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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

When the state is more likely to cause you problems than help you out, you want them to be bad at it. The corrupt cop going on a fishing expedition to try to bust you for something because you're dating his ex, who can't find anything because it's "spread out, fragmented, stored with multiple conflicting versions" -- that's what you want to happen.

It's also not just about the government. If you give everyone a government ID which is easy to use over the internet, private companies will then demand that you use it over the internet and use it as a tracking ID. Which is the evil to be inhibited.

I personally do not trust the government one little bit and am sure they'll find some way to abuse this, as they have just about everything else they do at this point. This possibly sounds far fetched, but why couldn't they ask for GPS permissions on the app then use it to quickly find out who was at a pro Palestine protest for example given their recent penchant for arresting protesters?

They have given us no reason to believe things will improve with it's introduction, and have given us plenty of reasons to believe it will be abused. It's almost perfect for that, "install our software on the device you have most places you go, or you can't earn a living anymore".

More than this, employers are already required to verify right to work when they employ someone, either by physically seeing a passport or by means of an existing government system which allows them to verify visa status with an online "share code". They can be fined if they don't.

There's zero reason to believe employers which currently ignore this requirement (and likely minimum wage etc as well) will suddenly start complying because there's a "digital ID" instead.

Since the Tory gov you have to supply various ID to work in (legitimate) businesses or rent from (legitimate) land lords.

The only extra kind of enforcement this enables for these cases is demanding ID cards off people where they live or work.

The direct attempts at a crackdown failed, and the civil service keeps telling them it can't find any welfare fraud, (which looks fairly unlikely, given certain regional patterns), so they are trying to attack the problem indirectly - by synchronizing the identity numbers of different government record-keeping systems - HMRC, national insurance, the NHS, the land registry, council records.

Strangely there was no fuss when universal child benefit was taken away in 2015 (or maybe later I forget). The media was full of stories about how rich people were getting £20 a week when they didn't need it.

Now apparently pensioners that have a larger income than most working families are desperate for the fuel allowance and they will be freezing to death without it. Its nonsense.

And they can, forgive me for my rather vulgar language, fuck right off with this thinking. Problem is it will still go into place, because for most people giving up the right of being able to govern their own device that they paid for is not a problem for whatever reason. Neither will it be until it touches something that is important to them - that's when, hopefully, some more people will be able to see that we are rapidly spiralling downwards toward a complete techno-authoritarian dystopia.

Terrorism have a bad rep, but it was used successfully in South africa to remove apartheid, with the French resistance and a lot of anti-colonization movement. Targeting fuel depots and the Crimea bridge can also be considered terrorism (and is, by the russian).

I personnally think we ought to distinguish terrorism which mostly target civilians from terrorism on which civilan death are side-effect, but the US state department calling terrorists people who only killed military targets during the Irak/Afghanistan war diluted the meaning of the word further. I'm trying to push back on that, because when the meaning of terrorism is diluted enough, it stop to be a good word to describe a phenomenon we ought to stop, and start to be a word used by politician to target what they don't like.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mnnje4wlro

Also since all the data available about you in one place any malicious actor who can bribe someone with access can immediately get all your data: passport info and tax id, addresses, work history, all cars and all owned properties, everything.

Having centralized system with information about everything can very easily be used for oppression.

Note that having a 'Digital ID' and 'all the data available about you in one place' are two completely different things. You can have a electronic ID system and separated specialized systems. In fact I think Germany is going in this direction, also giving the citizens the ability to request deletion of all information held about them in a particular system.

Confidential data can have better security checks and encryption layers so it is accessible only by the citizen itself or whoever the citizen grants access to (please don't bring up blockchain, it can be done without it). The technology exists.

Not quite right. This is defense in depth. The judicial system is supposed to prevent abuses like this, but just in case, you also limit the ability of the government to track you.

> Confidential data can have better security checks and encryption layers so it is accessible only by the citizen itself or whoever the citizen grants access to

The countries that these discussions are about (the UK and RU, with the subtext of the US) have not demonstrated that their legislators are trustworthy enough to implement digital ID in a privacy-preserving. Unless and until that happens, then discussion of it is off the table. When you advocate for a thing being implemented, you are implicitly advocating for its current real-world implementations.

My point was the government can still totally track you as an individual, the data is just fragmented all over the place. But if you are high profile the government can totally put some investigator to track down everything.

It's a great way to combat bureacracies. It only doesn't work against smart people, such as computer hackers.

KYC has already killed any financial privacy people may have had.

However, a bad actor (depends on how well funded/connected they are) would still have a harder time getting information.

As for the KYC thing, right now it's mostly to ensure you're not funding terrorist/criminal enterprises (at least it was the case for one of my previous companies). The data isn't just readily available to any political party who asks for it (I guess most companies will comply under certain conditions, but the legal friction is the point I think).

As others stated: KYC killed private banking. Good.

The only saving grace for us is incompetence. Tyrannies breed incopmetence in goverments since competent people are able to ask troubluing questions. At least I hope so.

I saw some British politicians discussing this on Sky last week, and I really don't see the point of the British digital ID.

They say having yet another new ID number will make things "easier." But didn't really say how. Brits already have ID numbers for lots of things. It wasn't spelled out how having yet another number will make things better.

