The responsible party, in the case of the Federal government failing to provide a national ID, is the contingent American citizens who are rabidly against the idea of national ID.
We have these little things called elections for doing that. Parts of the government would love to have this perfect registry and things like RealID are attempts at that but there's a lot of push back and reasons not to have some mythical impervious citizen tracking system too.
Technically correct, but it's an attempt by the federal government to increase the validity and security of state IDs, so it is relevant to this conversation about the shortcomings of state IDs and the role of the federal government in solving that problem.
It doesn't solve the problem, both because you have to ask for one (it's not issued to every citizen) and chiefly, it isn't a federal ID. The other parts are almost moot.
An ID doesn't have to be national to be secure and state issued is still government issued. AFAIK RealID has the states check with other states electronically as part of the process of issuing a new ID, it's why some people have been so resistant to getting a RealID and we've pushed back the original deadline requiring RealID for plane travel for at least a decade (maybe 2 at this point?).
Sorry, what, elections are for doing what exactly? Not provide a registry of residence, surely.
Your second sentence builds up two strawmen:
1. That the registry has to be "perfect", whatever that means. It doesn't, it just has to be canonical, and allow for errors in it to be corrected according to some well-defined process. (Not by pulling 20 random documents in front of a judge and suddenly legally become another person.)
2. That these registries are "mythical". It's very much a solved problem. You (I'm assuming you're American) are literally living the only developed country without a registry of who lives in it.
Japan solves this by having the registry in your town of birth, other countries have this registry centralized -- perhaps the U.S. would be best served by state-wide registries, though since migration across state borders is unregulated, I bet that would be very difficult to maintain.
As for the reasons not to have such a registry, I have yet to hear any convincing ones.
You asked about holding the government accountable for not providing secure IDs. Doing that is a political question and we've had attempts to for thinkgs like RealID, they don't because there's a significant block that don't want them to for all sort of reasons ranging from legitimate to paranoid.
> Japan solves this by having the registry in your town of birth, other countries have this registry centralized -- perhaps the U.S. would be best served by state-wide registries, though since migration across state borders is unregulated, I bet that would be very difficult to maintain.
You're just describing birth certificates here. The US has those... very very few people don't get them. Getting access to them was an important part of Keirans's method of stealing Mr. Woods's identity. They will inevitably get lost or destroyed so you have to have some method of bootstrapping someone's identity and Keirans exploited that system through research.
It was designed around a time when it wasn't easy to acquire massive amounts of information about someone so it's not surprising that it starts to come apart a little bit in our digital panopticon.
I am not describing birth certificates. I’m describing a registry of residence.
That’s another thing the U.S. does wrong. If you hold a birth certificate for a child, what does that prove? It’s just an officially issued statement that a particular person was born to these particular parents. It’s completely useless as an authentication mechanism of identity.
The problem is not that birth certificates can be re-issued when lost. The problem is that they are trusted to mean anything about that person that possesses it.
Nothing you said made it sound any different from a birth certificate. What proves that you are the person living at that address and that you are the one that should be allowed to update that information? Just having a list of where people nominally live is meaningless by itself. The US has that information in loads of places, it's just not treated as the ground truth.
Also that system doesn't seem to work that great, the numbers I'm finding show Japan has about 3 million identity theft victims a year. Lower than the US but only slightly lower per capita.
The biggest problem in this instance isn't that his identity was stolen it was that he wasn't believed, partially because he was homeless, seems to have some mental health problems per the article and they're a maligned group in the US, and the courts and prosecutors didn't take the relatively simple step of requesting DNA evidence to resolve the situation.
> Japan solves this by having the registry in your town of birth
Japan is notorious for impersonation and false identities (especially children impersonating dead parents to claim their pensions).
> As for the reasons not to have such a registry, I have yet to hear any convincing ones.
The Japanese system is hugely cumbersome and also famously makes it difficult for people to escape from abusive family members (to the point there are e.g. dedicated companies for helping people move away in the middle of the night).
I understand your sentiment as a fellow US citizen; it can get annoying how so many people globally take part in debates about our society. To be fair, it's not like we in the U.S. shouldn't be open to hearing ideas from others about how we could run our government better. God knows there's plenty of room for improvement. And if I were to go to another country and see things that don't make sense to me, I'd understand they aren't going to just change anything immediately on my account, but I'd also appreciate having my thoughts considered by the people there.
His problem is more that he seems to believe his (and all others') country's ID system is somehow impervious to abuse (despite being imperfect by his own admission). The more centralized things are, the less you have to hack to do a takeover. The less centralized things are, the easier it is to accumulate supporting evidence for a takeover. It's a necessarily complicated system that has certain holes, and the main thing that would've helped in this case was more benefit of the doubt for the person who was up against a lot of documentation.
I appreciate that you’re defending my right to voice my opinion.
That said, you’re contradicting yourself: am I saying my country’s system is impervious to abuse, or am I admitting that it is not?
My point is not that a central database of people makes identity theft a thing. My point is that by not having one (or any), you are making it a lot easier than it has to be.
In one country, this kind of abuse of identity happens all the time, and in others, it is exceedingly rare. Anyone should be able to draw their own conclusions from that.
I’m seeing a statistic online that says “33% of Americans Faced Some Form of Identity Theft at Some Point in Their Lives” — not sure if that’s accurate but it’s a scary number!
Well the Japanese one apparently doesn’t. But surely you see how it would be a logical fallacy to discount a type of system because of one faulty implementation?
I think it's on you to make the logical connection between the type of system and positive results at this point. (And no, your anecdotes and general vibes don't count.)
> That said, you’re contradicting yourself: am I saying my country’s system is impervious to abuse, or am I admitting that it is not?
That's not me contradicting myself, it's literally quoting you contradicting yourself. Because you've made both of those arguments.
At this point, you seem to have backed off basically all of your claims about your system actually being better, leaving me with the question of what point you're trying to make at all.
> not sure if that’s accurate but it’s a scary number!
Boy, you sound like you'd be a very educated voter, LOL.
I Googled "scandanavian id fraud rate" and got 36% for Finland and 45% for Sweden out of one of the top results. So what exactly are you on about?
The US government isn't responsible for that failing. The people of the US generally do not want a national ID, and elect their representatives accordingly.
He was homeless and likely lost his ID and the papers needed get a new one. Then the identity thief obtained an ID and birth certificate.
Unless you are suggesting that the government take biometrics. Except that wouldn't have helped in this case, cause the identity thief would have shown up with ID and gotten scanned.
