How so? In Sweden we have digital ID and it's great! Super practical and I struggle to think of how it would be used to spy on citizens, given that it has the same legal protections as banks have regarding your account transactions etc.
Like sure you could in theory see every document I've ever signed if you have a warrant for BankID servers, but you could probably glean most of that if you had a warrant for the banks servers anyway, so it's not really a new capability.
It's not really that a digital ID can be used to spy on people (governments can already do this to a pretty large degree without needing spyware). It's that it's a permission system that can be instantly updated and centrally managed by people that have legal authority to spy on you.
If your digital ID is controlled centrally by the government (the guys that are watching most things you do already), and you need your digital ID to do most commercial interactions (banking, buying things, travel, etc), it means the government can revoke your ability to do any of those commercial interactions (or even other things that aren't strictly commercial, think "travel papers" for driving out of state).
And it doesn't even have to be in response to criminal actions. You too too many trips this year? Well, you've used up your CO2 budget as a citizen, have fun not buying CO2-intensive food (meat). Said something racist online? Well we certainly can't let a person like you buy a car now, can we?
And yes, things like credit cards and credit scores are centrally managed to a degree, and Visa/Mastercard can deny transactions for somewhat-arbitrary reasons (they're actually fairly legally limited in how they can do this, it's not totally arbitrary). But these things are not tied into every aspect of your life (your bank doesn't necessarily know how many miles you've driven this year), whereas states can (or can invent the legal authority to) tie a digital ID into everything.
> If your digital ID is controlled centrally by the government (the guys that are watching most things you do already), and you need your digital ID to do most commercial interactions (banking, buying things, travel, etc), it means the government can revoke your ability to do any of those commercial interactions (or even other things that aren't strictly commercial, think "travel papers" for driving out of state).
The government can already do this today in the US, they can put your ID on a fly denylist, your passport on a "always go to secondary screening list" (ask anyone who's ever been to Iran on vacation and then decided to travel to the US) and your license plate on a wanted list.
The USA will probably get a lite version. The PRC already has the most severe version. The EU will introduce something severe and pretend otherwise. (And the UK will copy them while pretending not to.)
They wield way too much power. I've never understood what happened with American Express and Diners Club. These used to be major credit cards which have gone into heavy decline.
I think AmEx and Diners shot themselves in the foot with their fees. I know a lot of shop and restaurant owners, and none of them accept those cards because they take a cut that is easily double or triple of what Visa and Mastercard take.
I completely agree with your main point, but the state supervised CO2 budget strikes me as a bad example; I see no real way to prevent companies and citizens from "externalizing costs" in the form of environmental damage except by regulation that restricts (historically, we did not get rid of leaded gas by gentle admonishment either).
But my digital ID is in addition of my physical one, it's not a replacement.
It provides convenience, and the only thing I'd lose of it was hypothetically revoked(the government has no such powers, and are unlikely to gain them, more on that later) is that convenience.
The reason the government is unlikely to gain those powers is that it would require a change in the grundlag, and such changed has to be approved twice, and there has to be an election between the two approvals.
> It's that it's a permission system that can be instantly updated and centrally managed by people that have legal authority to spy on you.
How is it a permission system? It's a way to prove your identity safely, online. No proposal/implementation that I'm aware of (maybe outside of China, but I'm not familiar enough) that actually conditionally does so based on preconditions and blocks you from actions. It would probably be actively illegal to do so in multiple countries.
> But these things are not tied into every aspect of your life (your bank doesn't necessarily know how many miles you've driven this year)
I mean, that's not true. LexisNexis is the company many car vendors send your driving data to, to be bought by insurance companies to do adaptive pricing. Banks don't necessarily need that data, but if they did, they could buy it too.
Which is why it's better if it's the government - there can be laws, regulations, pressure, judicial reviews to ensure that only legitimate uses are fine, and no such discrimination is legal. Take a look at credit scores in the US - they're run by private for profit companies, sold to whoever wants them, so credit scores have become a genuine barrier to employment, housing, etc. If this were managed by a state entity (like in France, Banque de France stores all loan data, and when someone wants to give you a loan, they check with them what your current debts are, and if you have defaulted on any recently; that's the only data they can get and use), there could be strong controls on who accesses the data and uses it for what.
> How is it a permission system? It's a way to prove your identity safely, online.
Can someone revoke your ability to prove your identity? To pick an example, say, the far right wins an election and decides that trans people need to go back to their birth genders, and revokes the validity for the identifiers of anyone that has transitioned.
I was with you until your 3rd paragraph. Why are you carrying water for climate change accelerationists and racists?
The examples don't even make sense historically. Haven't you noticed that most governments are failing to decarbonize, and government force against citizens is usually against the left?
Racists deserve free speech, and our society is better for it. When racists are silenced, anti-racists become complacent, stupid, and ironically, racist because they lose the ability to recognize racism.
Defend everyone's free speech. Don't require the necessity of unfair accusations. The destruction of people's lives over unfair accusations is simply a failure of due process and the desire of people to join a mob for safety. You should hate that no matter what you think about the right to free expression and belief. Anyone who would earnestly defend mob justice led by demagogues and supported by people afraid to be targeted next has a particular demagogue who they back.
> Racists deserve free speech, and our society is better for it.
To the extent that our society is better for extending free speech to racists it has nothing to do with them deserving anything, but with the costs of empowering any fallible human institution to deny anyone things that that particular group of people do not deserve, and the cost of failing to make that distinction is being susceptible to being convinced that some other group truly does not deserve it and therefore some institution should be empowered to identify members of that group and deny it to them.
Wild how you're weaving a tale about mob justice when someone says something against racists.
Also, it's logically incoherent how you're portraying mob justice as a bad thing while rejecting governmental regulation. The entire idea of the state having a monopoly on violence is to prevent mob justice, or individuals taking the law into their own hands. Basic civics.
I'm generally in favor of free speech, but there are thorny issues associated with it that "free speech absolutists" aren't interrogating because they stop at "racists should be able to say what they want".
One is free to say racist things. Others are free to mock them in return.
Racists are not free from consequences. If they don't like others freely expressing themselves in return, at the rhetorical and emotional expense of the racist, racists can freely express themselves in their home.
You're advocating a very reductive approach to free speech.
There are a lot of definitions of what that entails. Some people have landed in hot water for making comments about what's happened in Gaza and accused of that.
Because in a free country you have the right to be a climate skeptic and a racist?
Being a racist is mostly useless and self-serving, but if you make any particular scientific position illegal, it's identical to having state defined science. That's how we got people passing bills to define pi and Lysenkoism. It's how we institutionalized chattel slavery and sometimes teaching black people to read punishable by death.
The goal of government isn't to promote your "correct" opinions. The goal of government should be summarize the beliefs of a fully-informed public in order to act on their behalf.
