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...
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.
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.
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.
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.