My tech mind tells me that it's just going to save some DB admins from having to JOIN some columns. But a number is a number. Why yet another number?

And the whole thing about having a number will somehow stop people from working illegally seems like a red herring. I believe Brits already have to have a national insurance number in order to work. That hasn't stopped people from working illegally. They talking heads didn't explain what's so magical about this new number that will suddenly do things that the old number or numbers didn't.

/Not a Brit. Just bewildered by what appears to be a solution in search of a problem.

They don't have a national ID system though. Having a lot of different ID systems that are IDing other things for other purposes doesn't address this.

> My tech mind tells me that it's just going to save some DB admins from having to JOIN some columns.

I don't know how this works in the UK but I do know a bit about how this works in other jurisdictions. The data in the current systems are there because there is a law that says what data is collected and for what purpose. You can't lawfully use it for a different purpose (there might be a loophole for public safety or whatever, but that would be an exception). Your organisation would break the law and the bosses could go to jail. But also, it was designed for one purpose and if you tried to use it for a different one, you would run into a lot of data quality issues.

Not to say the idea is good or bad, but how people watch hyper-partisan media and draw any conclusions from it is beyond me.

You are pretending as if Sky is like Fox News in the UK. It is more like a slightly right of centre network.

I actually don't like that they are legally required they do this as often it becomes a shouting match between two participates. I want to hear someone's argument in full.

To take an example - would I want the current US government to be better at compiling information across all its agencies / departments? Absolutely not. What it does with its current level of consolidation is authoritarian enough that I'm not moving back there any time soon. I hear similar sentiments from my Hungarian colleagues, who are quite familiar with competitive authoritarianism in their own country.

Of course, this mistrust becomes self-reinforcing. I don't trust the US government, so I want it to be bad at its job - but then it's bad at its job, so I see it as ineffective and bloated and continue to mistrust it.

IMHO the only way out of this spiral is the hard way: a system must do the hard work to show itself trustworthy, and it must do so _before_ people will entrust it with the information that would make the job of being trustworthy easier. As with human relationships, it takes a _lot_ more work to repair trust than it does to break it. Unlike with human relationships, you also have systemic factors: the system needs an unbroken series of good, principled leaders; it needs to visibly and credibly punish corruption, not turn a blind eye; it needs to de-escalate divisions, not inflame them; it needs various institutional safeguards to work properly, not chop away at them; it needs to allow meaningful dissent and criticism, not crack down on it; it needs to learn from expertise, not undermine it.

Most importantly: the system needs to learn from its failures, and adjust the rules and incentives of the system itself to prevent those failures from recurring. This is generational work.

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.

[1] https://x.com/songpinganq/status/1972382547427590401

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/jordan-petersons-chine...

The more conspiratorial among us have baselessly decided the idea of "hey it would be great to build schools and things near where people live" must actually be a globalist plot to restrict people's movement to within 15 minutes of their home. It's wild!

People are worried that it would be made difficult for you to travel outside 15 minute city via a combination of mandated digital payment system for all transactions that are tied to you identity and removal of personal vehicles (e.g. cars).

e.g. Person A is allowed by authorities to buy a train ticket, while Person B is not due to <arbitrary criteria>.

I've been told this has been done in China to stop people travelling to protests, but I don't actually know if that is true.

Do I think this is the intention behind 15 minute cities? No. I do however think that what they are describing is possible since I've had problems making transactions electronically for legal purchases because my transaction was flagged by the bank for being fraudulent.

Also in the UK the bank can refuse to give you your money.

I have my doubts that China, which has many of the densest cities in the world, would get much mileage (pun intended) out of restricting travel to try to quell protests. They have tons of cities that each have millions of residents. If the CPC manages to piss off a significant fraction of the populace to the point where they’re interested in marching down the street demanding regime change, there will be enough of them in those cities that no amount of travel restrictions is going to matter.

Arguably much more important would be that I don’t think most people in China own any significant weapons, and we’ve seen decades ago how shy that government isn’t about just running people over with tanks until protests dissipate.

I never said it was part of a government conspiracy. What I am saying is that your ability to transact freely is infringed by opaque mechanisms.

If that is added with digital only payments which is tied to your gov id, it isn't difficult to imagine a scenario where your ability to transact freely be taken away to stop you from travelling for political reasons.

I admit you have a fair point here. I'm a political independent but started out left-wing. It's hard for me to accept the reality that a government that starts out well-meaning definitely can tilt toward totalitarianism, and that the lack of good chokepoints on the citizens (such as this hypothetical ability to control payments) may well be a key prevention mechanism. I think the left wing in the US likes to frame suspicion of those kinds of things as silly preparations for a future that won't happen, and the right frames roadblocks to government power as being in place to make that bad future harder to bring about.

You are making the assumption that any politician or government is "well meaning" or started out as such. I am in the UK and I look at the politicians and the state apparatus with absolute contempt.

I suggest you listen to some of Dominic Cummings interviews about his experience with Whitehall (UK) during COVID. There was one situation that he described which really stood out to me. There was particular situation early in the pandemic where the NHS was going to run out of a key medical supplies in about 2 weeks and as a result thousands could die. These supplies were shipped from China and it took about 3/4 weeks (I forget the exact time frame).

