America Keeps Rejecting an ID Card It Already Has

The SSN was never intended as a national ID. It was originally created alongside the Social Security Administration, to track what individuals put in and what they take out. People only received one upon becoming employed. Over time, the IRS realized that it could be used as a national ID, and adopted it for that purpose. They encouraged people to obtain one from a young age (even for their newborn children), and it was used to replace the original 'honor system' of 'How many children do you have?' tax discounts; now they'd need to register their child with a SSN. Companies eventually began piggybacking on the number as a national identifier (due to our lack of one), and voila. We're left with an awfully insecure identification system that shouldn't be an identification system for much in the first place. For anyone interested in more: [this video] , and the sources below the video.

This video does a great job explaining it: [this video] The summary is that the USA does not have an official national person identity number. The SSN is the closest approximation, so it is being (ab)used as one. This is despite that it is explicitly not designed for it and has some qualities which make it less suitable (the numbers are small and very predictable). In general, nearly every national-identity-system suffers from a contradiction between assigning identities and identifying. Where the number you get assigned is simultaneously your identity and a secret you use to establish your identity. There are initiatives to solve this using cryptography, but this is complicated by political attitudes towards privacy and government tracking. I dare say in the USA this is more pronounced due to both the problem and the political attitude against solutions being more pronounced.

This happened to a photography editor who sits in the cube across from me. He found out he had a ticket in Pittsburgh, a city he had never been to, when he tried to transfer his license to a new state. No lawyer would take the case either. He eventually went to an identity theft company, who took $400 and fixed the issue in three months. I use to work in Identity Management at a major university. A number of people came through our systems without SSNs. We had a complicated set of rules to make sure we didn't provision two accounts. We'd check if the names were reversed and we'd check both the month/date = date/month on the date of birth (people from other countries might enter it backwards without thinking about it). We even had rules for SSNs that were off by <2 digits with similar names. Every morning we'd have a set of "manual provisions" we'd have to stop and check. Occasionally duplicate accounts get created and we'd have to go through a big manual process of combining them and telling them "You need to use this account; forget about the other one. It no longer exists," and get their stuff synced across all AD domains (Universities typically have several). What surprises me about this article is the NYC system doesn't use the SSN (which is good in a sense, it should never be used as a identification number, see the latest GCP Greg: [this video] ). The idea of an identity and criminal record us that follows us digitally is a very new concept, one that didn't exist 150+ years

They are in fact not great IDs and the Social Security Administration asked very nicely for the rest of the country to not use them as a form of identification: [this video] A few reasons why SSNs are bad as IDs: 1. There are a number of situations where people will not have a SSN. 2. SSNs are "secrets" that need to be broadly shared to participate in many parts of business and government in the US. 3. SSNs lack many security and authentication mechanisms most forms of ID have (e.g. photo ID) There are folks in the US who rally against the idea of a national ID, but I've always thought it was a silly argument considering how pervasive and problematic SSNs are as a form of identification.