google”. How does that lead to perfect law enforcement? Like, how does it prevent homosexuals from kissing?
I don't mean this dismissively. I assume there is a series of steps that make sense that I’m not seeing.
But no one should use sign in with google.
Are you saying that it's 100% garanteed optional in all situations? It has no power to be used to control or even coerce you or discriminate against you or build a profile and track you which can be used at a later date by a different party when a new political wind decides it finds you inconvenient? I find all of that hard to believe while still performing the convenience function let alone any legitimate law enforcement function.
I can explain the logic behind it.
The first step you need to take is view a government as a hostile entity. It's not your government, it's occupational government. It's unjust by default and you don't agree with the rules it makes, including immigration and taxes.
Now imagine there are three arms of the government -- the one that collects taxes, the one that administers unemployment benefits and the other, which gives out visa, including family reunification permits.
You, as natural born citizen want to bring another person from the outside as a partner and for that you need to sponsor their visa. Government in their infinite wisdom decided you need to earn a certain amount of income for a certain time to be able to sponsor a partner (otherwise you both will be able to claim benefits). To do so you get a list of unemployment premiums paid from one agency and submit to the other.
Now here is the kicker -- if the government is able to aggregate the data from all the agencies mentioned above, they can better implement their policy, i.e. deny you family reunification visa AND bust your for not paying taxes. To aggregate the data they need to have the primary key to join datasets, including data sets from the governments from other countries (see CRS).
In this imaginary situation you can get your partner a visa and immediately stop working. If the government is able to join datasets, something will automatically trigger and you will get the letter saying visa is revoked.
You can disagree or agree with any specific policy, or you can deny government the capability to implement privacy invading policies.
Think of it as a backslash against tracking by google on all the sites with ad sense, algorithmic feeds and the rest. Maybe gestapo is not sending you gulash tomorrow, but it's symptomatically not great.
Add:
Can the government ask Palantir to join datasets without the primary key? Sure they can and they do, that goes against the same principle as above. Is it better to have civil freedoms and privacy protection that come from literally doing Holocaust? It's better, but it's not on menu yet.
But the government can already do all that without Digital ID. That's my question with the fear mongering.
A hostile government can already link your data from all sorts of places. Digital ID at least helps us for more security.
Without Digital ID + Hostile Government you have the worst of both worlds.
"But the government can already do all that without Digital ID."
That may be true, but the point is that it makes law enforcement less perfect, and that can be good. That is the point "stavros" is making.
Rosa parks broke the law by seating on a seat where she was "not supposed to". Hypothetically, if there were a quick ID check machine on the bus, it could have just prevented the whole thing from happening at all.
If you start with the premise that the government is hostile by default, it logically follows they will get some capability they didn't have before or increase the one they had. You will have less chance to fall through the cracks and the friction you get from not having the convenient thing is a proof that the beast is at least partially crippled.
It's very often that government has a capability to retroactively assemble a very detailed information about a specific person, but doesn't have a capability to proactively screen the whole population and implement policy.
Illegal immigration is a good example of it -- when somebody is already sitting in a van it's possible to figure out whether they are a citizen or not and maybe even find pictures of watermelons on their phone. It's however impossible to selectively block phone numbers and bank accounts of all the people who are present in the country without government authorization.
Your entire post is motivated to allow people to deliberately scheme to break a multitude of laws.
SMH
The main concern here is that it will create a narrow bridge (i.e, the digital ID system) between people and various services and opportunities which will make it an easy target for people who wish to wield power against someone.
Perhaps your digital ID is needed to open a bank account, get a phone number, sign up for insurance, etc. Now, suppose some fascist government comes into power. They could start cancelling the digital ID's of people or groups they do not like or are bigotted against. These people start losing access to critical infrastructure.
Now, this could already happen, even with imperfect paper IDs, of course. But by making everything digital, we are reducing societal resilience towards such kind of hostility.