>The goal of government should be summarize the beliefs of a fully-informed public in order to act on their behalf.
I fully agree with your position here, but do you think the government has a roll in making sure the public is not misled or believes things that "experts" consider to be false? Do you think expert opinions should carry more weight that the average Joe?
I think my position is that the government is a tool we, the taxpayer, should use to investigate things and educate us of its findings. That this should be done in an open and transparent way so that we can trust the results. I don't think for profit companies should responsible for educating people. (sorry for the tangent)
It is the most unpopular speech which is at the greatest risk of being censored, and so there is it also the best place to hold the line on free speech. If you don't defend the right to say racist things, then you've already conceded the fight for free speech and are now just negotiating your surrender.
Racism will get you fired from virtually any company in America, thrown out of virtually any business or school, etc. If you don't think it's deeply unpopular then I don't know what to tell you. It is the speech which is closest to being outright banned everywhere. It already is in most developed countries, probably most of the developing ones too (at least on paper), America stands out as one place it remains technically legal even though it will get you blacklisted from almost everywhere. The only reason it's still legal here is because the first ammendment is unusually strong. Chip away at it, and I guarantee you'll lose more than you're bargaining for.
Racist thought and language is everywhere. People supporting racist institutions and language are everywhere.
These days, bigots are getting their teachers thrown out of school. It just happened at OU.
Universities are dropping DEI because Trump asked them to. Many companies are acting similarly, obviously in some sectors more than others.
Ask minorities if racism and other forms of bigotry are unpopular. You'll probably get a different perspective than the one you gave me. That is unless the only minority folks you know are Clarence Thomas and Vivek Ramaswamy.
> Like sure you could in theory see every document I've ever signed if you have a warrant for BankID servers, but you could probably glean most of that if you had a warrant for the banks servers anyway, so it's not really a new capability.
It's a single point of failure. Digital ID servers on creation because as valuable to compromise as value_of_bank_hack*bank_count plus whatever other services are rolled in.
Furthermore now only one warrant is needed, or one illegal executive order. Take the USA as a live example - legal protections aren't actually real, a government official with enough political power can just do whatever they want while the courts struggle to keep up, and then just ignore court orders.
If your identity is spread out in many different ways, at least then there's more friction to compromise. Just because one bank capitulates doesn't mean the actor immediately has health information on you, for example. Just because the unemployment office capitulates doesn't mean the actor has your financial records.
I think a lot of people in the US are clinging to the hope that this type of friction, along with judicial decisions, will cause the process of removing our legal protections to stall out. I'm not optimistic that this is the case, because the party currently driving the federal incursion on private and state-held data is the one that until recently was opposed to things like national ID. Anything can be done in the name of protecting people from N, if you can get a majority to be afraid of N.
I don’t really get why people seem convinced that the government is removing protections for all citizens under a smokescreen of illegal immigration handling, as opposed to taking limited and temporary measures to deal with an unusual situation.
My current interpretation is that they are fear mongering about violence because they are actually way more racist than they admit publicly, and might want to remove more people than they were letting on initially.
So okay you can definitely disagree with that, and how you feel about it can definitely be influenced by how much you feel threatened (personally or network) and that’s valid.
But why do we think that they are using this as a ruse to like become despotically authoritarian in general? Do we think that the borders were opened intentionally to fabricate this “crisis”? If not, it would be such a huge coincidence, because there are a zillion reasons to be concerned about the demographic situation without needing to use it as a smokescreen, what are the odds that this problem organically appeared and then they happen to be able to take advantage of it?
Note that I’m not asserting that the borders weren’t opened intentionally to fabricate this problem to which they can react with a “solution”, that sounds exactly like something a government would do. I just don’t hear anyone saying that out loud, at least, and having personal network or moral values or whatever threatened and reacting to that just seems a lot more likely to me as a reason why people feel like the world is ending.
> I don’t really get why people seem convinced that the government is removing protections for all citizens under a smokescreen of illegal immigration handling, as opposed to taking limited and temporary measures to deal with an unusual situation.
Probably because the actions being taken are against people of every category; illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, and naturally born citizens.
As has been noted, _anyone_ not being entitled due process means _nobody_ is entitled to due process. Because then can kidnap you, claim you're "of a group not entitled to due process", and do whatever they want to you. And you can't push back because you're not in that group... because you need due process to do that.
> But why do we think that they are using this as a ruse to like become despotically authoritarian in general?
At some point, you have to call a duck a duck. They're doing things that despotically authoritarian would do, over and over. They may or may not _think_ that's what their goal is, but it clearly is.
What actions are being taken against legal immigrants and naturally born citizens?
Are you referring to getting arrested and released due to some suspicion (let’s say the suspicion is always fabricated for the sake of argument), or deported, or something else?
On due process, if someone accidentally gets a free flight to a foreign country, that totally sucks and they should be paid compensation, but let’s not pretend that deportation is the same as what authoritarian regimes typically do. Have people disappeared off the face of the earth? I think the Germans of the ‘30s would have a very different reputation if they had simply attempted to deport all the Jews…
ICE themselves states that only 70% of the people they arrest are even illegal aliens. Only 44% have prior criminal records or pending accusations.
Getting arrested with no valid cause doesn't "totally suck", it's a fundamental violation of the most basic rights of anyone living in a functioning country. As long as you can just pick up anyone you want, nobody has rights. You have a basic right to not be arrested for doing nothing wrong, and yet that's exactly what ICE is doing to tens of thousands of Americans.
>I think the Germans of the ‘30s would have a very different reputation if they had simply attempted to deport all the Jews…
Which is what they were literally doing. At first. But when you consider human beings as corrosive to your society, you will never be satisfied with just getting them out of your borders. The same people who treat prison rape as a good punishment for criminals will not be satisfied with illegal aliens just being removed, especially since they will "come back".
We've been through all this before. We literally signed treaties with Native Americans, but letting them have all this land just wasn't acceptable because they were "savages" that don't deserve it, and weren't being as useful with it as we would be!
> Have people disappeared off the face of the earth?
It is established that hundreds of detainees from the July 2025 Alligator Alcatraz intake were unaccounted for in ICE’s online system by late August and reported as such through September 2025, with recurring reporting of about 800 with no online record and some 450 with unclear location data.
> On due process, if someone accidentally gets a free flight to a foreign country, that totally sucks and they should be paid compensation, but let’s not pretend that deportation is the same as what authoritarian regimes typically do.
Are you being facetious, or do you genuinely think so lightly of people being black bagged with no due process and deported to a random country that you'll joke about it being a "free flight?"
Also, you seem to not be aware that deportation and "voluntary deportation (via various forms of pressure)" of Jewish people was the step Nazi Germany did before the concentration camps.
