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0 pointsspacebanana71y ago0 comments

> geriatrics had their brains pickled in decades of anti-communist propaganda and voted against it.

Isn’t the CCP’s behaviour still one of the best arguments against universal government ID?

0 comments

No. In fact the entire thing that makes Chinese surveillance so bad is that they don't need an ID to identify you

Universal government ID allows your identity to be very efficiently communicated between different public/private sector agencies.

That's how your local CCTV camera catching you jaywalking could communicate to your bank that you should be fined.

jiggawatts1y ago

I cannot fathom the error in logic that yields the conclusion that elected governments having a SQL table with a primary key constraint is somehow "the same thing" as the authoritarian abuses of power by a single-party communist dictatorship.

A number on a piece of paper is not the root cause of secret police brutally cracking down on dissidents!

spacebanana7OP1y ago

The possession of power and the misuse of power are of course different things.

But knowledge of the full population is particularly corrosive kind of power. It can reveal negative information - one can query for all people without a donation to political party, for example.

jiggawatts1y ago

Only if that data is in the same table.

The primary key is just a number, and tells you nothing other than perhaps roughly when you were born (if it is sequentially allocated).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

arlort1y ago

No. In fact the entire thing that makes Chinese surveillance so bad is that they don't need an ID to identify you

spacebanana7OP1y ago

Universal government ID allows your identity to be very efficiently communicated between different public/private sector agencies.

That's how your local CCTV camera catching you jaywalking could communicate to your bank that you should be fined.

jiggawatts1y ago

A number on a piece of paper is not the root cause of secret police brutally cracking down on dissidents!

spacebanana7OP1y ago

The possession of power and the misuse of power are of course different things.

But knowledge of the full population is particularly corrosive kind of power. It can reveal negative information - one can query for all people without a donation to political party, for example.

jiggawatts1y ago

Only if that data is in the same table.

The primary key is just a number, and tells you nothing other than perhaps roughly when you were born (if it is sequentially allocated).

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse