[salawat]

>The logic is: “Only communist governments know who their citizens are.”

The logic is actually "That which I wish to control or destroy, I must first enumerate/name."

A Government that exists only to administer (and not control the populace), has no need to know who all it's citizen's are. Merely to know who is involved in the limited processes being administered.

Sadly, all common sense around that seems to have evaporated since 2001 in the U.S. It seems like only those of us left who experienced the pre-9/11 world are doing a terrible job at instilling a picture of a government that's not all "Big Brother is watching" in the younger generations. The gluttony of Law Enforcement and the IC for a Single Identification Number to unify and enumerate every flesh and blood person wandering around cannot be overstated.

[jiggawatts]

"You can't improve(manage) that which you can't measure."

In practice, all government departments in all countries have databases with primary key identifiers in them.

We can do this accurately and efficiently, or we can continue to insist on doing it inaccurately and inefficiently because of "Red Scare" propaganda.

You are proposing that you prefer your government to be slow, inefficient, inept, and vulnerable to fraud and corruption.

I prefer my government agencies to not waste my time, not confuse me with similarly named people, etc...

This is a real problem that occurs every day, versus the slippery-slope arguments that derive from anti-communist hysteria.

Here's a real situation: Identical twins with the same name, because "John Sr is the son of John Sr for ten generations, and he didn't want to give up the tradition just because he had twins." That's a real story from a public school system where the kids were living at the same address, attending the same school, were born on the same day, in the same hospital, etc...

How would you disambiguate them? You would start with... assigning... a... unique... number perhaps?

[Muromec]

>You are proposing that you prefer your government to be slow, inefficient, inept, and vulnerable to fraud and corruption.

It's a fair trade off if your target KPI is having zero genocides enabled by extensive records-keeping.

[mrguyorama]

The US did not require any data crunching from IBM or anyone else to genocide the Indians.

The entire line of thought is straight up propaganda from weird Christians who have a really weird cult belief that some id number is the mark of the beast and saw a great opportunity to lie about the holocaust (plenty of jews were murdered using no better data than "Wilhelm says he saw them praying last Saturday").

You can see the same stupidity in the talking point from 2nd amendment maximalists that the jews were only genocided because they gave up rights to own guns, or something to that effect, as if a population experiencing genocide would have qualms about illegal firearms.

[jiggawatts]

If you think the lack of records-keeping is protection against genocide, or has ever prevented one in the history of the world, then I have some bad news for you.

[salawat]

>How would you disambiguate them? You would start with... assigning... a... unique... number perhaps?

Yep. That's how. Now lets see what inevitably gets built once you do that.

Now do you that mapping to a Federal system, which maps that ID to a set of tables including a map to every other every other organization's ids relevant to that individual such that one can essentially completely hose someone via the "Sanction this individual in particular where (subquery). This system has already been built in the Financial sector, it's called OFAC. More advanced integrations are in progress. Look up "Fusion Centers".

Do I think that's a worthy trade in case that gets in the wrong hands? Fuck no.

Should those same systems be free to be "privately built and transacted for business purposes" in a way that utterly sidesteps prohibitions against the Government directly building that dataset themselves, resulting in 3rd party SaaS queries through Data Brokers? See LexisNexis, Palantir, or any of the Credit Bureaus or other data brokers. Also telecoms selling location data. Or automotive manufacturers feeding telematics to insurers or Law Enforcement.

Worthy trade for the risk? ?Hell no.

You can have a world where nightmare abuses of these types of systems are outright impossible, or you can have a world that's incrementally more efficient, but you must accept these abuses being realizable. That's an XOR there. There is no escaping it.

Certainty of abuse has probability 1. How do I know? Because I've been tempted to do as much before, and I know that I am an uncharacteristically extreme example of someone that thinks something through before committing to it, and it's only by doing so that I've managed to avoid implementing that very thing. 98% of people will not hold themselves to at least the the rigor I have. There are people far too pragmatic to be bothered by such things as ideals or edge cases; which is necessary to deal with when you're talking about enabling top down practicable social targeting systems. We are not special. It will not be different this time. Our nature is not such that we can safely discount these sorts of things.

The enemy is among us, and they are us. I don't fear communists. I fear the paperclip maximizing zealots among us who will sacrifice everything in pursuit of thrir goal. I've been one of them.

I will not subject those down the road to a working Panopticon. I will not build that lever. I'm sorry. I will consign you to a fate wherein you suffer from an occasional bureacratic mixup, but you will never once need worry that some madman is sitting on the button that causes you to lose access to everything instantly. That will allow a faceless bureaucracy to control your access in real time. To know your every move, all the time. I'd rather you be free. That you be unmanageable. That the mechanisms of external social coercion not be perfect. For without those spaces, there is no room for freedom. Only not currently having your chain jerked. Know that if ever you are subdued by the machinations of the technophile, it will not have been I that forged those chains.

Just because you can build something, doesn't mean you should.

Just because you can measure something, doesn't mean you should build the yardstick.