The way I think about this is, let’s say a lot of Americans are moving to Switzerland illegally by overstaying their visas. If I went along with that group, I would not be surprised to be deported by force. If I went there legally and got caught up in a raid or something, or even targeted personally because I sound American, and I get locked up for a bit and then sent back to America on an airplane, would I be upset? Absolutely I would be, that would be a terrible experience. But at the same time, I would understand that a lot of my countrymen are breaking Swiss law and the Swiss have to do something about it, and I can see why it might be hard to not make any mistakes. It would probably make me not want to go back to Switzerland.
Is that not a valid take? Does it not apply somehow? If I put myself in their shoes, that is how I feel.
First off, maybe Americans do move to Sweden, and maybe sometimes they overstay their visas. On the other hand, for decades, various aspects of Sweden encourage this, such as the economic environment - turns out Swedes don't like picking apples, and if some Americans (a small percentage) don't overstay their visas, the apples don't get picked, and Sweden's apple industry collapses within a single season. So the society implicitly approves of having as many Americans as they can get, even if the government goes back and forth on the issue. As a result of this you have Americans with two generations of descendants that have lived in Sweden for decades and are undocumented or perhaps documented under some program that the new government of Sweden just decides it doesn't like. Or maybe they're citizens and the new government just wants to start denaturalizing.
> or even targeted personally because I sound American
I challenge you to really think deeply about this position. Think about what it means for a State to decide that all people from a whole bunch of different countries kinda look the same because of the color of their skin, or kinda have similar accents, and then just start arresting people based off of that. What does that mean for other people who happen to have accents? Who happen to have that one color of skin? Just typing it out makes me feel disgusted, it's flagrantly racist. Why don't you feel that way?
Finally, I really deeply wish to impress upon you the critical importance of due process. It genuinely is All or None. There is no "due process for people who immigrated legally and no due process for people who immigrated illegally," because due process is the method that determines that. If due process is gone, there is no "oopsies we deported you by accident," and there is no "hang on a second, I'm an American, I don't even have a passport, just look at my driver's license!" Do you understand that when due process is suspended, nobody is safe from being black bagged? How could you justify that? How do you not immediately think of the SS?
And all this for what? People being black bagged at the streets, people stuck in traffic tear gassed by high strung ICE agents, businesses being raided, all this violence because why? What actual problems were there from undocumented immigrants? Because deporting them is hurting the economy rather than helping it, so it wasn't the economy. Nobody's taking up the low paid fruit picking jobs that undocumented immigrants worked, so it wasn't for the jobs. Crime isn't going down, so it wasn't public safety. It's so transparently been a distraction from the failure of the ruling class to improve affordability that even my most stalwart of Trump supporting relatives are turning against it and looking to left economic populists like Mamdani.
Of course this is where it starts. If you ever find yourself in the situation of saying “at least it’s not as bad as Nazi Germany” then you’re probably not heading in a good direction.
There is quite a lot of daylight between “something to complain about” and “authoritarian regime”. I never said they had “nothing to complain about”.
I’m not trying to convince anyone that there isn’t authoritarian regime behavior happening. I am just trying to figure out what people are talking about when they refer to that as if it is happening.
I am using “Germans of the ‘30s” as a euphemism. Obviously I know the timeline of what happened, you are just misinterpreting as an opportunistic drama nitpick. Whether the misinterpretation is happening consciously or subconsciously, I don’t know.
If the “Germans of the ‘30s” had only ever done deportations, which they did do, i.e. had they stopped there, we would not view them in the same way. Ergo, if the current regime stops with deportations, which we have no evidence to show that they won’t, then there is nothing to suggest that they will end up behaving in an authoritarian way, because further massive steps are required to get there. And besides, the current American regime has tremendously more legal justification for these deportations than the Nazis had for the Jews deportation. The Nazis presumably had to change German law to even deport the Jews. No change of law is required here, because it is perfectly congruent with the existing legal framework (and was done consistently for decades prior to this administration, just more quietly and I guess in smaller numbers).
It’s weird how slippery slope arguments are only valid in public discourse when it comes to the Nazis, and in that case it’s so valid it is just taken as a fact. Just because someone is doing something that can be squinted at to look like something that happened prior to a genocide, does not mean that it will lead to genocide. The ad absurdum version of this line of thinking would suggest banning vegetarianism or painting, as genocidal mania soon followed.
A citizen being rounded up by the state and bundled off to a foreign country illegally and with no process is absolutely kidnapping regardless of how much you want to pretend otherwise.
> A citizen being rounded up by the state and bundled off to a foreign country illegally and with no process is absolutely kidnapping regardless of how much you want to pretend otherwise.
You realize half of Americans literally don’t care right?
But I respect your effort for trying. I will stay on my gaming chair and do nothing (won’t vote, won’t donate, won’t raise awareness).
> what are the odds that this problem organically appeared and then they happen to be able to take advantage of it?
Quite low. Borders weren't open to fabricate an excuse to engage in authoritarianism - the excuse was simply fabricate, whole-cloth, with no basis in reality to justify it.
There is no immigration problem in the USA. Large portions of the American economy are dependent on immigration, documented or otherwise. Immigrants, documented or otherwise, commit less crimes per-capita than USA citizens.
So, the current government is using immigration as a flash-point to get themselves elected, and as an ongoing distraction away from their failure to address their other platform (affordability). Getting to be more authoritarian is the stated goal, based on the plan outlined in "Project 2025."
Illegal immigration is a problem whether you want to admit or or not. Just allow the amount of legal immigrants needed. Saying illegal immigration is not a problem is just as much of a smokescreen as saying immigrants are "the" problem.
Ah, well if it's a problem, it should be trivially easy for you to illustrate how exactly it's a problem, using hard facts and numbers. I earnestly invite you to do so!
Europeans are projected to numerically lose control of America, which in a democracy is equivalent to losing control functionally.
It’s very convenient for a lot of people to pretend this doesn’t matter at all, and many or even most Europeans have at this point been brainwashed through childhood conditioning to not be able to go there even in their thoughts, lest they become the deepest evil, according to their conditioning.
But, in a sane world, anything pre-1945, the statement “Europeans are projected to lose control of America within single digit decades” would spur a panic.
Let me guess, I’m just a horrible immoral person and I’m not allowed to think about this, right? Do you have any arguments besides that one?
I think it was a mistake of the left to brainwash white kids to think of themselves as belonging to a group of evil oppressive colonizers - precisely because a few decades of that type of over-the-top racial "justice" schooling has led (inevitably, and even understandably) to the white nationalist backlash we're seeing today.
What should have happened was to stick with the individualist, civil rights notion that all men and women are created equal. Full stop.
Your complaint about the brainwashing is valid to a point, as no one should be raised having guilt for being born of a particular race/ethnicity, and in fact people should take pride in their heritage.
However, you do not explain why you think it matters whether a majority of the US remains of European stock, (by which I guess you mean not mixed race as well). And this is where your argument is transparently, well, racist. Because to explain that, you would probably need to denigrate other races.