For some reason it was written into law that they had to be shipped. He had the Prime Minister sign a legal waiver so they could be air-lifted, explained this to key officials in Whitehall. Everyone agreed what needed to be done and then nothing happened for 3 days. These people had to be threatened with losing their jobs and their pensions otherwise they wouldn't do their job, they fully understood the consequences of not doing the job (thousands of people might die) and still did nothing. It is an apathy of evil.

This behaviour is commonplace in ossified organisations unfortunately and I wasn't surprised one iota when I heard this.

As for mechanisms that reduce state power as prevent totalitarianism. No one thing will prevent it. It would be a combination of things.

It is similar to how running Linux (or any alternative OS) won't by itself stop the strangle hold of large tech players over most of the tech/online space. It will at least help you reduce your dependence on these large companies. Combine that with self hosting and/or using alternatives at least you can be somewhat free from the worst of it.

> I think the left wing in the US likes to frame suspicion of those kinds of things as silly preparations for a future that won't happen, and the right frames roadblocks to government power as being in place to make that bad future harder to bring about.

Silly partisan politics is going to have both sides pretending that the other side doesn't have any merit in their positions. I would just ignore the noise and actually read the facts about things and draw your own conclusions.

I believe that most of the politics you see is really theatre. It keeps people squabbling over things that are ultimately unimportant.

In reality that means "have you paid off what you owe in the manner that was agreed" and does the person have any red flags e.g. County Court Judgements against their name or residence.

There are people I know that manage it properly and those that don't. It has nothing to do with wealth or class.

None of this should be that surprising: it’s hard to make all of your debt payment payments on time if you’re either broke or in jail.

e.g. I had a 995 credit score on Experian back in the late 2000s. The highest was 999. I earned £18,000 at the time, and was in my mid-20s and didn't really own anything at the time. I did have a credit card at the time where I made the payments, and I lived at a household which had no debt, and I was on the electoral roll.

That is why when you are making larger purchases they do a "means test" e.g. see if you earn enough to pay a mortgage.

Gaming the system like you were able to do in order to improve your credit score is very much correlated to financial literacy which is correlated to socioeconomic class which is correlated to race. This is how we arrive at credit scores being race and class indicators, but not bound by laws that prohibit using race and class as indicators.

Everything about this reply is completely incorrect.

> Your case is a great example of why credit scores are not reliable indicators. You were living on the ropes then. One job loss and you probably have very little saved and will be forced to incur debt and and start defaulting on payments potentially. You were very much the risky bet. And yet, you were able to game the system to look like a reliable bet.

So you made a bunch of assumptions about my personal circumstances. Let me correct you:

- I didn't "Game the system". I had absolutely no idea at the time such a thing as a credit score existed. I cannot game a system when I have no idea that it exists. The only reason I checked is that other people at work were checking theirs and I did so sheerly out of curiosity. Many years later I happened to work a contract where they wrote software that did the credit checks.

- I was not "living on the ropes". I lived within my means.

- I had 2-3 months of savings. My strategy for saving this money was to save it on payday. So I forgot I had the money and couldn't spend it. I do exactly the same thing now.

- The debt I had on my credit card was paid off in full monthly. I only used it for online purchases (many online sites didn't take debit cards still).

> Gaming the system like you were able to do in order to improve your credit score is very much correlated to financial literacy which is correlated to socioeconomic class which is correlated to race.

Again I did not game the system. I was completely financially illiterate at the time. My only financial literacy, I had at time was that I shouldn't spend all my money after payday and I shouldn't spend more money than I had. I found that out in the first month of living on my own. My family actually earn a lot less than I do now.

None of this has anything to do with race. From reading your comments replying to me and your posting history, I am pretty sure you are from the US. You are applying your US centric view of the world onto the UK. The UK is not the US.

> This is how we arrive at credit scores being race and class indicators, but not bound by laws that prohibit using race and class as indicators.

What you are trying to do is to erroneously shoehorn in your brand of US politics into a discussion about the UK. As a result of this you have got everything about my personal circumstances (at the time) and the circumstances of family and wider community completely incorrect, in an attempt to score some political points (it obvious btw from the language you are using).

I suggest in future you shouldn't make assumptions.

Not repaying loans and using credit cards to get cash -> you're probably bad with money -> lenders are unlikely to get their money back from you.

Saying that a person’s credit score is entirely due to their own financial decisions is incorrect because it’s overly simplistic, that’s true, although the main factor is that person’s behavior (whether that behavior is their fault or not is a different story). It can also depend on circumstances specific to the person but not directly related to their own actions (e.g. their credit provider revises credit limits across the board due to external factors, so their credit utilization changes too, without them having used any more or less of it).

In addition, and what you’re alluding to, is that these models are continuously revised. A set of behaviors and circumstances that lead to a higher score in one economic environment may not do the same in another.

Credit scores as implemented in for instance the US are not a direct reflection of a person’s moral character or intended as a reward for good behavior. They’re uncaring algorithms optimized solely for determining how risky it is to lend you money, so that financial institutions can more accurately spread that risk across their customers and maximize their profits. This also enables credit providers to give out more credit overall, based on less biased criteria (not unbiased, because models are never perfect and financial circumstances can be proxies for other attributes).

