[MichaelBurge]

Individual states already issue identification cards, and people use that all the time for this purpose.

In a system like the US, I think it's better for the states to handle identification cards, not the federal government. There's a lot of details that go into identifying someone, and your local state is best equipped to handle that.

To give a few examples:

What's the procedure for changing your name? A lot of people change their name after marriage or divorce. Those are usually handled by the states, so adding a federal government in there raises the net complexity.

Should people in Alabama be able to force the residents of California to put their original sex on a federal id card? I don't care, but other people do. It could be one of those pointless political distractions that's better left unanswered.

If the federal government runs it, now they have to own or rent a bunch of land in every major city in every state so they can service id card requests. So it gives them a larger presence. I guess they could reuse social security offices, but they couldn't reuse state DMV offices which are the more natural choice.

[sokoloff]

That's a very practical argument and I agree with it.

The Tenth Amendment's Reserved Powers clause also suggests this is a states issue, unless you can contrive it to be part of the census.

[nicole_express]

> What's the procedure for changing your name? A lot of people change their name after marriage or divorce. Those are usually handled by the states, so adding a federal government in there raises the net complexity.

To be clear, the federal government is already involved with name changes-- in fact, though my name change was issued by a state court, I had to get it changed with Social Security before I could get a new driver's license.

Similarly, passports do have a sex listed, so that's already something with federal jurisdiction. The passport system is also handled through post offices, solving the problem of needing more offices.

[ourmandave]

> If the federal government runs it, now they have to own or rent a bunch of land in every major city in every state so they can service id card requests.

Don't we already have that with the post offices and the passport system?

Couldn't they expand passports into a Federal ID system?

[ghaff]

Sure. You could require every American to get at least a passport card. Maybe even waive fees for those below a certain income level.

I'm not qualified to comment on constitutional issues so I won't.

I will say that, even if it's mostly an emotional issue (people already need at least some sort of state government-issued ID to do lots of things), there's a huge resistance in the US to anything that smells like "papers, please" or universal ID that people are required to carry and present upon request.

Which is how a lot of people view the idea of a Federal ID system. That may seem silly to a lot of people outside the US but it's how things are.

[colejohnson66]

> there's a huge resistance in the US to anything that smells like "papers, please" or universal ID that people are required to carry and present upon request.

And yet, you are, under certain circumstances, already required to ID yourself to a police officer upon request.[0] The most common form of ID? Your driver's license.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_and_identify_statutes

[superuser2]

Shared-secret numbers and physical cards are not enough. We need a cryptographic API that lets citizens sign requests to authenticate themselves, such that the signature they emit is only useful for one relying party at one time (not useful if stolen).

Fifty cryptographic APIs, on the other hand, would be a nightmare. We'd at least need the federal government to force states to implement one conforming to some open standard so that the integrations aren't intractable.