I think you could make an argument that Europeans should stay a majority in Europe, on the basis that it is Europe. But America is not Europe, and never was. Europeans were a minority throughout the Americas when they showed up, and they will be a minority here again, and I don't see a big problem with that.
[edit] Just to add, there was nothing "sane" about the way Europeans conducted themselves either on the continent or here, especially in the decade prior to 1945. Also, prior to 1945, there was no general notion of "European", but rather many smaller nationalities. From 1941, it was a widely held idea that people of German descent for instance were a threat to America and should be deported. In the 19th century, a lot of people thought the same about the Irish, and you would have had to replace "European" with "English" in your statement to get some sort of nativist reaction.
> Europeans are projected to numerically lose control of America, which in a democracy is equivalent to losing control functionally.
This is incomprehensible to me, since there are no European Americans, there's just... Americans.
> Let me guess, I’m just a horrible immoral person and I’m not allowed to think about this, right?
Yes, you correctly intuit that there's something inherently wrong about being a racist. I support you in following this thread to figure out why people are disgusted when you talk this way.
>Europeans are projected to numerically lose control of America
What does this even mean?
You realize you descend from africans right? How african do you identify? Is it bad that you don't identify as african even though it is provable that you are descended from africans? Is it bad that the UK developed a culture that wasn't really african?
>Let me guess, I’m just a horrible immoral person and I’m not allowed to think about this, right?
You are allowed to think about it, and others are allowed to rightly point out how stupid, utterly unfounded, and abysmal, and utterly pathetic such a thought is. It's deeply childish. Grow up.
Oh no, the UK might be more brown in 100 years, what a shame, anyway who wants Tikka Misala? No? Aw, well lets have a cuppa instead, freshly imported from asia!
You know the Hamburger is german right? Or all that delicious cajun food is, not from white people, though it has some french influence thanks to the brits deporting my family 300 years ago. Or how saint patty's day isn't something the Irish Celebrate?
Meanwhile, do you know where Algebra comes from? Not Europeans.
Except, by leaning on European "control" of the US, it's a hundred times dumber! Your own logic is that each and every one of us should be violently deported because this country belongs to Native Americans.
Fuck me, do you even know how the US got Texas? A bunch of Americans illegally settled in Mexican land (that was owned by the spanish at the time) and cried to Uncle Sam to "protect" them and the state that resulted from that behavior has the utter gall to assert that their state should "Stay European"!
God forbid your children have to interact with other human beings who have different cultures than them, the utter horror. God forbid a "European" country have to learn a second language, that definitely isn't "European"!
>But, in a sane world, anything pre-1945, the statement “Europeans are projected to lose control of America within single digit decades” would spur a panic.
The US quite literally killed 600k of our own people to give some control to imported africans and their descendants. America started as a multicultural nation sharing land with Native Americans, and supporting extremely varied immigrants basically without a formal process for hundreds of years. The KKK came back to life partially to oppress french and irish catholics because "European" wasn't actually what racists cared about. The Irish and Italians and Jews were "others" because racists DGAF about European ancestry or purity.
Do you even see how trivially you are being played? Do you really think the administration full of first and second generation immigrants from Non European countries gives a single fuck about America becoming "Non European"?
It's a problem insofar as it exists and is illegal. I'm no fan of the current administration, but the Biden admin just plain refused to execute the laws. That seems problematic to me for an executive branch.
I have no problem with uncapped migration, but to flat out refuse to enforce the law is a bit ridiculous. What should be done is simple: Congress should just pass a law like is expected of the Legislative branch that says all immigrants are welcome.
As an added benefit, it would get rid of the illegal wages overnight. Americans complain that illegals are taking their jobs, but they're only taking the ones that aren't filled by US laborers. And US laborers can't legally compete with illegals if illegals are being paid less than minimum wage.
A single, simple, straight-forward law could fix all those issues with the stroke of a pen.
>but the Biden admin just plain refused to execute the laws.
The Biden admin tried to pass the single most restrictive immigration law the US has ever seen with bipartisan support from all but the most progressive democrats.
Please tell me, who killed that bill?
>As an added benefit, it would get rid of the illegal wages overnight
Speaking of laws not being enforced, republicans have spent 30 years bitching about immigration while utterly refusing to enforce existing laws punishing primarily republican owned businesses for hiring illegal immigrants and suppressing wages. Gee, surely they care about fixing things right?
Even Trump's admin is still refusing to enforce those laws. Desantis spent five minutes suggesting he might finally enforce such laws and was immediately stopped by republicans
>That seems problematic to me for an executive branch.
So you voted for an executive branch that demonstrably violates all sorts of laws, refuses to punish friends for violating laws, and pardons literal war criminals or literal scammers if they donate enough. Good job. Please tell me how pardoning the guy from Nikola Motors is enforcing the law and a good use of the executive branch.
>What should be done is simple: Congress should just pass a law like is expected of the Legislative branch that says all immigrants are welcome.
Again, democrats love nothing more than passing laws in congress and there is ample evidence of that. It is republicans who have spent 50 years OPENLY not doing their jobs in congress. They are the ones saying, openly, that congress not passing anything is an intended outcome. They are the ones saying that preventing democrats from doing anything at all is intended. Democrats, despite such bad faith, still cross the aisle and pass things republicans want, because the US system requires bipartisanship as a feature.
When the illegal migrant laborers come to cash their checks every week, those checks carry the signature of republican families. If you've ever bought potatoes that come from a Maine farm, they were picked by migrant labor, overseen by angry and lazy republicans who do nothing but bitch about migrant labor while smoking weed with the local cops, and choosing to hire that exact labor. LePage made zero effort to enforce laws on the book to stop those very republicans from using migrant labor.
Why hire the politicians that have a demonstrated history of making no attempt to solve the problem, voted in by the people causing the problem in the first place?
Meanwhile here in Maine, bulk asylum migration is pretty much the only reason why Lewiston is a functioning and thriving City, and migrants from former french colonies in africa are the only people who can still speak french and carry that culture after the KKK spent the early part of the 1900s stamping out my french ancestry and culture.
I'm late on this reply; have been solo parenting while the spouse was out of town, but I wanted to say thank you for the detailed response.
Also, I understand why you presume I voted for the republican candidate during the most recent presidential election, but I assure you I did not. Trump's interview with Bloomberg Business solidified beyond any doubt that he was a fool that had no idea how tarrifs worked.
I am equally dissatisfied with the lack of enforcement against employers of illegal migrants and agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment. My initial response was to point out that somehow Trump has quelled the rush of migrants without new legislation as a reference against what Biden's administration seemed not to be able to do. But you make a very good point about the unreasonable unwillingness of republicans to pass legislation that would likely have dramatically helped the situation.
