It's worth considering that people were initially very resistant to the census, then to SSNs

I guess what this makes me think is that the census does what it does for a reason, and SSNs are non-universal numbers which were originally used to track people within the Social Security program but which I suppose has gotten way out of its original scope by being used as a government form of identification and is useful for keeping all your government shit together and for things like obtaining passports and driver's licenses.

So, yeah, there's potential for abuse with this system, but if I had to say what angers me so much about these sorts of arguments, it's the slippery slope idea.

Then again it's possible to argue that the census/SSN and now internet ID thing was a validation of the slippery slope idea all along, but seriously, nobody in the government has been alive that long (the census is OLD) and I'm predisposed to using Hanlon's razor: it's probably stupidity, not malice.

I mean, the government isn't a monolith, and neither is the FBI, the CIA, or the NSA, or whatever. Have you seen some of the leaked slide shows from the leaked data from the NSA? They look like they were put together by the kind of people I'd label 'douchebag'. Anyway, even high-ranking government officials are still people and it gives them more power than they actually have to react with this sort of abject fear.