[corrral]

I'd be more sympathetic to this argument if all that info weren't a couple subpoenas or search-warrants away at most—in fact, the government can often just pay for access to these things, usually with the implicit threat that if access isn't granted at a reasonable rate, the business may find itself in some trouble. Like, if we banned private parties from collecting tons of info about us, then maybe that concern would have some merit, but we don't, so it doesn't.

Point is, they don't need a national ID to pin you to some cell phone records that place you at location X at time Y, to get your CC usage data, to find out pretty much anything they like, to connect that to a license plate, to snag toll and other photo records of the vehicle from various sources, et c., and the only reason there are any restrictions whatsoever on that ability isn't because we don't have a national ID, but because we're not yet living under a tyranny. Difficulty IDing people isn't the limiting factor.

The public-private hybrid ID we have now is terrible and also carries all the same risks under tyranny as a national ID, which is at least not-terrible.

It's not like having a national ID would mean all the spying-data companies collect on us would automatically be shared with the government—more than it already is, anyway. It'd be the same as now, except with fewer ID-related problems for people.

[0xbadcafebee]

Yes, the government can trace people right now, if people are not protecting their identity. Because there is no ubiquitous ID, it is still possible for you to protect your identity in almost every part of society. But that possibility will rapidly disappear when a ubiquitous ID arrives.

The difference between rounding up people or not is often just whether it is logistically feasible. Right now, even if they collect every kind of data from every business, it would be a nightmare to attempt to collate it all, because it comes in so many sources with so many differing fields that may be out of date or inaccurate or wrong and would have to be normalized etc etc etc. Impractical to do on a very large scale. Except when there's a single identifier they could look for, which would completely solve the problem for them, and make it easy to round people up.

Companies that sell data to the government without the consent of the public is a huge problem we need to deal with, for obvious constitutional reasons (4th amendment).