Ive gotten the same response, knee jerk reactions that regurgitate CNN talking points and assumptions that im a Trumpist. Im a lifelong NDP / Green Party supporter. lol..
I understand why it happens, and I am a registered republican, but that's mostly because I align most with small government and low regulatory environments philosophically. In practice, my voting record is probably some random smattering of blue, red, and green. I vote for the candidate I think is best, and I try to evaluate all candidates based on their positions before looking at their party affiliation.
But also I live in the Portland, OR metro area so my vote is pretty much irrelevant.
Well this is a controversial statement. Many people have thought there was an immigration problem in the USA since well before Trump entered politics.
If I pretend to believe that there is definitely no immigration problem, though, then I agree with you. But like I said, that is a controversial statement.
Would you believe that the people who support this just do believe there is an immigration problem? People are allowed to care about things other than the economy and crime stats, by the way.
What is it about being a US citizen that increases criminality? Shouldn't we expect that crime comes down as the US has been a leader in immigration, considering immigrants commit less crime? Has crime come down in Europe as it became a leader?
I've been trying to make sense of the statistics. Interested to hear any explanation that can reconcile these contrasting observations.
Generally it seems to be more related that if you are an immigrant, you more likely try to keep your heads down. This comes from a video about immigration in sweden. For which the first generation of immigrants want to contribute to society in most cases, while the second generation seems to be more open to crime. The second generation does of course has then the citizenship and are not considered to be immigrants anymore. But this does does not need to correlate with immigration and culture per se, but also can have todo about second generations being badly integrated and/or having less oportunities then other citizens. Just seems citizens generally accept less shit from the government then immigrants do.
>> why do we think that they are using this as a ruse to like become despotically authoritarian in general
You stated this very well.
But I do think it's a ruse. I don't have a problem with enforcing the law on illegal immigration.[0] But I do think the deployment of National Guard and in some cases Marines on American streets, allegedly to disperse anti-ICE protests, is a long game to make sure that there will be no judicial obstacles in the way if MAGA loses the 2028 election fair and square, cries foul that the election was stolen, decides to send in their own slate of electors, and faces nationwide protests.
I live in Portland. I see the ridiculous cosplay of protesters outside the ICE detention facility. I see the absurdity of deploying troops to face off against them. If these clowns can be used as a casus belli to declare war and use the US military against the civilian population, then it will be no stretch to do so when a large portion of the population rises up to demand a proper electoral count in 2028. That's the scenario I see when I see the willy-nilly, unnecessary use of federalized troops on American soil.
And for the record, I'm a registered Republican and mostly libertarian.
[0] I am not anti-immigration, and I don't view immigration as a "demographic problem". I don't care what race people are as long as they are coming here for the right reasons and want to integrate and be productive members of our society. I was also an illegal immigrant in Europe for years. I accept the fact that countries have the right to decide who they want to accept as citizens, and that breaking those rules may damage your ability to become a citizen of the country you want to be accepted into. And that going there illegally may carry certain risks.
> "If these clowns can be used as a casus belli to declare war and use the US military against the civilian population, then..."
That hasn't happened though. Deploying the national guard to stare down and maybe tear gas some clownish protestors is pretty typical stuff, not a civil war.
By the way, I was in Seattle when the CHAZ stuff was happening and saw firsthand how both sides of the media were lying about the reality on the ground. Half the media wanted me to believe it was a violent insurrection and the other half wanted me to believe it was just a family friendly Woodstock situation. Reality as I observed it: it was just a bunch of losers huffing spray paint fumes, with the police hanging back a few blocks letting them make fools of themselves. I saw no violence, I wasn't stopped at an armed checkpoint by AK-47 wielding masked rebels like Fox News promised (I didn't seriously expect that, lmao.)
Well then it sounds like there's no reason to send the national guard in at all, and that it's quite wasteful to do so. So why are they sending in the national guard?
It's a very typical thing to do in response to protests. Maybe it's just worthless posturing, I don't know. I do know it doesn't constitute a civil war.
> But why do we think that they are using this as a ruse to like become despotically authoritarian in general? Do we think that the borders were opened intentionally to fabricate this “crisis”?
Maybe because many things Trump does and says are blatant lies and shameless despotic authoritarian ones? Ignoring courts, ignoring the constitution especially the first amendment, using his office for personal gain. I don't think I have to give examples because they're just too many. Only last week he pardoned a convicted drug dealer who was Hondurese president while planning to invade Venezuela and "just killing people" because of drugs for which there isn't even any evidence. It was just the last of many (including silk road captain Ross Ulbricht). Anyway that's just one of the recent things.
And the borders were never actually open. It's really hard to migrate to the US and the illegals do all the work the Americans won't do for almost nothing.
The real problem with public safety is the huge income gaps, leading to disenfranchised ghettos with festering organised crime gangs. A lot of them might be immigrants but many are born Americans. The thing they have in common that they are poor and have no upward opportunities.
There are schemes, where e.g. KYC would require centralized storage of identifying information, which is equivalent or stronger than Digital ID. I'm not sure why Digital ID servers would store your health records.
The best implementation I know of digital ID is the one in Estonia. It comes with a data tracker, such that each citizen can see who exactly has been looking at their data [1].
Done more or less like that in Belgium too. Basically, if any civil servant look at your data, this is recorded in the "Banque Carrefour de la Sécurité Sociale". Your eid is used to authentify/authorize you on various state web site (which is OK)
US credit reports also show you who is looking at them. Does visibility really matter when mandatory participation is normalized as a part of functioning in society?
Your digital id is great until your leadership decides you need to be conscripted and sent to their meat grinder and the penalty for failing to appear for your death sentence is being cut off from food and water because everything is linked.
The idea of all these digital documents is never a problem until you go through the exercise of figuring out what it will all be used for (controlling you).
Digital ID makes no difference to this whatsoever. If a government wanted to cut you off from utilities they could make it happen within hours already.
Same with conscription, which needless to say was invented and effectively implemented prior to the invention of digital anything.
You should maybe read some articles about modern situations where people dodged conscription before assuming what is practical today. The average person who hasn't thought about it for a week is certainly in trouble but..
I'm not sure about that. Maybe? But... Firstly, there are surprisingly many people who are insanely patriotic so would volunteer anyway (perhaps fewer than in the past but perhaps still enough; see point three). Secondly, there are surprisingly many people who enjoy violence and killing people so would volunteer anyway (this probably hasn't changed). Thirdly, modern warfare doesn't need large numbers of people (this has definitely changed over time). And fourthly, a lot of modern people rather object to being ordered around by the government (I think this has probably increased a bit, at least; I can imagine that there are even people who would volunteer for military service when it's optional but would resist being conscripted).
In fact I cant disagree with most of what you've said, except to say that I was thinking from the state perspective, rather than the cannon-fodder.
