[pp.int.general] 120 Days Left for Utah in the USA

[Ray Jenson]

Amelia Andersdotter wrote:
>>  4) The signer's full personal ID number (like, mine is 720121-4819: 1972,
>> January, 21, 481st baby born on that date, 9 as a checksum digit)
>>
>>  The item in (4) is like a turbocharged SSN on steroids. Any data anywhere
>> is tied to that number and not your name - be it data in governmental,
>> corporate, medical or banking. And the number is present on every ID card --
>> identities are usually checked against photo and personal number, not photo
>> and name.

This is what we've successfully fought in the United States with the
advent of the RealID system, because we maintain an implied right to
privacy under the first amendment to our national constitution.

>>  Outside of our personal sphere, as when dealing with authorities, banks and
>> hospitals, we are numbers and not names. If you guys think you have it bad
>> with the Real ID proposals and people being careless with SSNs, you have no
>> idea where the slope leads.

My point was more that I'm hope we don't get there, and can once again
be the bar against which all others are measured. We used to be. Perhaps
it can be again.

Thanks, Rick!

> What is really stupid is of course that the state still cares about
> you having a name, or what you're called. I couldn't, for instance,
> change my surname to Andersson (despite this being strikingly similar
> to my current name which merely denotes me as Anders' daughter
> instead).

Uh oh, Amelia... you've just triggered my righteous indignation...
prepare for a barrage of words. In other words: LONG REPLY COMING. (Did
you expect any different from me?)

The state cares only because the tradition of changing paperwork demands
it. Changing information on paperwork used to mean changing it not only
in all branch offices of the government, but in the central offices as
well--a task which we'd balk at today, if we were dealing with actual
paper. People also don't yet trust that electronic media might offer
greater protection of privacy because people working for the government
today can still remember the days when a computer failure potentially
meant hundreds of hours of productivity lost due to computer downtime,
not to mention potentially lost records because not everyone understood
the concept of redundancy. Therefore, computers are not to be trusted.

And for this reason, I'm almost positive that paper records are still
kept. Therefore, changing your name is something that is still a fairly
big deal, though not as momentous an occasion as it used to be.

> Personally, I think it would be better if to the state we were only
> numbers. Discrimination from the state wouldn't be possible neither
> due to gender nor ethnic origins and everyone could go by whatever
> name they liked rather than what they were registered as.

I disagree that discrimination wouldn't be possible. You may want to
watch a few old George Lucas films ("THX-1138" comes to mind) to see
what I mean. They still roadblock everyone, and there are still
challenges to the individual to prove identity. I think that social
numbers are a waste of time in the modern day, especially where access
to information within the governments of the world is already ubiquitous
to the point that your identity can be verified simply by looking up a
person's photo on a computer network, and having the correct name helps.
A social number isn't really necessary, because all of the other
information the government stores about you can be easily verified by you.

No matter what system is in use, people will be discriminated against.
Such discrimination is not done by governments, as a general rule, but
by the person who interacts with the individual at the end. The
governments tend to strongly prohibit such things, so it's not
believable to them that anyone would still discriminate in this day and
age. But it does happen.

And then there are those who must endure claims of discrimination where
none has actually occurred. Generally speaking, claims of discrimination
in these cases are made because someone didn't get their way.

In either case, the situation is not resolved simply by giving someone
their way; instead, it creates a new roadblock to the public so that the
agency can prove it's not continuing to discriminate as it has in the
past. Here in the US, we call this the "Lowest Common Denominator Rule",
which is to say that if there's a problem, the solution that serves the
fewest people is enacted in order to prove that minorities are not
discriminated against. It's a cynical viewpoint, but an accurate one in
many cases.

Governments no longer need to see gender, age, nationality, etc., in
order to discriminate. All they need to see is the person standing in
front of them. Often, such discrimination goes unnoticed because people
are ignorant of one detail or another regarding policy, law, or history.
Things would be much more simple if governments operated transparently
enough that the average citizen could see what's stored in their file,
and even challenge authorities to prove some of the things that are in
there (for example, I discovered that in my file, I'm listed as a
suspect in some crimes I was never charged with, questioned about, or
even knew was happening, simply due to whom I was associated with... in
spite of our guaranteed right in this country to associate freely with
whomever we'd like to).

