I always remember the movie Brazil when I have to interact with a stupid cybernetic apparatus like every big company, where simple programs are the brain and low-paid humans are the actuators.
This is one of the obvious consequences of not having a national identity number assigned to everyone at birth, which exist in most developed countries, except for anglosphere, for some reason.
Objection to ID numbers as a concept aside, I don't think it actually solves the problem this author faced.
Fake identities are dime a dozen. It is not exactly hard for an illicit entity to just put some random ID numbers it bought off the dark web on its books. And now you have just made it even harder for the people who had their identities stolen to clear themselves. How do you convince some company drone doing sanction compliance that you didn't actually work for Sanction Circumvention Ltd when your ID number matches the one on their company's payroll files?
Not to mention the sanction list is full of foreigners. The American authorities compiling the list aren't going to know what's the national ID of a random Russian or Iranian guy running an import business. So what is going to happen if your name matches someone who's on the list with a blank ID field? Probably the same thing that happened to the author, I guess.
If they put an ID on a sanction list, there’s a possibility to verify it. They could verify that it actually belongs to the person they want to sanction before putting it on the list. Failing that, the actual person can prove that they don’t belong on the list by verifying their identity.
Verifying identity is a much simpler problem than establishing identity.
> If they put an ID on a sanction list, there’s a possibility to verify it
They didn't care to figure out if the Sean Byrne of County Sligo actually existed before putting the name on the list. I doubt they would bother verifying an ID number.
Plus, going back to my point about the list being full of foreigners, how do you verify the validity of a foreign ID number and address? Maybe Ireland is going to comply with a US request, but many other countries won't, and you are now back to square one.
in Egypt, every person is born with a universal national ID number , which is standardized everywhere here, but it created some problems, it became extremely valuable to attackers.
If leaked, it can be reused across completely different services ( and you can never change it under anycase )
Having the full name + national ID was enough to bypass verification and activate various services, and many people weren't tech savvy enough to realize how dangerous it was to share or leak that info
Identity numbers being abused is a consequence of them being misused. And as far as I can tell, this happens more often with american SSNs than anywhere with actual national identity numbers.
All that these numbers do is uniquely identify people. They aren't private. To actually prove your identity, you present your ID, passport, or a digital signature tied to that identity number.
You’re talking about different things. Sweden has personal identity numbers and they’re public information. It protects you from being mixed up with someone with the same name. Not from identity theft though.
When you renew your passport, the new one will have a new serial. Not matching a passport serial doesn't mean anything. Not matching a national identity number does.
A government may have entirely benign reasons for creating a comprehensive population database, but you cannot guarantee who will control that database later. You have to trust the people who control it, not only now, but at all times in the future, but history does not support that.
Nazi Germany and occupied forces used census data, municipal population registers, etc., to identify and track down targeted people. The United States, during World War II, used census information to assist in the removal and incarceration of citizens with Japanese, Italian, and German heritage. The Rwanda population database explicitly classified people as Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa. This became the mechanism to target Tutsi during the Rwandan genocide. In China today, these databases are used to surveil and imprison Uyghurs.
Those are examples of official policy turned to dark purposes. It did not even include malfeasance for malfeasance or criminality by individuals or cartels who somehow gain access.
A government won't give up on malicious acts just because it lacks accurate census. The United States does a lot more surveillance and oppression than EU countries that have national ID and mandatory ID documents.
The lack of a comprehensive population database only seems to hinder the actual useful civilian bureaucracy, not law enforcement, intelligence services, or ICE. The latter just grab anyone who looks brown enough.
In the US, where race is entirely defined by skin pigmentation and there's heavy segregation ("redlining") of living quarters, sure: databases aren't necessary. But in places where race is defined by heritage or culture, things which can be disguised by the targets of a regime, these databases are a vital part of any serious ethnic cleansing operation. I don't remember the statistic in IBM and the Holocaust that compares Jew survival rates in occupied countries with versus without digitised censuses, but the difference was stark.
Uh? The reason is that the constitution doesn't explicitly allow the federal gov to do it, so it's a state power.
