Comment by lxgr

I broadly agree on the theory of administrative friction increasing the resiliency of societies against non-democratic government action, but I wonder if that ship hasn't sailed with the digitziation of most governments: All that data is already present in some database, public or private (with the government able to coerce access in many cases).

So I get the historical aversion to IDs as the stepping stone of governments to gaining access to potentially democracy-subverting informational hazmat, but these days, I feel like the downsides of not having a ubiquitous and privacy-preserving ID scheme vastly outweigh the little bit of extra friction of it will ever add.