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Easy! First, let's inroduce a national artifact that everyone "should" have. Next, let's add penalty modifiers to civilian life for not carrying said artifact. Finally, since this isn't legally mandated (nor guaranteed), start imposing conditions for revokation.
I get that "let's not turn into Europe" is a thing, but there's at least one New World nation that has a wide variety of ID cards (from various levels of government) and doesn't have a problem with this.
Canada doesn't have a national ID card (the SIN doesn't really qualify, nor does the birth certificate or the passport), thus not being able to answer "papers, please" isn't a crime here. None of the various government-issued IDs really have anything to do with biometrics, either, besides a general description of your person (including whether you're human or subhuman, useful when it isn't physically obvious, and lots of these ID cards are issued to subhumans for a variety of reasons anyway).
When you go to deal with the Federal government (for instance, when voting), Provincial IDs are acceptable.
It doesn't, and shouldn't, need to be anything fancier than that. Forging these cards generally isn't a problem since the advent of cellular networks and general anti-forging techniques, and the biggest market for these cards is subhumans who require an ID stating they're a real human being anyway.
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This argument proves too much. It’s not an argument specifically against federal ID cards, but against any and all ID cards, including state issued ones. Given that none of this is a problem with state issued IDs, I don’t find this vision very likely.
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