Technology

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:

After 9/11, many governments began collecting, storing and using biometrics identifiers in national IDs. Authorities justified these initiatives by arguing that biometric identification and authentication helps secure borders, verify employment and immigration, prosecute criminals, and combat identity fraud and terrorism.

...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.