I read the federal government’s Zero-Trust Memo so you don’t have to

The thing I don't get about the non-religious arguments is that we already have a national ID, it's just a patchwork system of unreliable, not-particularly-secure forms of identification that are a pain in the ass for a regular citizen to have to deal with. And the REAL ID stuff essentially makes state IDs conform to a national ID specification anyway.

And regardless, if you do want a national US ID, you just get a passport, and it'll be accepted as a form of ID everywhere a state-issued driver's license or state ID is accepted. Of course, in this case it's technically voluntary, and many Americans don't travel internationally and don't bother to get a passport.

Many State governments do not recognize a US passport as valid ID. This was unexpected when I first encountered an example of it, but apparently that is normal and I was just the last person to find out. The REAL ID legislation only regulates processing and format, there is no enforceable requirement to share that with the Federal government and many States (both red and blue) do not in practice. States recognize the ID of other States, as is required by the Constitution.

Because there is no official national ID system, you can do virtually everything Federally with a stack of affidavits and pretty thin "evidence" that you are who you claim to be. They strongly prefer that you have something resembling ID but it isn't strictly required. This also creates a national ID bootstrapping problem insofar as millions of Americans don't have proof that they are Americans because there was never a requirement of having documentary evidence. As a consequence, government processes are forgiving of people that have no "real" identification documents because so many people have fallen through the cracks historically.

Of course, this has been widely abused historically, so the US government has relatively sophisticated methods for "duck typing" identities by inference these days.

> The thing I don't get about the non-religious arguments is that we already have a national ID, it's just a patchwork system of unreliable, not-particularly-secure forms of identification

Yes, and this unreliable patchwork is already being heavily abused by surveillance companies (eg Equifax, Google, LexisNexis, Facebook, Retail Equation, etc) involuntarily storing our personal information - creating permanent records on us that we can only guess the contents and scope of, sorting us into prescriptive classes so that we can be better managed, and completely unaccountable to even their most egregious victims.

Social security numbers were promised to only be used for purposes of administering social security, and yet now they're required by many businesses for keying into that surveillance matrix. The main thing holding back more businesses from asking for identifiers is that people are hesitant to give them out.

Before there is any talk of strengthening identification, we need a US GDPR codifying a basic right to privacy. Until I'm able to fully control the surveillance industry's dossiers on me (inspection, selective deletion, prohibit future collection), I'll oppose anything that would further empower them.

> Many State governments do not recognize a US passport as valid ID.

Whoa, I did not know this. That's wild.

> Before there is any talk of strengthening identification, we need a US GDPR codifying a basic right to privacy.

That's a fair point, agreed. Privacy needs to be legally recognized as a strong right before we allow more centralization of this sort of thing. (Though sadly it's already pretty centralized, just not by the federal government.)