Comment on YSK to get a passport in the US, you need to have access to information about your parents and most recent ex-spouse

stoy@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• unsettlinglymoist@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  As an American/Swedish dual citizen…

  I think I’ve only had to show mail to prove my address when first getting a driver license in a new state. So that’s a thing yes, but not very common.

  Unlike in Sweden, in the US you don’t register/update your address with the authorities when you move. It’s not that the US doesn’t have a “working database” for that – it’s just not a thing at all, there’s no population register like in Sweden.

  In Sweden you use your personnummer for identification, but you also have secure authentication methods like BankID that aren’t available in the US. Your personnummer is public information and you’ll provide it just about everywhere because there’s little risk to you.

  In the US we use our social security numbers for both identification and authentication. Because they’re used for authentication, they’re considered secret and we’ll only share them when strictly required for necessary services (like government agencies and banks). This is obviously really poor security and they weren’t originally intended to be used for authentication, but it is what it is.

  Swedish system is of course more efficient and more secure.

  source

  • stoy@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Thank you for clarifying this!

    The US badly needs a population database, however, I absolutely understand that with how the US government have abused and fooled their citizens in the past, there is a huge distrust of the government among Americans.

    source

    • MutilationWave@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yeah people won’t even fill out the census. Last time it was done most of the people I worked with said they wouldn’t fill it out.

      source
• Zedd00@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The US government has the information, but there’s no way for companies to sell you something if they used that data.

  It’s the same with US taxes. The IRS knows exactly how much you owe them each year. As a citizen, you cannot access that information. You have to fill out needlessly complicated forms to guess the correct amount of money to send them. If you guess wrong you can go to jail or be fined. To prevent this, you pay a company to fill out those forms. They don’t get access to the correct number either, but you can buy insurance from them so they’ll pay for your lawyer to defend you if you guess wrong.

  source
• MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Kind of

  The vast majority of the time we use our social security numbers as a personal ID number. Drivers licenses also will have unique numbers on them which you can query off of, so too do passports.

  By law, no one is required to have any of those three. People having a social security number is pretty common, but getting one of those is the easiest of the three.

  Because none of them are a legal requirement to be a citizen, each one has multiple document set requirements, and if you have the other two, the third is trivial to obtain.

  The documents you need if you’re not leveraging another form of ID are basically a set of documents that aren’t that difficult for your average person to get their own copies of but harder for some one else to forge and claim to be another person

  source
• Maggoty@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Americans are not fans of centralized information on the population. It doesn’t help that the corporate equivalent to Voldemort is trying to sell it as a means of “law and order”. Something every American understands is meant to screw with us. Literally every time we give the government a new database they abuse it. The most recent is connecting a medical database to immigration enforcement.

  So yeah. If we could stop electing people under the motto, “The Cruelty Is The Point”, then we could have nice things.

  source
• shalafi@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  The US is not only quit populous, our huge footprint and lack of government centralization causes a lot of stupid shit like using bills for proof of residence. Imagine tying 100s of thousands of databases together so the federal government can pull all info on a citizen.

  BTW, this is exactly what Palantir is accomplishing and we should be screaming about it.

  My wife had to sent utility bills with her name and our address on it to immigration to prove she didn’t marry for the green card and we’re actually living together. And don’t start me on our immigration system, totally and purposefully broken.

  source