The logic is actually "That which I wish to control or destroy, I must first enumerate/name."
A Government that exists only to administer (and not control the populace), has no need to know who all it's citizen's are. Merely to know who is involved in the limited processes being administered.
Sadly, all common sense around that seems to have evaporated since 2001 in the U.S. It seems like only those of us left who experienced the pre-9/11 world are doing a terrible job at instilling a picture of a government that's not all "Big Brother is watching" in the younger generations. The gluttony of Law Enforcement and the IC for a Single Identification Number to unify and enumerate every flesh and blood person wandering around cannot be overstated.
In practice, all government departments in all countries have databases with primary key identifiers in them.
We can do this accurately and efficiently, or we can continue to insist on doing it inaccurately and inefficiently because of "Red Scare" propaganda.
You are proposing that you prefer your government to be slow, inefficient, inept, and vulnerable to fraud and corruption.
I prefer my government agencies to not waste my time, not confuse me with similarly named people, etc...
This is a real problem that occurs every day, versus the slippery-slope arguments that derive from anti-communist hysteria.
Here's a real situation: Identical twins with the same name, because "John Sr is the son of John Sr for ten generations, and he didn't want to give up the tradition just because he had twins." That's a real story from a public school system where the kids were living at the same address, attending the same school, were born on the same day, in the same hospital, etc...
How would you disambiguate them? You would start with... assigning... a... unique... number perhaps?
It's a fair trade off if your target KPI is having zero genocides enabled by extensive records-keeping.
The entire line of thought is straight up propaganda from weird Christians who have a really weird cult belief that some id number is the mark of the beast and saw a great opportunity to lie about the holocaust (plenty of jews were murdered using no better data than "Wilhelm says he saw them praying last Saturday").
You can see the same stupidity in the talking point from 2nd amendment maximalists that the jews were only genocided because they gave up rights to own guns, or something to that effect, as if a population experiencing genocide would have qualms about illegal firearms.
Yep. That's how. Now lets see what inevitably gets built once you do that.
Now do you that mapping to a Federal system, which maps that ID to a set of tables including a map to every other every other organization's ids relevant to that individual such that one can essentially completely hose someone via the "Sanction this individual in particular where (subquery). This system has already been built in the Financial sector, it's called OFAC. More advanced integrations are in progress. Look up "Fusion Centers".
Do I think that's a worthy trade in case that gets in the wrong hands? Fuck no.
Should those same systems be free to be "privately built and transacted for business purposes" in a way that utterly sidesteps prohibitions against the Government directly building that dataset themselves, resulting in 3rd party SaaS queries through Data Brokers? See LexisNexis, Palantir, or any of the Credit Bureaus or other data brokers. Also telecoms selling location data. Or automotive manufacturers feeding telematics to insurers or Law Enforcement.
Worthy trade for the risk? ?Hell no.
You can have a world where nightmare abuses of these types of systems are outright impossible, or you can have a world that's incrementally more efficient, but you must accept these abuses being realizable. That's an XOR there. There is no escaping it.
Certainty of abuse has probability 1. How do I know? Because I've been tempted to do as much before, and I know that I am an uncharacteristically extreme example of someone that thinks something through before committing to it, and it's only by doing so that I've managed to avoid implementing that very thing. 98% of people will not hold themselves to at least the the rigor I have. There are people far too pragmatic to be bothered by such things as ideals or edge cases; which is necessary to deal with when you're talking about enabling top down practicable social targeting systems. We are not special. It will not be different this time. Our nature is not such that we can safely discount these sorts of things.
The enemy is among us, and they are us. I don't fear communists. I fear the paperclip maximizing zealots among us who will sacrifice everything in pursuit of thrir goal. I've been one of them.
I will not subject those down the road to a working Panopticon. I will not build that lever. I'm sorry. I will consign you to a fate wherein you suffer from an occasional bureacratic mixup, but you will never once need worry that some madman is sitting on the button that causes you to lose access to everything instantly. That will allow a faceless bureaucracy to control your access in real time. To know your every move, all the time. I'd rather you be free. That you be unmanageable. That the mechanisms of external social coercion not be perfect. For without those spaces, there is no room for freedom. Only not currently having your chain jerked. Know that if ever you are subdued by the machinations of the technophile, it will not have been I that forged those chains.
Just because you can build something, doesn't mean you should.
Just because you can measure something, doesn't mean you should build the yardstick.
It does not follow that something you can't currently measure must have a measure built, and then as a consequence of it's measurability then be managed.
Those that seek power will beseech you to build these things for them. It is your job to see these things for what they are, and learn to be able to say "No."
