[sjducb]

Occasionally a bad government will come along.

When the bad government tries to do the bad things it will use the tools it has to hand.

If there is a national ID card system that is required for daily life then it is much easier for the baddies to take control of the population.

You can see this in WW2 when the Nazis took control. The Netherlands was twice as effective at killing Jews than France. This is because the Netherlands had good record keeping and already knew who the Jewish people were.

Hundreds of thousands of French Jews survived because France did not have a pre-existing population tracking system. The Nazis had to build one from scratch and that took time, giving French Jews time to run and hide.

This is why a friend of mine refused to tell our local supermarket that she wants kosher food.

[admissionsguy]

When I was growing up in Poland, I found it ironic that the national ID card system in Poland had been introduced by the Nazi occupants and then preserved out of convenience.

When I lived in the UK, I found the lack of ID cards liberating, especially associated with the lack of mandatory reporting to the central government of your every address.

I now live in Sweden and the degree of centralisation and digitisation is scary. The current and foreseeable governments are wonderful by Western standards, but isn't it inevitable that darker times will come at some point?

[yencabulator]

The thing that gets ridiculous is Americans trying to argue that storing (state, state_local_driver_license_number) is somehow different than storing (federal_driver_license_number).

[junto]

Fun fact. Post-Nazi Germany recognized that centralized records storage was one of the main reasons a rogue state had been able to target Jews, “undesirables, and bohemians (woke) during the holocaust.

As a result the modern ID card system and citizen registration is decentralized by design. When you move between two Bundeslände (states), your records are digitally transferred. They may not under any circumstances exist in two. They get held in a kind of digital holding state during the transfer.

Post-Nazi Germany is one of the most privacy conscious nations I’ve ever seen. Germans still largely insist of the privacy on cold hard cash. Credit card uptake is still vastly lower than neighboring countries. Privacy laws are stringent and well defined. Usage of dashcams and ring cameras are challenging to keep legal.

I trust the German state more with an ID card system than I would the UK for example. British citizens have long given up their rights meekly to be spied on by their government and the UK government has a poor record of safely delivering well designed large IT projects.

[Muromec]

>As a result the modern ID card system and citizen registration is decentralized by design. When you move between two Bundeslände (states), your records are digitally transferred. They may not under any circumstances exist in two. They get held in a kind of digital holding state during the transfer.

Fun fact. When the war in the East started, first thing russians did in certain places was to go to the district tax office, get the to the decentralized paper storage and ransom every person who can reasonably have about 30K USD to not sit in the torture basement, including some random IT shmuks reading this forum.

Then the same people had a huge pain in the ass to prove their identity to other part of split-brained system, since all the primary documents are stored in a province that government can't physically access and trust their word.

[racional]

When the war in the East started, first thing Russians did in certain places was to go to the district tax office, get the to the decentralized paper storage and ransom every person who can reasonably have about 30K USD to not sit in the torture basement, including some random IT shmucks reading this forum.

Not surprising -- do you know of any sources to read up on about this?

[sjducb]

> As a result the modern ID card system and citizen registration is decentralized by design. When you move between two Bundeslände (states), your records are digitally transferred. They may not under any circumstances exist in two.

This doesn’t sound like much of a protection to me. The rouge central government could just seize the records from the states, then do bad things.

Good thing that the AFD only gets about 20% of the vote. (The AFD is considered too problematic by most European fascists. Many prominent members of the AFD want to deport a million people from Germany and are openly sympathetic to actual Nazis)

[MaxPock]

They didn't even allow Google steet view for the longest time

[LeonidasXIV]

That is not true. There was an outrage where a low-quality high-readership newspaper claimed that the streetview data would be live and show potential thieves when you are home or not. Thus Google created a system to opt out of their homes to be recorded, which has lead to so many people opting out that Google decided not to record any more street view data past the initial few cities in Germany.