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.
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.
"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.