I think this is exactly what people are worried about. It's worth considering that people were initially very resistant to the census, then to SSNs. What seems outlandish to one generation seems perfectly normal to the next. These changes come slowly. IMO it's likely that at a future point, you will need to use a government-issued ID to use the internet. I expect that the rationale will be that anonymity isn't a requirement of free speech, only the protection of it is, and that storage of private data isn't a breach of privacy, only the examination of it is. Of course, I completely disagree with this rationale, but that's not to say that I don't find it likely to win. Obama obviously does not feel that people need or deserve extra-systemic protections from an abusive government.I don't think anyone's going to require an interbutt surfer license to access the internet in general or to use Hubski or Reddit. Is this what people are claiming is going to happen?
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.It's worth considering that people were initially very resistant to the census, then to SSNs
I absolutely agree. I highly doubt that the Obama Administration has entertained nefarious designs; unfortunately, that is an intrinsic part of the defense. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Just because the 'slippery slope' argument seems tired, or is often abused, that doesn't mean there aren't circumstances where it reasonably applies. We can have a well-meaning and bumbling bureaucracy walk us into a undesirable future just as easily as a cast of Machiavellian masterminds, if not with greater ease.I'm predisposed to using Hanlon's razor: it's probably stupidity, not malice.
Machiavellian masterminds are still pretty bumbling, if the arc of history is much of an indication.