Conscription has never been popular, and I think today in healthy industrialised nations it would be an exceptionally hard sell. Ukraine, Russia and (somewhat) Israel give us hints here of what might happen if the US or Germany or India started drafting all able-bodied young men.
It would be a disaster, but my guess is that it wouldn't stop governments from trying.
> Digital ID makes no difference to this whatsoever.
Of course it does. It makes it possible to track exactly where you are and what you are doing. So it pushes the balance of power towards the authorities.
if your digital ID is tied to your phone (which is eventually where things are going), that is exactly what is going to happen. There is no reason that it would stop somewhere in the middle.
Why would anyone propose, and why would anyone agree to, Digital/Physical ID becoming mandatory for mundane transactions? It doesn't make any sense and it would never fly.
1. This is a wild exaggeration: There are lots of men walking in Ukrainian streets.
2. Why single out Ukraine here? Isn't this what any country does with people who don't appear for the draft? (Unless they can pay a doctor to diagnose them with bone spurs or something?)
> 1. There are lots of men walking in Ukrainian streets.
With the right papers clearing them of draft obligations, sure.
>2. Why single out Ukraine here?
Because this is the best example right now that everyone knows and can somewhat relate to. Unless you happen to know any other western country currently doing this.
Why would you assume that's somehow more palpable? Is there a competition I'm not aware of?
And my current EU country would also draft me by force after I applied and got citizenship, which is why I don't do it. Sure, unlike Russia or Ukraine, I wouldn't be sent to fight in a war (for now), but many countries have mandatory conscription for their male citizens.
So there's nothing special or noteworthy about Russia's conscriptions of its own naturalized citizens, especially given its at war, so I don't get the point you were trying to make with that article you shared.
Did you assume that naturalized citizens would somehow be spared obligations of military service just because they weren't born there? That's not how citizenship works.
Ah- the headline is "Russia Starts Issuing Draft Notices at Airports to New Citizens and Returning Expats".
Basically the Russian's are conscripting people flying in to airports, both regional and international. With an added nuance of racism against non-Slavs.
>>> Just grab any man you see on the street, throw him in the van and ship him to the conscription office for processing.
>> 1. This is a wild exaggeration:[1] There are lots of men walking in Ukrainian streets.
> With the right papers clearing them of draft obligations, sure.
So basically you agree with me that it was a wild exaggeration?
[1] Also your computer seem to have a bug where its clipboard selectively remove words (see the part in italics) from the text you quote without inserting ellipsis or any kind of marker to indicate it. The alternative would be that you very deliberately misrepresent what I wrote and that wouldn't be a nice thing to accuse you of.
1. Nope, I do not agree that it's a wild exaggeration and I explained why.
2. No, my computer has no clipboard bug, I just don't want o clutter a thread by constantly quoting the previous entire conversation like you're doing just to only add one line of thought to it, especially given it's clear from the context what I'm referring to, given that you can just scroll up a bit and read the entire comment if you want to drive deep in the full context of the conversation.
3. And you can drop the mafia style "it wouldn't be nice if I were to accuse you of X" tactics, since it's not a good strategy for arguments and I don't care what you want to accuse me of, I stand by what I say. By all means feel free to accuse me of anything you want, but don't be a coy weasel about it.
Have you even been to Ukraine lately? you can walk on the streets of Kyiv and there is so many men walking on the streets without getting picked up. I've been walking the street as a man and and from the looks of it you can't tell if I'm a foreigner or a Ukrainian and I never been stopped and they never tried to conscript me. Do some people get conscripted in Ukraine and Russia? Sure.
But it's just an exaggeration claiming that anybody walking the streets are just grabbed and thrown into a van and shipped to a conscription office. That is not what is happening.
>Do some people get conscripted in Ukraine and Russia? Sure.
It's not that they get conscripted that's the problem, it's that people are being chased and violently thrown into vans of the street without any kind of warning or check of conscription status beforehand, Which I argued is proof the government doesn't need any kind of digital ID to oppress you..
There's video evidence of such events online, check X and Telegram. Just because it doesn't happen in the capital and places where tourists like you go to, doesn't mean it's somehow OK or that it's not happening in other regions like villages where it's less likely important people with influence live unlike the capital or large cities.
you are russian right so I doubt you been in Ukraine lately and you just get your knowledge from Russian propaganda. I bet you can't name a single person that been kidnapped of the streets.
Video evidence is not a good standard anymore. This isn't the Iraq war where you can see the people who dress different and have a different skin color are the "enemy"
Russia has faked videos in the past even prior to the whole video Gen AI slop.
I will believe it when someone reputable runs a good investigation and does some real journalism rather than just sourcing Russian propaganda and suggesting reality is some lovecraftian nightmare
Useless doomerism. There are many cracks to hide in, most investigations are closed without a conviction, etc. You don’t need to have spy-level tradecraft to be a dissident.
I wish this kind of nonsense “you are helpless” posting were forbidden by HN rules. It serves no useful purpose.
I didn't miss anything. Lone deserters spread out, are more tricky and resource intensive to catch in the wilderness of mountainous border areas with rough terrain, than in flat densely populated areas like city or village streets that can be easily patrolled by vans.
the singaporean "singpass" has been an amazing convenience. at this point its like why is any company still asking you to fill in personal particulars on forms? they should ask for access to singpass and you just authorize them.
you apply to or for anything.. and they just give you the option of authorizing via singpass.. and you use your passkey-like singpass app to authorize it... and its done!
you go to hospital and they need your medical records? singpass
you go to university and they need your academic history? singpass
you apply for bank loan? insurance? license? food handling permit? singpass
Doesn't this mean that it's not only your hospital that sees your medical records, but... everyone who would otherwise only need your name and telephone number?
Or is there some way to restrict which party gets which data?
I don't think any of the national id services I've heard of stores all your data in a centralized place. Usually the national id service only provides identification to the service providers that request it. Each service provider (like, your bank, hospital, pension provider) will store their own data as they've always done, they just use the service to identify you.
In Finland there is centralized database of all medical records. Which makes information transfer simpler. There is ofc risk of untheorized access. But for that reason legal system exists. You get audit trail and then can prosecute or fire those who accessed information unnecessarily.
It is trade-off, but probably lot more accountable than paper records in big hospitals.
In CZ, we have a so-far-somewhat-nonintrusive digital identity that is mostly used to access government services.
Yet we already had an interesting situation which shows just how complicated trust is. Sberbank, the Russian bank, was slated to issue digital identity certifications in March 2022. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and Sberbank got booted out of the country before actually gaining that capability.
What if it was March 2021 instead? How would we treat signatures on documents verified by Sberbank a day before the invasion etc.? What if the content of that document was really suspicious? Etc.