One can feel however one wants about whether this system is good or not. But it’s definitely different in kind to ”social credit” systems like the one China has implemented, which directly takes into account far more non-financial factors and determines far more non-financial outcomes, effectively exerting much more control over many facets of people’s lives.

This is the whole crux of the situation so buying it in a disclaimer misses the point.

Every lender and background investigator I’ve ever interacted with have treated credit score as a social credit marker, but sure, your mileage might vary.

> They’re uncaring algorithms optimized solely for determining how risky it is to lend you money, so that financial institutions can more accurately spread that risk across their customers and maximize their profits.

This is a fallacy; algorithms are “uncaring” in an anthropomorphic sense, yes, they lack a psychological capacity to care, but their designers are very much not, as you admit in the very next sentence.

> But it’s definitely different in kind to ”social credit” systems like the one China has implemented, which directly takes into account far more non-financial factors and determines far more non-financial outcomes, effectively exerting much more control over many facets of people’s lives.

We entirely disagree on this point. Probably because we have different definitions of “non-financial factors” and “non-financial outcomes.”

It maybe doesn’t adress the point you’re interested in, but it doesn’t miss the point I was making, that the goals and mechanisms revolves around how well a person manages credit. For the credit provider everything else is secondary or irrelevant, including whether it’s because you’ve made poor decisions or external factors have screwed you over.

> Every lender and background investigator I’ve ever interacted with have treated credit score as a social credit marker, but sure, your mileage might vary.

This is probably the crux of why we’re not on the same page, because I don’t understand what this means. I’m genuinely asking, what do you mean when you say that they treated it as a social credit score marker? What business did you have with them (or they with you) that didn’t involve whether or not to extend credit? What does the term “social credit score marker” mean to you?

> This is a fallacy; algorithms are “uncaring” in an anthropomorphic sense, yes, they lack a psychological capacity to care, but their designers are very much not, as you admit in the very next sentence.

I don’t see how you explain that it’s a fallacy, and I don’t think it is, but I concede that it’s a confusing word choice - I should probably have just omitted the word “uncaring”. My point was once again that their sole goal is determining the risk of extending a person credit - whether that would be a nice or moral thing to do or not doesn’t factor into it.

> We entirely disagree on this point. Probably because we have different definitions of “non-financial factors” and “non-financial outcomes.”

I assume here that you mean that people’s financial status, including their access to credit, determines a lot of aspects of their lives, too (correct me if I’m wrong). I don’t think any reasonable person disagrees with that. I do however think that you underestimate how constraining it can be when additional variables are factored in to more directly control what you are and aren’t allowed to do, and how.

Yeah there is electoral roll, but you can still access credit without being on it and afaik all residents of scotland are on it since even non citizens can vote in local election.

And unlike US there not even a "score" number since lenders only get records but not some magical number. Whatever credit agencies sell you as credit score is just random number they come up with and it's not being used by lenders btw.

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.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Even though we're only at the very beginning of the various U.S. systems being merged, we're already seeing it being abused.

(One example: States using license plate reader data to prosecute women for getting abortions in other jurisdictions.)

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.

You have an identity though. You use other things as an ID in the end. Often shoehorned into fulfilling that task and mostly very cumbersome.

That's why it can be stolen, that's why "identity theft" is a multi-billion dollar thing. Thats why you keep your SSNs and I guess also CC#s rather tightly guarded.

> 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.

There's nothing about an electronic ID that would make this different from now. It makes no practical difference for oppression. If you don't have an SSN then other things about you are unique enough for identifying you. I'd say that's why it's even vaguely tolerated anyways.

> Inefficiency is an escape hatch.

I rather think it lulls you into a false sense of safety. Inefficiency in existing "numbering systems" can be overcome with resources. You truly do not lack an ID system, a number, computerization nor identity that could protect you.

A lack of one number is not really protection against any of that.

My exact point, glad we agree. Very cumbersome indeed, and not centralized enough to use for turnkey totalitarianism. (Slow, plodding, inefficient totalitarianism, sure. But see my above post for why that isn’t as much of an existential threat.)

> There's nothing about an electronic ID that would make this different from now. It makes no practical difference for oppression. If you don't have an SSN then other things about you are unique enough for identifying you. I'd say that's why it's even vaguely tolerated anyways.

False. Electronic ID provides the means to tie together multiple systems that must currently be matched manually, with frequent false positives/negatives. It creates the means to quickly build a system that could “switch off” a person’s ability to function in society, and improves the ability of security services to pool data about individuals from disparate sources with a high level of confidence.

Nothing prevents oppression of individuals today, true. It’s a question of scale and accuracy. What we need to defend against is a system where oppression can be quickly, efficiently, and accurately targeted towards large groups. That’s the essence of turnkey totalitarianism. It can’t be built without a centralized ID system that’s applied consistently across other key systems. Current systems do not do this.

