Comments Elsewhere

Micha:

The author explicitly structures his scenario as voluntary.

I hear that you don’t, legally speaking, have to sign up for a Social Security Number, either. The problem is just that, if you refuse to, there are a lot of things that the government will just happen to keep you from doing.

Suppose that the U.S. government gets into the business of producing biometric identification cards aimed (as the author explicitly suggests) especially at developing countries where the local regime doesn’t really have the resources to issue those kind of “hard” identification papers without help from richer and more efficiently organized states.

Who do you suppose would be the primary “customers” for a “service” like that? (1) Willing customers who just happen to want an absurdly detailed ID card for “security” in their day-to-day business, or (2) unwilling customers who are either directly or indirectly forced to get that absurdly detailed ID card because the regime in the country where they live now requires everybody to get this biometric ID card as part of its coercively imposed “security” procedures?

A “service” like this is sure to have “positive security implications” for the primary consumers of “security” technology today. But those are governments, not ordinary citizens, and the degree to which they are able to carry out their “security” schemes has little or no connection with positive outcomes for ordinary citizens’ safety or quality of life.

Simply replace “U.S. government” with “trusted third party institution”, like Visa or Mastercard.

Oh, come on, you know better than that. I may as well argue that government welfare is a great idea, because, hey, if you replace “U.S. government” with “voluntary mutual-aid societies,” then I’d be describing a voluntary and potentially valuable service.

Governments don’t have the same incentives, the same structure, or the same partners and allies as private organizations. Not surprisingly, even though Visa or Mastercard could in principle already be issuing “hard” global biometric identity cards like this, they aren’t, because it doesn’t pay to do so, if your incentives depend on voluntary customers, and are based on making money rather than on geopolitical power and “security.”

Either way, I don’t see how better identification is necessarily inimical to liberty.

It’s not. However, more relentless government surveillance is. And that’s the primary thing that any government-issued biometric ID scheme being put into effect for its “security implications” is going to facilitate.