It's not like you care about all the thing you enumerated, they literally ask you for your "race" when getting a driver's license, which is the defacto ID document anyways. You're installing flock cameras everywhere and gargling palantir's balls while they implement the surveillance state.
Yeah and that's exactly what shouldn't happen. Government's should not have a power to ask a private company for data under any circumstances and they should not make "race" a compulsory data to submit, so that you could exercise your rights.
Attaching numbers to people is unbelievably creepy. My identity is not a number. We recoil at the idea of having assigned and tattooed numbers on our bodies and I don't feel it's okay to do it, just so you could maybe avoid misidentification.
The one conflating the two isn't the author, but the state. A fixation on the state sanctioned representation of someone's identity instead of the actual, living person himself is exactly what caused TFA's author troubles.
Very few countries require you to carry an ID. Many countries require you to own one and keep it up to date, but don't care whether you carry it outside.
Also, I find the point kind of moot for the US where a driving license is essentially an ID card, you have to carry it to drive, and you have to drive to go anywhere in most places.
So, your name is also this sort of identifier. But an “identifier” is not an “identity” in the way you mean it. Sometimes words are used in multiple ways.
This has been going on for a long time. In the early 2000s I knew someone with the relatively common name Ian Smith who was routinely held up in airports because someone else with that name was on a watch list. I think in the end he managed to get some kind of stamp in his passport that officially said "not that Ian Smith", and it seems mad this isn't easier to resolve these days.
Mercury unblocked my accounts because their founder is a very kind man who bothered to verify what the document actually says rather than falling back to, "Computer says no." But everywhere else? De nada. Computer says no.
And it's not even me. It's a fuzzy match with someone in their 50s. Doesn't matter. Computer says no.
And I can't "get off the list" because it's not me who's on the list. The computer will always say no.
In the long run, I'll be fine. I think. But I'll pay $100k+ by the time it's over. These systems are being steadily expanded, as the dumbest incarnations of themselves. We've gone from Thin Thread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread to crappy fuzzy matches on shoddy data executed on with 0 diligence. It's the stupidest possible timeline.
I think many, many other people will be sharing our fate soon, which is partly why I've been writing about this slow rolling train wreck in motion in bits and pieces.
> How can this be the company started by Wozniak and Jobs ...
The same Jobs that routinely denied publicly that he was the parent of his daughter, even though he knew? The same Jobs that cheated Wozniak financially? The same Jobs that led to a change in legal legislation on how organ transplants work?
The world needs to move on from this marketing bs that he was somehow a "great" man who is morally solid and must be doing the right thing. Apple is precisely the company founded by Jobs.
Honestly the best thing to do might be to change your name at this point. I'm glad my name is not common, this kind of issue is going to only get worse in the future.
We managed to get given a drug dealer's former landline, and had to get it changed after strange calls in the middle of the night. Then our neighbours got the same number after about a year and had the same issue.
Given a US senator was "on" the post-9/11 no-fly list for the same stupid reason, merely making noise and getting the press invlolved isn't enough to fix the deeper problem.
That is trading one problem for another: when the name on your birth certificate doesn't match the name on your government issued ID, certain other government entities tend to deny you services.
This is the case for me - since the age of 4 or 5. I don’t live in the US but have lived and worked in 3 different countries and the only time it was an issue was getting married. Everything else - bank accounts, drivers license, residency permits, employer background checks, etc were no problem.
I would think that changing the last name only should be fine though, since up until somewhat recently, most women changed their last names when they got married, so most systems should be equipped to handle this.
It used to be very common for migrants to change their surnames, although less so now. There used to be a person who wrote about Scottish Lithuanians called John Millar, who was born as Jonas Stepšys. Noam Chomsky had said that his family's surname was substantially altered after they went to the USA.
There are tonnes of them. Especially Eastern Europeans and Jews. Italians sometimes too. Still happens in entertainment, since Steve Carell and Nicholas Cage's real names are more Italian sounding.
Hah. Cage changed his last name because he didn't want to be a "nepo-baby"... You should look up that Italian-sounding last name and see who it belongs to.
>The Robert Johnson they kept being confused with wasn’t a man named Robert Johnson. It was a known alias of someone convicted of plotting to bomb a Hindu temple and a cinema in Toronto
Also, sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads, so you gotta be careful.