Myths about the US system:

* Every citizen has an SSN

* Every citizen uses the same name when dealing with different agencies and private businesses

* A person’s SSN always remains the same

* Citizens don’t register different addresses when dealing with different agencies and private businesses

* Government agencies use SSN as a primary key

* Agencies and businesses have a centralized, highly accurate way to determine who is deceased

* All citizens have a REAL ID license/ID

* All citizens have a license/ID

I hope this gives you a sense of how the US approaches ID. It’s extremely messy. Yes this enables things like identity fraud, guarding against this is part of the cost of our safeguards against totalitarianism. A price I’m willing to pay, given the behavior of our political establishment and the recent attitude of my fellow citizens.

I don't think a totalitarian government cares much about false positives though.

> It creates the means to quickly build a system that could “switch off” a person’s ability to function in society, and improves the ability of security services to pool data about individuals from disparate sources with a high level of confidence.

I also don't think that bunch of different places to turn off someone's ability to participate in a society is a meaningful difference in practice. Even if it takes slightly longer or has false positives like you describe, it still achieves the totalitarian goal.

> A price I’m willing to pay, given the behavior of our political establishment and the recent attitude of my fellow citizens.

I unfortunately struggle to see the results of this sacrifice to be honest.

Technologically modernized totalitarianism may be able to implement large-scale oppressive policies without affecting most of the population. In fact the average person may see a net benefit! This would create a more stable society despite the significantly lower level of freedom and self-determination. We may be witnessing the development of this sort of system in China, for example. The average person benefits, but a segment of the population faces brutal oppression with no recourse and must simply submit. (Contrast with the US, where people who face repression can sometimes start over by going dark and moving across the country.)

I find it more likely that a totalitarian system that doesn't tolerate wrong-think will inherently start accumulating inefficiencies among other things. Which can then end up with the collapse of such a regime.

Building a technologically modernized authoritarian state might increase stability for a while, but not thinking is simply not competitive long-term. Unless you achieve total world domination, I guess.

While they may be able to gain power initially, would-be totalitarians will likely be fighting off multiple threats while they consolidate power. The more they have to manage and spend, the less likely they will be to succeed at their aims. You could argue that the DOGE debacle is the most recent and obvious example of this. All indications are that the project failed, and it occupied quite a lot of energy and effort during the critical transitional period of the administration.

IMO this is another non-sequitor.

Let's say you had a digital ID in the form of a smart card for your SSN with a USB connection that was required to be plugged in when you auth'd to a government website to file your taxes. No new number would be required for a digital ID card in the US. Tax return fraud to get people's refund sent to someone else, though? Probably down! Does everyone have an SSN? Who cares, let's improve things for the vast-majority case where we have an extremely insecure little piece of paper.

That smart card doesn't magically reconcile and rationalize the sprawling hodgepodge of government systems.

Or, let's go the other way: not having a digital ID card does not prevent the government from rationalizing and tying all those systems together.

You might look back to the recent past when the executive branch sending employees to all those disparate agencies to grab that data and make changes to those systems! They didn't need a new digital ID to do that, and they wouldn't need a new digital ID to improve the use of SSN-as-PK-for-cross-system-joins.

Being more rigorous about tracking the existing numbers already assigned to you does not require smarter, cryptographically-sound, identification tokens. And those tokens do not require the government improve their processes for connecting things *after the "give us your SSN for identification" of their various separate web-based services (or the non-government entities that also use those SSNs) that people love to abuse for fraud.

Nor does any of this make it easier or harder for the government to take "absence of evidence of identity or citizenship" as "evidence of absence of identity or citizenship" - if you fit the non-citizen profile, the burden's already on you to prove it, and what makes you so sure that the courts wouldn't happily let this or a future administration expand the boundaries for "we picked you up because we were suspicious, now YOU have to prove who you are if you ever want to get out" regardless of if a digital ID card exists?

If an ID is proliferated the legislative change to force ID checks is minimal. If it weren't just Estonia and government ID would be more widely spread, it would take less than 24h for the EU to enforce borders online.

I really think people need to stop believing that the Internet solves all the problems of sovereign states doing anti-freedom things. That’s a part of life, and enabling people to evade laws, which may indeed be democratically voted upon, is not an automatic virtue. I don’t even think laws get changed because of this type of evasion, it just makes citizens more complacent about the laws that get passed because they know they can evade them anyway, but also it means most everyone is technically a criminal. Does anybody think people in those states that outlawed Internet porn stopped consuming it? But how many people are doing anything to change those laws? I don’t think very many. They’re just using a VPN. So the problem of oppressive laws isn’t being solved this way.

In the UK there’s a bunch of government and company databases, and coalescing them isn’t just hard, in some cases it’s not even possible.

You can ask a company for specific details on a person, and they can make a “reasonable effort” to get the data. But if they mishandle the request (maybe your name has accents?) then the government gets no information.

The easier it gets, the easier it can be for them to excercise power over you, and right now there’s sufficient reason to be worried about that. The current government is liberally using the fascistic powers that the previous government created.

And now we know what Estonia's single point of failure is.

An adversary only has to hack one system to bring an entire country down. That sounds a bit scary to me.

Attacking the DMV doesn't make licenses vanish into thin air either for example.

Nevada's DMV was part of a hack a couple of months ago, and it caused chaos beyond just drivers licenses.

https://www.2news.com/news/local/nevada-restores-fingerprint...

