It's been a lot longer than that. You may have forgotten to include the encroachments that you supported; you seem only to have started with the disaster under Biden.

For example, I never hear about how hard librarians* fought against "National Security Letters" after 9/11. How quaint it is now to imagine that people thought that there should be a fundamental right to be able to read freely and without disclosing what you read to anyone, especially governments?

Technology has only made this cheap to do at scale.

For people who may not be familiar, the government insisted on the right to go into libraries and get a list of the books you've read. Hell, it's basically just a "pen register**," and the culture not only gave up on resisting that this data be considered private, but forgot why anyone would have ever thought that way.

Now we're arguing about forced digital attestation, but we're barely arguing about digital ID anymore ("of course" we need that), or even remember that most people were against federal identification in the US. Federal identification failed at every point to gain any support; it was pushed hard and failed during the Clinton admin, finally passed with everything else of this nature after 9/11, and then it was resisted and ignored enough to force deadlines to be pushed farther and farther back - it's been 30 years of RealID at this point.

There's no evidence that the population ever supported federal ID. The idea was forced upon them, and they just waited a generation for people to forget that the government once didn't even know or care that many people existed. 30 years from now, it will probably be weird trivia that the census was done anonymously: "You mean you didn't have to sign it under penalty of perjury? What would be the point of the data if you didn't know who it belonged to?"

In 5 days, May 27, 2026, you'll have to pay a fee of $45 in order to get on a plane for not having Real ID.

It's so obvious that these claims of necessity are always just excuses for a power grab. British Labour, who spent decades supporting huge amounts of immigration and then calling everyone racist who thought it was too much, now like Trump uses the prevention of illegal immigration as a reason to impose digital ID on everyone. They're xenophobes when it comes to tracking everyone's movements, but xenophiles when they needed to lower wages. Vote Tory, then! Nope, they supported and oversaw every element of all of this. None of this stuff ever sees a ballot.

[*] https://www.library.illinois.edu/ala/2024/10/07/15-years-of-...

[**] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland

America's Expanding Domestic Surveillance