Oh, the classic Tuttle <-> Buttle name confusion!
I always remember the movie Brazil when I have to interact with a stupid cybernetic apparatus like every big company, where simple programs are the brain and low-paid humans are the actuators.
This is one of the obvious consequences of not having a national identity number assigned to everyone at birth, which exist in most developed countries, except for anglosphere, for some reason.
Objection to ID numbers as a concept aside, I don't think it actually solves the problem this author faced.
Fake identities are dime a dozen. It is not exactly hard for an illicit entity to just put some random ID numbers it bought off the dark web on its books. And now you have just made it even harder for the people who had their identities stolen to clear themselves. How do you convince some company drone doing sanction compliance that you didn't actually work for Sanction Circumvention Ltd when your ID number matches the one on their company's payroll files?
Not to mention the sanction list is full of foreigners. The American authorities compiling the list aren't going to know what's the national ID of a random Russian or Iranian guy running an import business. So what is going to happen if your name matches someone who's on the list with a blank ID field? Probably the same thing that happened to the author, I guess.
If they put an ID on a sanction list, there’s a possibility to verify it. They could verify that it actually belongs to the person they want to sanction before putting it on the list. Failing that, the actual person can prove that they don’t belong on the list by verifying their identity.
Verifying identity is a much simpler problem than establishing identity.
> If they put an ID on a sanction list, there’s a possibility to verify it
They didn't care to figure out if the Sean Byrne of County Sligo actually existed before putting the name on the list. I doubt they would bother verifying an ID number.
Plus, going back to my point about the list being full of foreigners, how do you verify the validity of a foreign ID number and address? Maybe Ireland is going to comply with a US request, but many other countries won't, and you are now back to square one.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. As you said, Ireland might comply, which would’ve solved this particular issue.
in Egypt, every person is born with a universal national ID number , which is standardized everywhere here, but it created some problems, it became extremely valuable to attackers. If leaked, it can be reused across completely different services ( and you can never change it under anycase )
Having the full name + national ID was enough to bypass verification and activate various services, and many people weren't tech savvy enough to realize how dangerous it was to share or leak that info
Clearly it was the services that weren't tech-savvy using a non-changeable non-secret ID as some kind of authentication. Can't blame the users here.
This is the SSN in the US too though.
Its not as if it even helps since the numbers can be leaked and stolen and then abused & the situation ends up even worse since it is so centralised.
Identity numbers being abused is a consequence of them being misused. And as far as I can tell, this happens more often with american SSNs than anywhere with actual national identity numbers.
All that these numbers do is uniquely identify people. They aren't private. To actually prove your identity, you present your ID, passport, or a digital signature tied to that identity number.
The abuse only happens because US courts deemed a third party liable for a lender’s error/cost cutting in attempting to verify a borrower’s identity.
In most countries you cant do anything with a single number id of a person. Except ironically the US so youre doubly so off.
You’re talking about different things. Sweden has personal identity numbers and they’re public information. It protects you from being mixed up with someone with the same name. Not from identity theft though.
It helps. Period.
National ID numbers will not help with cross border situations like this.
Don't worry, I don't doubt it will be turned into an international system like phone numbers.
He has a passport with a number on it. Why isn't that sufficient? There are also multiple countries involved in this story.
When you renew your passport, the new one will have a new serial. Not matching a passport serial doesn't mean anything. Not matching a national identity number does.
for some reason.
The reason is there. It's no big secret. Pick up a history book.
Care to be a little less vague? Maybe a little more helpful?
A government may have entirely benign reasons for creating a comprehensive population database, but you cannot guarantee who will control that database later. You have to trust the people who control it, not only now, but at all times in the future, but history does not support that.
Nazi Germany and occupied forces used census data, municipal population registers, etc., to identify and track down targeted people. The United States, during World War II, used census information to assist in the removal and incarceration of citizens with Japanese, Italian, and German heritage. The Rwanda population database explicitly classified people as Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa. This became the mechanism to target Tutsi during the Rwandan genocide. In China today, these databases are used to surveil and imprison Uyghurs.