We already have exactly this right now, without digital ids, it's not even theoretical. The government blocks plenty of residents from aspects of society (eg can't work based on visa rules, can't access public/health services at all without legal residency). Currently that's enforced by random members of e.g. medical staff looking at your skin colour to decide whether to ask to check your physical paperwork before they'll look at your weird looking mole. Governments enforce plenty of paperwork checks & blocks today. I think a digital id strictly improves this scenario.
> We already have exactly this right now, without digital ids, it's not even theoretical.
That is true. I was answering skrebbel's question about [how does having a digital ID system lead to perfect law enforcement?].
> Governments enforce plenty of paperwork checks & blocks today. I think a digital id strictly improves this scenario.
I hope you are right. Personally, I am not against Digital ID. My concern is, (a) how can we make sure that the infrastructure operating the digital ID is democratically controlled and not just owned by tech oligopolies; and (b) what security practices, social norms, and legal checks and balances shall we implement to prevent weaponization of this sort of infrastructure and violations of privacy?
>(eg can't work based on visa rules, can't access public/health services at all without legal residency)
You aren't a citizen in such case - you aren't legally allowed to do so. This is another issue with law being in power but it's enforcement over the years was spotty - and people just got used to it.
What you are saying is that government blocks you from committing a crime - which it should try to do so as government's responsibility should be first and foremost towards it's citizens.
Whether you agree if such law is moral or not is irrelevant in this case. As an active participant in the system you could vote for parties that want to change it or campaign to have it changed(even by talking to people) if you find it immoral.
Digital ID on the other hand affects citizens, and allows power abuse towards citizens from government, including unelected officials and middle-level clerks.
Here in the UK, the government wants:
* ID checks for social media (to protect children)
* A digital ID card, allowing ID check records to be provably linked to the original ID document (to prevent illegal working)
* The police arresting people for posting unfashionable takes on human sexuality to social media
And even if you trust the current government, there are very real fears the next government will be Trump-admiring right wing populists who are eager to upend the status quo.
> The police arresting people for posting unfashionable takes on human sexuality to social media
When you look into these cases, they always turn out to be "a sustained campaign of harassment and abuse against one or more named individuals". It took years for even Glinner to finally cross that line and get his collar felt.
For the most part it doesn't go as far as the arrest but it gives the right for police to do "a sustained campaign of harassment and abuse against one or more named individuals" because their kids are posting unpopular memes on social media
UK is in big trouble, it's a naughty nanny state
> because their kids are posting unpopular memes on social media
I can't work out what this is supposed to refer to? Is this supposed to coexist with the "parents have complete responsibility for their kid's internet usage" from the Online Safety Act discourse?
> When you look into these cases, they always turn out to be "a sustained campaign of harassment and abuse against one or more named individuals".
No that isn't the case. The are substantial problems in the UK around the the various hate speech and terrorism laws. Pretending there isn't by hand waiving away concerns and pretending that them being found not guilty later after having their life turned upside down (the process is the punishment) is quite honestly disingenuous.
Digital ID is fine if it is a choice of citizen if to use it or not, without any consequences - soft or hard. It is convenient to use, and can streamline processes.
If physical ID gets heavily discouraged and Digital ID gets mandated for everything, you basically have to keep a tracking device(a phone, which already fulfills that role) that is now tied to government records. Location, who do you meet, your contacts, when do you access your bank etc - all of that can be exposed extremely easily. The ease of access is the problem - as normally law enforcement needs to go through lengthy process to access such data across multiple vendors - but now all it takes is just storing metadata about access to Id Portal, and can do so in bulk.
Now they have it in single place - and in most cases - no code is open source, with no way to verify if it even does what it promised to even if it was open source.
The issue is that even if you have 100% trust in current government, you are one election away from a change to something vastly different. Always ask yourself this question when a law is proposed:
- would I be fine with this legislation if the government in charge represented everything I hate?