Sweden's population is only around 11 million people, and you're geographically concentrated in the southern mainland provinces or near Stockholm. Both of those make thing a lot more practical to manage and make it a lot harder to abuse because you don't have the scale to make profit as attractive, or the distance to make oversight more difficult. You're also relatively culturally similar.
It doesn't seem like those should matter so much, but it really does make everything about democracy easier.
Things get much weirder when the population isn't so low or isn't relatively concentrated.
I mean, I can do all my voting, tax filings, etc. etc.
All the way from Mexico, with no issues. You're right that most of that must of the Swedish population resides in the south, but, as someone who grew up in Northern Sweden, it's not like we're marginalised or anything, not really.
> I struggle to think of how it would be used to spy on citizens
Hacker News has a unique user base. Professional Software Engineers, many of whom are Senior or Principal or Staff in level. Leaders and Managers and Architects.
I think, anytime we design a new system, we need to carefully think about how it can be used and what can go wrong. Not just with the current owners and users of that system, but future users and owners too.
Discrimination is one of those areas where identity management can go wrong. Discrimination and deliberate but undetectable Denial of Service "bugs" that always seem to hit the same types of users in the legs.
And getting evidence of wrongdoing like that takes years. It's nothing to an institution, but a lifetime to an individual. Sometimes there aren't even recordings or logs of individuals trying to ensure service and legal contracts are upheld. And again, the legal process is nothing for a large institution but soul crushing for an individual. And the solution always seems to be more institutional power, not individual power.
That kind of education in Engineering Ethics is common nowadays in University and College.
A lot of us who grew up self-educated in the early days or specialized in other schools may have missed out on those lessons early in our career.
And a person who goes through a Brazil-esque nightmare like that comes out at the end with a broken reputation. And always whispers and subtext floating around even after justice.
And there may be technically sophisticated intelligence services that can detect that kind of subtle tampering. But it's not the responsibility of other country's intelligence services to protect citizens of countries other than theie own.
Going through that I can say strength wouldn't be enough.
But Sweden has not so far required that you install state owned spy ware on your devices.
BankID is very convenient, I use it all the time here in Norway but, at least theoretically, it is a private initiative of the banks and not the state. It is not compulsory to have BankID.
Yes, it is the single most popular vector for scammers to fleece old people. Great! Add to that, that your identity is controlled by banks, not the government, and that banks can terminate you without any due process, and complaining can take weeks if not months, and there is no guaranteed positive outcome.
No thank you, I'll take no ID over ID any day, and at worst, a physical plastic card over a bullsh*t digital solution that is used to lock you out off society.
Sweden is really the worst possible approach, is authoritarian, and hands over the power to the banks controlling the digital ID system.
Banks and fintechs turned really brazen with triggering invasive AML/KYC requests without any legal basis, even more invasive than tax offices. Nonchalantly freezing and locking funds and accounts. They oftentimes require the latest version of smartphone app working only on recent smartphones. I don't want my digital identity to depend on them.
Sweet how the OP is about something that exactly corresponds to what EU wants badly too - chat control - but you decide to talk about Digital ID. OK wait a bit more, then your beautiful DID will start making more sense.
For now you may need a warrant. However, after just a simple law change, it will all be available without a warrant. I'm not saying there will be a law change, only saying that it brings us one step closer to data.
That’s sort of how all this type of policy is pushed through
Convenience - what you’re describing is convenience
It’s totally fine if you prioritize that over everything else, but my only thought here is that everyone should be crystal clear in what they are trading off for convenience
It’s convenient for the government too, tk have a single identifier to thread a persons entire life
We are, sadly, well beyond any expectation of privacy, but we should at least be aware of it and try to not make it worse
Again,I struggle to think of how it'd be used gather any data not already available.
Yes it's selling point is convenience. Convenience is good.
In this particular case I disagree that there's a price in privacy. At least currently, and the way the Swedish electronic ID is implemented, I don't see it.
With other variations there might be problems of course, though I'd worry more about someone messing up the security of it rather than privacy
I used to think like that. Now in my country we have a president who would use that to deport or target political opponents, track people who criticize Israel, etc.
You can never put the genie back in the bottle and you never know who will be in charge in 20 years
How about stacked the supreme court with sycophants (at least one of which has been caught taking bribes) whereby allowing his gross violations of the law to be tolerated on appeal to the supreme court (legal eagle has a great video on this).
And then bullied executive who dare disagree with him (e.g. jan 6 commission, and his first impeachment) and even perform completely baseless criminal investigations that (e.g. against Comey) that are so ill-advised that he has to appoint unqualified prosecutors to even file these claims because no serious one would stand for it.
He now wields enough scary-factor that even though we have handwritten proof of his involvement with Eepstein that his own party is too cowardly to impeach him or even release the files (the same party that freaked out about Clinton getting a blowjob now afraid to go after a pedophile, and one who flirts with the idea of pardoning Maxwell and moved her to a minimum security facility)
The President nominates but the Senate approves Supreme Court appointees.
And just because you disagree with rulings doesn’t mean they are “violations of the law”.
The President is also head of the executive, as in they have direct authority for all executive functions. Yes they can fire anyone they want. Trump is hardly the first to do that.
In Parliamentary systems the Prime Minister has far more power. Their party has a majority to pass whatever law they please, combined with a rubber stamp senate.
> He now wields enough scary-factor that even though we have handwritten proof of his involvement with Eepstein that his own party is too cowardly to impeach him or even release the files
I think they're only cowardly because each elected individual's goal is to survive long enough to get a sweet exit deal. Voting to impeach Trump is the correct thing to do (blatant corruption, violation of due processes, etc.), but it will surely lessen their chances of reelection.
I think Congress is full of a bunch of individuals trying to maximize personal gain agnostic of the outcome for the country, but I'm not sure how to realign the incentives to fix that.
I don’t get it, so you’re saying that the US isn’t a full democracy and the leader has too much power, but you think the US should implement digital ID anyway ignoring that situation? As if that will help?
The president isn't supposed to have that much power in the US either. The federal government in general wasn't supposed to have much power; power is supposed to be reserved to the states except for specific scenarios enumerated in our constitution. Unfortunately, a century of blatantly illegal power grabs by the federal government, combined with Congress (which should've acted as a check upon the president) willingly giving their power over to the president, we are in a pretty bad spot. However, if it happened to us it could happen to any country. At the end of the day the constitution of a nation is only meaningful to the extent that people will actually enforce it.
There’s not a lot of privacy ins Sweden anyway. Way too much private stuff is public and continuously scraped by private companies.
For those who don’t know: by just looking up a name, you can find a persons birthday, address, who also lives there. Oh and the person’s salary is public too.
> You still haven't presented even a weak argument for how it infringes on privacy.