So long as humans are kept from appearing human by numbers, little will
change. People must learn to treat one another with respect, and so long
as we are all just numbers this can never happen.

But I do agree that you should be allowed to call yourself anything you
want to, especially something as innocuous as gender identity based on
last name. Were we going by the same system of patronymic lines that my
ancestors in Sweden used, I would be Davidsson, and my sister
Davidsdotter. People would have a difficult time believing we were
related (and often, they already did comment that we didn't look enough
alike to qualify as siblings). But even with our last names being set in
stone by the second generation here (Jens Rasmusson named his children
"Jensson" which was misspelt by the census-taker, who then informed Jens
that all future generations would also be named Jenson), people still
discriminated against us based on gender, income level, heritage, and a
variety of other reasons. My sister changed her name when she married,
and found that when people didn't know whom they were dealing with, the
discrimination level increased.

Her job was even displeased that she changed her name, and so denied her
an opportunity for advancement that had been previously offered to her.
This kind of discrimination is still illegal here, so she sued, but lost
because she had no other proof of discrimination anywhere in the
company. And when she showed up to collect her things after being fired
for suing the company, they all said: "Oh, so YOU are this other person!
Sorry, I thought you were someone else."

Being a number increases that discrimination by placing a level of
separation between the government and the people. It dehumanizes a
population, which increases the opportunity to treat them as something
other than human. Being a number is not the way to get the government to
back off on the name thing.

But you know, the whole number thing... not really a great idea to begin
with. Numbers are good for anonymity, but too much of anything isn't
necessarily good. In the case of government, the restoration of personal
dignity requires that we become human again. And this means we must
begin to treat others as human, with understanding and compassion for
their plight, since they usually are restricted by policy. The solution
is to allow people to do what they can for one another, rather than
restricting them and saying it's wrong to help people who obviously need
it to get to the right help that they need.

In one example, local officials were censured for assisting a woman who
had been repeatedly refused welfare assistance on the basis that she
made too much money. They directed her to the donation centers where
food could be obtained, rather than continuing to allow her to be
stopped by the system. They were censured because their assistance
stopped her from continuing to ask for food stamps--solving the problem
by circumventing the system. The situation was that her husband had
recently died, leaving her and her family impoverished until the large
check from his life insurance arrived, and it had been lost in the mail.
For two months, she had tried to get them to issue another, and had
resorted to needing welfare assistance to feed her daughter. These state
officials saw that she was obviously in need of the food, saw her
inability to cope with the situation, and so they did what they could to
solve it. She got the food, and within a few days the rather sizeable
check arrived, which the state had been counting against her even though
she hadn't yet received it. Because she no longer needed the state's
help, she dropped her case, and the employees were portrayed as somehow
"bucking the system" by their superiors. As a result of this, the
employees were fired, successfully sued the state, and today (15 years
later) there is now an emergency food stamps disbursement program that
issues welfare within 7 days, as well as a referral system to the
charities who give out needed items like food and soap.

But it took state employees to assert that she was a human being who has
rights under the law, and that if she and her daughter starved then
those rights would be meaningless. The lesson here is that without
taking humanity into account, any system that serves humans cannot make
their claims valid.

And yes, this leads to the IFPI and RIAA... since they claim to serve
artists and yet rip off both artists and consumers. This is the mindset
that we're against. It exists in government, it exists in businesses,
and it exists in terrorist organizations. They have removed themselves
from the equation in order to remain objective, and instead have turned
people into objects--resources to be exploited, instead of real,
functioning people. The people of this mindset believe that more
separation is the answer, not less. Our position might be strengthened
if we go for more humanization rather than separating people from
government on the grounds of discrimination.

Just my two cents' worth... okay, so it was more like a nickel. Sorry,
longer than I had anticipated, but I'm not even going to bother with
spell checking this... I've spent an hour on it already.

Hope this clarifies at least my own position, and I hope it serves you well.

-Ray