Interestingly, it was somewhat common for Americans to have their SSNs - our now de facto national ID scheme - tattooed prior to WWII.
Now, of course, we still have a de facto national ID scheme, but it is encumbered with a complex set of regulatory and security problems related to the odd legal insistence that it is not a national ID scheme despite all appearances.
> Interestingly, it was somewhat common for Americans to have their SSNs - our now de facto national ID scheme - tattooed prior to WWII.
I am extremely skeptical of this claim. Do you have any sources indicating anything other than a few isolated instances? Not only were tattoos in general distinctly unpopular for most of American history, the Social Security Act was not signed into law until 1935, just six years before the US's entry into WWII. Not only was it controversial (though popular) at the time (being one of the reasons for FDR's dramatic showdown with the Supreme Court, where he bullied them into letting him have his way by threatening to pack the court), the effect of the Social Security program wasn't realized for decades afterwards, and at the time, SSNs had no other purpose.
It's really difficult to say how common it was, but besides the few surviving photos of individuals who had done this, there are contemporaneous reports of tattoo artists seeing a significant increase in business after the passage of the social security act.
In newspaper archives, we can find references to this practice fairly frequently in the 1937-1940 time period, including headlines like "social security law boon to tattoo artists" and some fun ones like "victim is identified by social security tattoo."
Of course I'm sure the practice was relatively fringe, but newspaper archives show us that it was not, on the other hand, especially isolated. Newspapers report on the practice occurring locally in nearly every state (that existed at the time).
I also think you somewhat underestimate the popularity of tattoos at the time. While they were regarded as fringe and somewhat antisocial, they were widely available and particularly popular in some circles, as they are today.
I think young people don't really understand how quickly (and recently) tattoos went from something really fringe to something fairly socially acceptable. I remember cops occasionally harassing my (white) dad because he had a few forearm tattoos back in the early to mid 90s.
I concur, have never heard of this practice. It was extremely rare for anyone to have tattoos even sixty years ago.
SSNs were definitely less protected -- I remember mine showing up on my student ID in the 80s, on school rosters in the Navy in the 90s, etc. But tattoos? No.
It isn't odd at all. It's written right into the law.
The fact everyone ignores it isn't really an excuse. National ID #'s for many are the top of a slippery slope. Once you start going down that path, that's it. You opened the door to surveillance nirvana. It is part of the reason I'm not terribly fond of driver's licenses; as even those are so damn networked the police don't even need your insurance to know whether you're insured or any of a myriad of other things. In the absence of a network integration, these concessions to traceability were fine. Now, the potential for abuse is just way to prescient. It isn't even about State's rights to me. It's about keeping the abuse enabled by a highly organized bureaucracy in check.
If the government of the last couple decades hadn't continually escalated the erosion of civil/constitutionally guaranteed rights, I'd be more amenable to giving a bit of slack to the idea. That isn't how it has worked out though. Do I think a unique identifier can be used benevolently? Yes. Do I think the society I share my life with can be trusted with such a thing? Not demonstrably.
I would much rather have national coordination about some sort of ID, with strong privacy stipulations attached to it. I would like a national ID that cannot be used by local police, cannot be used by national investigative agencies, cannot be sold, cannot be vacuumed up by tech companies.
That'd be much preferable to me than leaving it to the states to preserve the privacy of the people they register, because they don't really.
The cat is already out of the bag, imho, if nothing else via ways of tracking phones, stuff online, social media, etc.
Realistically unless we become a society of digital luddites that isn't gonna, change, so I see the question as more of a technical / political one of how do we _manage_ both the risks and benefits of an increasingly connected world.
Not sure I'd be a fan of national ID's, but, I think the way you describe it paints an incomplete picture.
I painted the complete picture as far as my point of view was concerned. I don't tend to draw or characterize the picture beyond that (or even describe it out loud to anyone) more and more because I've seen people run off with descriptions of things I don't ever want to see and make businesses out of them. You can never take it back, as it were.
I do not under any circumstance care to make it any easier for yet another network integration of yet another database to be implemented by yet another private agency that as a condition of working with them forces users (including governments) to sign an NDA and briefs users on ways to respond to inquiries in ways that don't reveal the company's existence or mission, which is nothing less than tracking and making consumable every last bit of information on movements and actions by $THAT_GUY_IN_PARTICULAR because whether it is illegal, quasi-legal or otherwise, we have done horribly at staying on top of the edifice of executive power and keeping abuse of these capabilities under control. Again, demonstrably.
I don't want anyone's descendants to have to suffer that. Maybe the sibling posters are right, and the cat is already out of the bag... That doesn't mean I have to leave the door open for further increasing the efficiency and magnitude with which systematic civil right infringement and erosion can be executed.
It could change. If society showed even the least little indication that they realized they were going too far, and had a conscious recognition of just how destructive to the American way of life the lengths we've already gone to are; perhaps I could muster up enough faith and confidence in the system to become a supporter. That hasn't happened, and in fact, in cases of when things were implemented with controls, there is significant evidence that those controls aren't the most reliable over time. So... Yeah. Guess I'm a speed bump on other people's road to progress. I hate it. I never set out to be that. I want to stop feeling the way I currently do everyday. Nevertheless, no matter how much I sift through what is going for the merest sign of a reversal of the trend, I keep coming up empty.
We should mot endeavor to hand down a world where what liberties there were when we entered are foolishly squandered. That is all that seems to have happened in my lifetime. I may be powerless to stop it, but I'm not powerless in regards to ensuring the process isn't unintentionally accelerated by my hand.
Now, of course, we still have a de facto national ID scheme, but it is encumbered with a complex set of regulatory and security problems related to the odd legal insistence that it is not a national ID scheme despite all appearances.