Those are examples of official policy turned to dark purposes. It did not even include malfeasance for malfeasance or criminality by individuals or cartels who somehow gain access.
A government won't give up on malicious acts just because it lacks accurate census. The United States does a lot more surveillance and oppression than EU countries that have national ID and mandatory ID documents.
The lack of a comprehensive population database only seems to hinder the actual useful civilian bureaucracy, not law enforcement, intelligence services, or ICE. The latter just grab anyone who looks brown enough.
In the US, where race is entirely defined by skin pigmentation and there's heavy segregation ("redlining") of living quarters, sure: databases aren't necessary. But in places where race is defined by heritage or culture, things which can be disguised by the targets of a regime, these databases are a vital part of any serious ethnic cleansing operation. I don't remember the statistic in IBM and the Holocaust that compares Jew survival rates in occupied countries with versus without digitised censuses, but the difference was stark.
Uh? The reason is that the constitution doesn't explicitly allow the federal gov to do it, so it's a state power.
It's not like you care about all the thing you enumerated, they literally ask you for your "race" when getting a driver's license, which is the defacto ID document anyways. You're installing flock cameras everywhere and gargling palantir's balls while they implement the surveillance state.
Yeah and that's exactly what shouldn't happen. Government's should not have a power to ask a private company for data under any circumstances and they should not make "race" a compulsory data to submit, so that you could exercise your rights.
Attaching numbers to people is unbelievably creepy. My identity is not a number. We recoil at the idea of having assigned and tattooed numbers on our bodies and I don't feel it's okay to do it, just so you could maybe avoid misidentification.
You are the one somehow conflating an identity card with your actual identity as a self, which seems extremely strange and spurious.
The one conflating the two isn't the author, but the state. A fixation on the state sanctioned representation of someone's identity instead of the actual, living person himself is exactly what caused TFA's author troubles.
Why did it need to go to tattooed numbers?
Also the implication that cultures and countries which have happily accepted id numbers are filled with non individualistic people is it?
> Why did it need to go to tattooed numbers
Many countries have laws about having to carry an ID on you all the time. Not as bad as a tattoo, but still not acceptable IMO.
> Also the implication that cultures and countries which have happily accepted id numbers are filled with non individualistic people is it?
Are we really gonna keep pretending there are no differences between cultures?
Very few countries require you to carry an ID. Many countries require you to own one and keep it up to date, but don't care whether you carry it outside.
Also, I find the point kind of moot for the US where a driving license is essentially an ID card, you have to carry it to drive, and you have to drive to go anywhere in most places.
So that you could not impersonate some other identity. Same in the spirit of carrying a plastic card, just without somebody touching you by force.
Either way you are branded forever.
Is your identity a string of letters? Don't be ridiculous.
Yes, if there is a set of strings that can uniquely identify you, and you can't have it removed, nor act like somebody else, it's your identity.
Even GDPR admits it
So, your name is also this sort of identifier. But an “identifier” is not an “identity” in the way you mean it. Sometimes words are used in multiple ways.
This has been going on for a long time. In the early 2000s I knew someone with the relatively common name Ian Smith who was routinely held up in airports because someone else with that name was on a watch list. I think in the end he managed to get some kind of stamp in his passport that officially said "not that Ian Smith", and it seems mad this isn't easier to resolve these days.
Background check softwares do this too.
Some of the low cost options now a days do not have human in the loop. They often miss obvious red flags or do too much false positives.
Something like this happened to me and it has cost me $20k+ over time, https://areoform.wordpress.com/2021/08/06/on-apples-expanded...
Mercury unblocked my accounts because their founder is a very kind man who bothered to verify what the document actually says rather than falling back to, "Computer says no." But everywhere else? De nada. Computer says no.
And it's not even me. It's a fuzzy match with someone in their 50s. Doesn't matter. Computer says no.
And I can't "get off the list" because it's not me who's on the list. The computer will always say no.
In the long run, I'll be fine. I think. But I'll pay $100k+ by the time it's over. These systems are being steadily expanded, as the dumbest incarnations of themselves. We've gone from Thin Thread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread to crappy fuzzy matches on shoddy data executed on with 0 diligence. It's the stupidest possible timeline.