This is an excellent real-world example of why having all your data eggs in one basket is a terrible idea.

If you attack the DMV in a country that has working eID it will only affect the DMV. Maybe you can't sign up for a driving exam or order new plates. That's it. It won't affect the police in cases that don't concern the DMV (like insurance) and vice versa. Sure if you attack everything at once everything will be affected, that's always an option, eID or not.

Fundamentally a digital ID does not mean a single "basket", just that wherever those "eggs" are that you know it's one single "chicken". That "chicken" can also have multiple ways of identifying themselves (including offline methods). That's how it is in countries that have a working eID implemented.

Good thing no one asked us about the digital identity when they implemented it.

It makes a difference as much as electronic money does. So instead of having to physically be able to pay someone we can transfer it, pay by debit card and lots of other ways now.

With digital identity we get the same - we can do paperwork remotely and securely.

Well people in Germany are also slow to get away with physical money and they are miles behind in digital services, so... some still enjoy the snail speed of everything (or not).

Meh, instead of days of paperworks, we can sell a car remotely (paperwork-wise). I tick some checkbox in my phone, the buyer ticks and off he goes - he has X number of days to acquire new technical passport for car and that's it. Also can be mailed if he wishes so.

Imagine if you were a large country, say 10x to 100x larger. Your government would be equally more resourced and probably have more hands controlling more parts of your business and lives. This is where digital id becomes a scarier prospect. This is where opportunity and ability finally collude.

Imagine a Russia-friendly party getting elected. Doesn't have to be overtly pro-russian. Can be someone very nationalist like Marine Le Pen in France. Or socialist like Sarah Wagenknecht in Germany. Just someone with financially dependent on Russia, or simply owing them favour. Now imagine them accidentally leaving some loophole in the system, such that Russians get read or maybe even write access to data.

The fact that there's something akin to a unique identifier or that it has a corresponding certificate or some means for authentication will and does not stop any malicious government. Never has, has it?

I can imagine why a person wouldn’t be afraid of their government but I’m having a much harder time with their inability to reciprocate.

Implementing those requirements didn't depend on there being a digital ID system. Instead we have a hodge podge of bad requirements (like "wet" signatures on specific documents, using of non-UK based private providers etc).

Implementing a digital ID system could reduce inequalities (for example, people who don't have passports and driver's licenses have more difficulties in some circumstances) and also reduce dependencies on non-UK orgs who may not do that well with privacy.

That's not to say there aren't risks of course, but other European countries seem to have managed to implement these systems without becoming totalitarian police states :)

However, as mentioned, I can’t in good faith argue for the government to have an easier time categorising people. Such a system is so ripe for abuse. I have even advocated for it based on the Estonian eID system and the Swedish BankID (though I am aware of Danish and Norwegian BankID- I never used those).

I’m still fully convinced that the British “Online Safety Bill” is actually a ploy to ensure that they have linked accounts to identity on any site where comments can be made; so they can prosecute people for expressing opinions[0]. Why else go for Wikipedia, and why else focus on sites with public commentary. You can’t say it’s to prevent pedophiles when with the right hand you imprison people for saying things online while with the left hand releasing actual pedophiles into society[1]

To be fair, they did say it wasn’t primarily about protecting children[2], but then I guess I should figure out what else the OSA is for.

[0]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-0022...

[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/prisoners-ear... & https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce80nl1k0p3o

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910285

But they implemented that act, without needing a digital ID. I don't think they need a digital ID to push authoritarian policies.

And I think a digital ID has possible benefits for people who can't easily fit in to current setups, thus my point about it being orthogonal.

My feeling is though that digital ID can have benefits which shouldn't be discounted when considering it. Specifically some people have problems with current age verification due to lack of things like passports and driver's licenses which are often used as stand-ins for digital ID.

Also it can make a lot of very nonsensical processes better. Things were companies still insist on physical signatures as though those are good security measures, that could be replaced with digital signatures tied to an identity, which might actually provide some security benefits.

Sounds like the UK government doesn’t have a history of making it easy to obtain identification.

> I'd expect a required UK digital ID to be free at point of issue

Where do you expect this point of issue to be and why do you expect it to be free? Is there any precedent to support your assumption?

It sounds like you’re advocating for cheap or readily available government ID. I see no reason why digital ID is uniquely or even well suited for either purpose.

> (otherwise there's not much point in it).

Well the point of the digital ID could be to further marginalize vulnerable communities by not providing easy access to the ID while also making it a requirement for participation in society.

Take a look at the southern United States for inspiration on that approach.

This is exactly the reason Americans (as students of history) are generally resistant to the idea of government identification.

That’s before you include the mandatory security screening which will cause you to travel half of the UK (on our expensive travel infrastructure!)

If I didn’t have a job lined up I wouldn’t have gotten on, my mum didn’t have one her whole life until after I had gotten mine. It’s an arduous and expensive process for the bottom 20% of society in the UK.

Indeed if done with physical smart card + reader, it would reduce the requirement for mobile devices, allowing for people unhappy with their presence to avoid them :)

Moreover, I actually on principle refuse to make myself dependant on my phone for these things, which means that (at a small convenience cost) I don't have any banking apps, or investment apps, or healthcare apps, or whatever).