It does not follow that something you can't currently measure must have a measure built, and then as a consequence of it's measurability then be managed.

Those that seek power will beseech you to build these things for them. It is your job to see these things for what they are, and learn to be able to say "No."

[RandomLensman]

Maybe the US is just particularly broken? It is not like countries with robust, state-run ID systems are all some sort of dictatorial or even data hellscape.

[salawat]

From my point of view it's a theoretical gamble. Canada, the U.S.'s neighbor to the north, already abised their OFAC equivalent against people protesting the actions of their Federal Government. Whether you agreed with why the people were protesting, think about that really, really, hard*. Your access to every asset cut off for what amounts to a political issue. At no other time in history, has such an action been possible in so short a time. At no point in time has one sitting in a chair on the other side of the country can completely change your life situation with a tap of the enter key.

We only have these systems implemented currently in places like finance or immigration, or National Civil Service, but by and large, most people are relatively ignorant of the increasingly broad reach of these systems, while at the same time, these systems grow to become more and more attractive targets for both hostile subversion, or just those seeking a means to power.

Historically, we had in built safeties to these sorts of systems because they consisted largely of individual human beings. Each component weighing in in such a way where even the most extreme individual at the top setting off the action potential would on average be damped. Either by non-cooperation of constituent parts (conscientious objection), dropping of signal (not enough people or resources to execute).

With computerization, we're removing more and more of that damping; we're entering a phase of civilization where we're increasingly in danger of our technological capability outstripping our civilizational capability to introspect all the links in the chain for one, and to restore things. It ain't a case of "a man can't do much damage in 4 years" anymore.

[jiggawatts]

Propaganda is a very effective tool. People internalise it to the point that it becomes a part of their personal identity, and it becomes a part of the ambient societal discourse. It's like the air you breathe. You don't even realise that you're breathing until someone tells you that you are.

Conversely, it is trivial to identify foreigners influenced by propaganda. You see the effect, but are not subject to the cause. It's like seeing a fish in a body water. You immediately think to yourself: "There's a fish in the water", but the fish doesn't think it's swimming in water. If you could ask it somehow, it would ask: "What is water?"

PS: There are quite a few topics like this where if you ask any American, you get some specific propaganda in response, but if you ask literally anybody else on the entire planet -- the other 96% of the human population -- you'll get slow blinking and maybe a "wtf!?" instead.

E.g.: Iraq caused 9/11, gun control, states-rights, and publicly-funded ("free") healthcare.

All three of them are very heavily propogandised for decades now by very-well funded lobby groups... in the US. Elsewhere people are like: "No, the Saudis did!", "Illegal!", "Wat!?", and "Of course!"

[fragmede]

proof that humans are just stochastic parrots as well

[salawat]

Sigh. I'm fully aware the propaganda of which you speak. Thank you very much. Yes, I know it's origins. No, it is not the stem of my dislike of these systems. Please stop trying to reduce it to "crazy American Red Scare mumbo jumbo".

I have spent decades watching the ways human beings interact with and use computers. I've made it my life's work to pick apart technological systems and how they have been applied to societal problems, and what the various outcomes are.

It is a fact that automation which removes dependence on other humans acts as a power multiplier to it's owner. It is a fact that as we remove more individual actors from things, decisions will be skewed more and more to the extremes of the component actors of the system. It is a fact that since the industrial revolution, and the introduction of industrial business machines, the acts of artifice and processes we are capable of creating have become more and more capable of facilitating industry fuelled process pipelines capable of generating great casualties. The last century having some very shining examples of how things can go wrong, and the bloody U.S. from 2016-2020 having gone through it's first brush with a certifiable psychopath in the Chief Executive seat.

I have had the everloving shit scared out of me, and much of my naive techno-optimism knocked out of me. I've now had a shining example of "what could a smart psychotic, amoral person do with this system" added to my "should I make this system?" calculus.

I look at cases of "everything is just fine..." non-U.S. posters entertain, and I just end up affixing "for now. Your psychopath in charge just hasn't come up yet.

India has it's Modi. China jas Xi. Putin's saber rattling again. Britain is chasing itself through fear into becoming what Orwell had nightmares of more and more every year. I listen to elders who think that "oh, just trust everyone else", that I then half to clean up the mess of afterward when their implicit trust in others ends up being violated.

I wish my misgivings were as easy to cure as innoculation to Red Scare propaganda. That was easy. I saw through that before getting out of middle school. This is much harder. My generation hasn't faired well in managing to build trust or emotional stability which scares the crap out of me for the odds of not leveraging technical advancement to unmake something beautiful that ultimately I still believe, or try to believe in. I love the American Experiment. I want to believe we are by and large good, virtuous, and comparatively enlightened people capable of maintaining a government that places as a priority maintaining a state of Liberty without degenerating into a mess social control mechanisms laying around waiting for the sufficiently motivated and intelligent psychopaths to pick up and orchestrate.

So again, sorry to bust your bubble. I could write volumes on this topic, but I don't feel like letting this degenerate into rambling anymore than it already has.