What's the concern about national ID and political enemies?
Because America has seen what happens when it's used in other countries.
The HN crowd is mostly too young to remember these sorts of things, or to have learned about them in school. But it's a very short ride from "What's the big deal with national IDs?" to "SELECT * FROM 'residents' WHERE 'religion' = 'jewish' ORDER BY 'national_id';"
I answered that objection already, I thought. If you want to find every Cohen in the country, you can do so from state driver's licenses, birth certificates, voter registration data (which is public!), tax records, E-Verify, social security, whatever. If you want to find everyone who's traveled to a "terrorist" nation in the last few years, USCIS already has that data.
Sure, the government rounding up people by religion is bad and worth protecting against. I do not follow the argument that blocking a national ID actually protects against this in any meaningful way.
(Also, uh, don't put a religion field in your national ID?)
But the government already has all the data about you. Just in lots of places and kind of disorganised I guess.
I see that having an ID number for everyone would better help to organise the data and let the government offer better services. Like.. when one deparment has asked for my address then it stores it somewhere, and when some other department needs it, then it gets it from the database, and doesn't have to ask for it again, and again and again on every interaction.
Right - the problem with "the government shouldn't be too competent so that it can't competently do harm" (which my gut wants to agree with) is that the parts that do good are unloved and unfunded and the parts that do harm will figure out a way to make it happen, usually because the harm benefits someone in power and the good does not.
Because America has seen what happens when it's used in other countries.
The HN crowd is mostly too young to remember these sorts of things, or to have learned about them in school. But it's a very short ride from "What's the big deal with national IDs?" to "SELECT * FROM 'residents' WHERE 'religion' = 'jewish' ORDER BY 'national_id';"