I think many, many other people will be sharing our fate soon, which is partly why I've been writing about this slow rolling train wreck in motion in bits and pieces.
Terrorism went from "kill one person to scare millions" to "stir shit up to cripple the adversary with the costs of prevention".
"The evil, I can tolerate; but the stupidity..." -Hubert Farnsworth
How can you possibly afford to pay $100k for something like this? That’s so much money!
Can I afford to? No.
But will I have to? Yes.
You can't seriously match people on first and last name and claim "fully matched".
Think of how manny John Smiths there are?
How can this be the company started by Wozniak and Jobs ...
As a guy named Chris Smith, I can tell you, people do absolutely "match people on first and last name", and it causes me no end of trouble.
They do unfortunately. I know someone with a more unusual surname who was getting chased for the debt of someone with the same name. It happens.
You’re presenting this like a mistake born out of incompetence.
It isn’t. The institutions involved simply don’t care whether they are destroying the lives of random people. At all.
And why should they? They are completely unaccountable in practice, sometimes even in theory.
> How can this be the company started by Wozniak and Jobs ...
The same Jobs that routinely denied publicly that he was the parent of his daughter, even though he knew? The same Jobs that cheated Wozniak financially? The same Jobs that led to a change in legal legislation on how organ transplants work?
The world needs to move on from this marketing bs that he was somehow a "great" man who is morally solid and must be doing the right thing. Apple is precisely the company founded by Jobs.
Honestly the best thing to do might be to change your name at this point. I'm glad my name is not common, this kind of issue is going to only get worse in the future.
I get phone calls for a guy named Randy about his business. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make the phone calls stop.
The simplest solution is to change my phone number. But
a) why should I have to? it’s my number, dammit!
b) how many accounts have 2FA? if I changed my number, what if I miss updating one that’s important?
c) it could happen again
If I change my number, however, that is the simplest way to solve the problem. It’s just, do I want to?
We managed to get given a drug dealer's former landline, and had to get it changed after strange calls in the middle of the night. Then our neighbours got the same number after about a year and had the same issue.
No, the best thing to do is get the press involved and make Apple and ideally the US gov fix their incompetent handling of this.
Given a US senator was "on" the post-9/11 no-fly list for the same stupid reason, merely making noise and getting the press invlolved isn't enough to fix the deeper problem.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ted-kennedys-airport-adventure/
That is trading one problem for another: when the name on your birth certificate doesn't match the name on your government issued ID, certain other government entities tend to deny you services.
This is the case for me - since the age of 4 or 5. I don’t live in the US but have lived and worked in 3 different countries and the only time it was an issue was getting married. Everything else - bank accounts, drivers license, residency permits, employer background checks, etc were no problem.
I would think that changing the last name only should be fine though, since up until somewhat recently, most women changed their last names when they got married, so most systems should be equipped to handle this.
It used to be very common for migrants to change their surnames, although less so now. There used to be a person who wrote about Scottish Lithuanians called John Millar, who was born as Jonas Stepšys. Noam Chomsky had said that his family's surname was substantially altered after they went to the USA.
And older example: Warner brothers were born as Wonsal (or Wonskolaser), and they changed their names too (Hirsz became Harry, Aaron became Albert).
There are tonnes of them. Especially Eastern Europeans and Jews. Italians sometimes too. Still happens in entertainment, since Steve Carell and Nicholas Cage's real names are more Italian sounding.
Hah. Cage changed his last name because he didn't want to be a "nepo-baby"... You should look up that Italian-sounding last name and see who it belongs to.
What name do you suggest they choose, "Roger Thornhill" perhaps?
>The Robert Johnson they kept being confused with wasn’t a man named Robert Johnson. It was a known alias of someone convicted of plotting to bomb a Hindu temple and a cinema in Toronto
Also, sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads, so you gotta be careful.
Hahahahahaha
I appreciate the humor and musical knowledge
And I'm surprised that your joke didn't get more laughs or comments on HN. There is life outside of screens ;)
Seems fair - https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/firm-in-alleged-iran-t...