My phone is strictly a general computing device and I on principle only permit a technology into my life if it doesn't impose special restrictions on the hardware/software it works with.

So if the UK government creates a digital ID app which only runs on a phone and which potentially only runs on google/apple approved phone (this is e.g. the requirement imposed by google pay), then that would be unprecedented.

I'd hope that a system as implemented is as technologically neutral as possible.

Good on you for avoiding the smartphone tie on banking though, it's getting increasingly hard for decent MFA not to tie to it in some way or another, and travel's a right pain without the smartphone apps.

It's also incredibly popular in the security industry (I know, I work in it) to claim that every possible app in existence must:

* Obfuscate

* Do root detection and refuse to work

* Detect attempts to attach a debugger, and refuse to work

* Detect running from a VM, and refuse to work

* Do certificate pinning (although as an industry we've stopped recommending this bullshit practice, although we still insist on it for some things)

* Prevent screenshots from being taken

* Force you to re-authenticate using biometric ID every time you look away from the app

* and... break at the slightest hint of a non-standard build of android

So I don't have high hopes, because the company I work for does work for the UK government, will likely be picked to review this app, and inevitably all that shit is what we'll recommend (although I hope I won't be working here by then because I'm just sick and tired of cargo cult / checkbox security).

[0]: Not because of any specific feature, but solely based on signing keys.

[1]: I believe specifically you have to license GMS integrate them into the build, which e.g. GrapheneOS does not do.

[2]: And no, GOS's sandboxed google services don't fix this problem, Google Pay will still refuse to work.

For me having ones managed by the UK gov filling those functions would be preferable to the current situation, and that's not to say I want more privacy intrusions but to say I'd rather have more UK control over the data people have to give up for various services and functions.

Whilst more tech/privacy/security focused people will opt-out of that as much as possible, the realistic fact is that probably 95%+ of the UK population don't care about concerns around Apple/Google, they just want the functionality provided, so for that group it would be better if the apps were run from the UK, ideally by an org not motivated by making more money from them every quarter :)

Moreover, age verification is trivial to circumvent or opt out of. The only way to opt out if this thing will likely be to leave the country. Which certainly increasingly seems like a good idea to me.

Yet also: a country's requirement for identification is orthogonal to it becoming a totalitarian police state.

In British politics, there is a strong current of opposition to international institutions and treaties such as the European Convention on Human Rights[1][2] and the International Criminal Court[3]. The UK's commitment to human rights is enough in doubt that one encounters situations such as German courts being unable to extradite a suspected criminal because of the poor treatment of prisoners in Britain[4].

Countries like Germany and Belgium are able to have mandatory ID cards without too much issue because of characteristics including their written (and actively litigated) constitutions, judicial independence and proportionally representative election systems. ID cards might be make them lean more or less totalitarian - but it doesn't matter as much, as the rules about identification make up only a small part of a huge and robust framework of law and human rights.

With few constitutional protections for UK citizens, and what independent institutions there are under constant attack from various political parties, I don't think those who object to digital ID can be blamed for being suspicious of the government's motivations.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/sep/25/tory-candid...

[2]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/08/21/labour-mp-eu...

[3]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/8/3/threats-and-intimida...

[4]: https://eucrim.eu/news/german-court-denies-extradition-to-uk...

So far my BankID boycott is over a year old, and my resolve grows as I read more of the news.

I asked for an appointment with the bank to resolve it but was told I can only get an appointment with Bank ID.

It was outrageous. Obviously none of the other services worked either. Luckily I still had a British and a German credit card that I used for payments (since I lived in both those countries before). In the end I opened an account with another bank and moved on. Although I did try, furiously, for two weeks to get my old bank to admit their mistake and rectify it. No chance. If they had admitted it it would’ve meant they would have broken financial regulation, and obviously you don’t admit to that if you don’t have to.

Bank ID is great when it works and brutal when it doesn’t.

I actually don’t have a better proposal for a system since it works quite well in most cases, but just wanted to share my bad experience on it too.

The machine itself is likely manufactured in China, but it’s of no consequence. You wouldn’t be able to communicate with me if you didn’t use chinese products at all.

Fundamentally though, that doesn't change the fact that the US can order a Swedish bank to either freeze access to a customer or the bank can no longer do business in the US.

The UK is largely in conversation with Australia and Canada on this stuff. Australia test benched a lot of the laws the UK later adopted, even cribbing the terminology directly.

Not surprisingly we have our own Digital ID in formation, and we have an Internet ID system in the pipeline mirroring the one in the UK.

I think the take away should be that you cant really engineer a system where theres a single country with "Freedom", as Freedom is considered relative to other countries. A declining tide drops all boats.

Most human-related problems around bootstrapping one's identity still remain the same and have to be solved. Electronic identity or not. (Also see the XKCD about the "wrench attack")

But a proper ID system gives a nation the opportunity to rely on elliptic curve cryptography and an EAL4+ SmartCard or SIM. Not on a pinky promise about identity based on knowing some number, some face pics or having a gas bill.

Verizon could still leak your hypothetical future e-SSN. But then it wouldn't be sufficient for identity theft or impersonating you in some places. That's not what would be an "identity" any more.