NB I was calling out your weak arguments. I wasn't attempting to do something that isn't my job ;)
For countries introducing digital ID etc, it's for the advocates to present a strong argument and evidence how it will respect privacy, how it will remain secure etc beyond "trust us bro" and "I can't see how it wouldn't be secure"
There are downsides with it since you are at the mercy of the corporation that owns the Swedish Digital ID. ny services trying to use this Swedish digital ID who these banks don't like can be cut off at any point and you are not allowed to provide alternative logins so it's only allowed to use digital ID if you use it.
If course I'm allowed to use alternative logins. And besides, there are at least 2 generally accepted digital ID solutions in Sweden. BankID is older and more popular, but there's also Freja (I had to open the tax authorities login page to remember the name of this one) that's accepted in most places.
There have been 0 incidents of any of the hysterical hypotheticals y'all are on about actually happening, maybe it's time for a reality check?
What is so fundamentally different about DID proposed in the UK or the US then? I read through some of the documents about it and the data scoping that will be available, which isn't with something like BankID seem to be the only difference. What am I missing here?
The problem isn't where digital ID starts, it's where it ends. It will start by being benign enough, and end with the ability to cut off dissidents in an instant. I'm aware that some Swedes are already getting microchipped. If you want to be branded and tracked by the state, that is your choice... Don't force it on the rest of us.
"In 2017, a railway company in Sweden began allowing travelers to load their ticket information onto the microchips implanted in their bodies, according to BBC News. Railway conductors were then able to use smartphones to detect the chip and confirm the travelers' tickets."
This has nothing to do with the "state microchipping people" this is biohackers loading NFC train tickets onto a chip they chose to have implanted? The level of intellectual dishonesty is gross. You don't have to have an NFC chip and even if you did how would that be any more of a UUID than a LIDAR scan of your face?
Those 4000 are bellwethers for whatever other impressionable idiots will follow them. (I'd forgotten it was that many, I thought it was a fraction of that.) Then it becomes mandatory, then compulsory, like so many other things.
You mention crack addicts there. Yeah, they're kind of similar. With a new drug like cocaine, it starts with a handful of impressionable people who get given it cheap. Then they influence other people who take it up, and before you know it you have drug epidemic on your hands. (As most developed countries do.? The difference is that the ruling class doesn't openly encourage cocaine use, because it doesn't benefit them in anyway (other than doping up potential troublemakers).
You should read some of the Fourth Industrial Revolution material that governments and their advisers put out. They are quite plain about where they want this to head. Transhumanism is sold as a means to improve us, but it can also be used as a means of control. (There is a lot of hypocrisy in such documents — how can one argue that we need to lower carbon emissions and at the same time engage in project which increase electricity usage? That seems contradictory at least for now, because even renewables generate have environmental issues. These data centres will gobble up more energy than people's homes do.)
These things start out as voluntary and then you find it difficult to function without it. My local bank is always busy, but there is a bank employee nagging everyone to use online banking. We're lucky it is still open, because every bank is shutting branches. They close branches and make them inconvenient to use, and then say the public want it. Yes, some do, but not everyone does and some want both options.
Similar scenario here. The old boiling a frog scenario. Some company trying to persuade its employees to get microchipped. Also other interests trying to push it. The dog thing is not unconnected, even with that, doing it to pets is partly a soft sell to saying humans can get one too. It has been normalised in science fiction films for decades.
"Their hand, their choice" turns into "they got a microchip, and why don't you?" into "everyone's got a microchip, why don't you?" and then "why the hell don't you have a microchip?" and eventually legal consequences for not having one. Of course microchips are only one possibility for tagging people... And the idea won't go away.
Read some later articles. The first guy who did this was maybe that magician from Missouri, or at least one of the first ones (there aren't many). And it's turned out to be a useless gimmick, that magician's implant is currently inoperative. Forgot a password for re-programming it, or some such.
Mandatory microchipping people is firmly in sci-fi land, and, as many other things first tried out in sci-fi land it's not something particularly relevant for a very long time, I suspect. It's not very useful, to start with (compared to what we use already).
Online banking vs physical buildings.. that's a purely economic issue, and can't be compared to something like chipping.
Dogs and cats are microchipped because they can't talk, and for other non-human reasons.
The point is that the more identifiable information that the monopoly on violence has the easier it is for something, anything really, to be used against you should your tribal affiliation conflict with the ruling party.
At least where I live, there's no extra information being gathered. The only difference is that I no longer have to physically go somewhere to deal with that information, because I can sign in to government services online.
Information that was previously in paper form and scattered across various bureaus is now being digitised and centralised, but that's orthogonal to "digital ID"!
I don't see how that's the case for digital ID by itself. I'm also pretty sure that we can analyse the impact of a single technology without also blaming it for the downsides of other, distinct policies.
"Hey now guys we just voted this law, now you need to use your BankID to login to your phone the first time. Because, think of the children! And well, if you have pictures we deem forbidden, you'll be reported."
Once the infrastructure for mass surveillance is available, States are tempted to use it.
Also even if it may be ok in Sweden for cultural reasons, the rest of the world unfortunately isn't (but can enjoy private washing machines in exchange).
In the US (approximately) everyone has a social security number and a driver's license. In practice, those are equivalent to universal ID, just more annoying to use in everyday life.
Services do not regularly query your SSN or DL to determine if it is actively “in service” or is blocked. In fact most types of businesses don’t touch SSNs at all (the potential liability for mishandling it is radioactive). And the few that request licenses typically are only using it as part of a one-time KYC flow, there is no ongoing link to a central provider.
No, because with classic ID documents, the government doesn't know if I went to a specific healthcare provider, if I opened a social media account, if I bought a train ticket, or even where my bank accounts are (reporting is yearly, not in real time). Accessing all of this data is possible but bears a lot of friction, which prevents mass surveillance (or at least increases the costs).
Once the eID system is set up and becomes ubiquitous, it will be trivial for companies to use eID to open any online account or reserve plane/train tickets. Therefore, giving enforcement forces very convenient access to all of my activity and allowing automated monitoring. Just look at what is happening in China.
What is happening in China? I haven't been there in many years. There have been stories in the West about a social credit score system they had, but it turns out they didn't really follow through with that one.
How come not? I typically hear of some scammy Zero-Knowledge Proof promising the world and delivering either an easy-to-pass-around identifier or something readily able to be mapped back to you as a person.
I feel like we're talking about completely different things. What's currently implemented in various EU countries is basically OAuth, where user attributes are verified by the state. Being able to map that account back to a specific person isn't a bug, but the whole reason for the system's existence.
There are also various plans for age-verification schemes that should (partially) preserve anonymity, but those aren't implemented and it's not what people mean by "digital ID".
Can is the key word here. As implemented today, users can choose whether to use digital ID. In my opinion, problems would only start if the users had no choice and the government was the one choosing for them.
Like sure you could in theory see every document I've ever signed if you have a warrant for BankID servers, but you could probably glean most of that if you had a warrant for the banks servers anyway, so it's not really a new capability.