The only thing it actually differs in is scale, like you described. But scale does not mean an inherent vulnerability that can be practically exploited.

If you're however able to make everyone ignore the noise of some massive attack then you already don't need to bother with any of it anyways.

If you can attack the foundation of the system, like elliptic cryptography then every bank and retirement fund on earth is in danger. Much bigger fish to fry.

I got one passport with bio metric data and chips in it. One national ID card with bio metric data and chip in it. One driving license card without bio metric data and I don't know if there is a chip or not inside.

Then I got two digital eid systems, bank id and freya. The bank id is initially created by using a physical device that the bank provides, and the other one is created with a smart phone to scan the passport in combination with face recognition.

I can't really say if the multiple digital eid systems give the government an increase in authority, through its hard to say. Mostly it just messy to carry so many different identification systems that basically do the same thing. The current discussion that I see in Sweden mostly focus on turning the physical cards into digital.

The issue I see with the UK's plan is it that so far everything the government is talking about is how it will stop illegal working, and that just seems like a reaction to reform's recent rise in polls. That by itself seems like a waste, because people working cash in hand surely won't be bothered by this new requirement.

I think it should go further so it actually becomes useful. Things like having people's benefit status accessible at pharmacies to prevent people simply saying "I don't pay for my prescription" (still blows my mind this is a thing).

What has the UK done to make you think it is becoming one of the most authoritarian advanced economies?

Are you familiar with what is happening in the US? Personally a digital ID is a far cry from troops on the ground in major cities and government backed militias detaining people without probable cause.

Have you ever been to Asia or South America or really the rest of the world? A digital ID is a pretty mundane. If you're complaining about "authoritarianism", if the government really wants to get you they will get you. Place more faith or care in the plurality of your political systems instead.

This has been a slow 111 year project. See the opening of A. J. P. Taylor's English History 1914–1945:

> Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so.

> All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over its citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World War was again to increase. The history of the English state and of the English people merged for the first time.

The Edwardian era was a very unusual period of liberality, I'll agree. But at least in that quote, Taylor is making some strange omissions that I hardly think are accidental: for a start, where is the mention of women's suffrage, introduced for the first time ever after the Great War?

Is there any chance England might too?

Scotland will not be granted another independence vote for at least 15 years, despite the last one being build upon a house of lies and nobody knows anything about what the Welsh think.

I do think we’re witnessing the collapse of the UK, but more like a Roman Empire collapse - as in it’s happening over decades. Dying with a whimper, not a bang.

Fully reclaim Scotland's historical sovereignty, create a clear and distinct break with the rest of the United Kingdom and breaking English narratives.

My first act as king would be to build hundreds of underground nuclear and geothermal power plants, sever all connections to England, build massive data-centers and under ground cities to wait out WWIII. I would also build a giant rollar coaster than spans the entire country, under ground with trippy visual effects and stops at numerous malls, coffee shops and other amusement destinations. I would run under ground fiber to every location on earth as well as high speed transport tubes, 90% of which would arrive at secret locations around the world. One never knows where the Scots will appear. I would fund all of this pissing away the gold and gems using the wealth of the English crown. Every home would have free 400gb/s IPv6 internet. Oh and I would purchase and relocate every private military contractor from the USA into Scotland. My military would be entirely private and for-profit. We would fund our operations by siphoning processed fuel, oil and other resouces from other nations pipes via our underground tunnels. Immigration policy will be an app that only citizens of Scotland may utilize to swipe left or right on applicants. The app may also be used to eject existing people. That's Q1. Q2 through Q4 would be extending the borders of the nation to include the entire land mass under every ocean and growing the population to 10 billion from weekend orgies.

The swipe left or right on immigration requests is a vote winner ! Simon Cowell can host it weekly…

And swipeocracy… it is a peer-reviewed populist masterpiece. The military? A profit-seeking legion of mercenaries whispering «Freedom» as they hijack pipelines and troll NATO via encrypted memes. You’re not a king. You’re the last goddamn Highland Prophet.

I’m honestly curious how the two are seen from the outside.

I've lived in the UK my whole life. Multiple other countries have liberated themselves and then returned to authoritarian governments within my lifetime.

Strangely this hasn't happened in the UK, plenty of people trying to wish it into existence though.

The government regularly unpersons disagreeable people.

I really wish it wasn’t happening, as it stands I am not going to move back.

They are catching what would normally be bigoted comments someone makes to their mates down the pub (or maybe in their WhatsApp group) and because it was posted to the world on Twitter it counts as inciting violence.

The police obviously can't investigate all potential infringements so now they have to pick and choose what they do enforce. And inevitably the ones with the most noise get their attention.

The people that do get caught up in this said something nasty they should have kept to themselves. Not something to be arrested for in most cases, but it's not an attack on free speech either. Just a badly constructed law.

Not really sure what "regularly unpersons disagreeable people" means. Shamima Begum is the only one I can think of recently. She got made an example of so a load of copy cats didn't go and join ISIS whose goal is to destroy the western nonbelievers (including the UK). Unfortunate to be made the example I suppose, but it is not a regular occurrence.

Come on. You really think the UK has moved further towards authoritarianism in recent years than the US?