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If you want to travel you have to accept that you need to present something to the destination that they recognise. If in the US you have (let us say) 50 types of driving license, you provide not just an administrative overhead, but you also provide 50 opportunities for forgery. As much as anything it takes experience to spot a fake, this experience is diluted 50 (or however many) times. How often does someone in Texas see an Alaskan driver's license and so on?
Whilst i agree that one standard document does not mean it is harder to fake, it makes it easier to learn and to spot fakes. Also, as technology improves it is easier to roll out updated ID cards / passports etc if they are standardised. Because you are going from only one old type, to one new type and the timescales are shorter too.
Also, having centralised databases reduces the need for people to ship data extracts to each other and thus reduces the opportunity for data to go missing in the post (i.e. like the HMRC fiasco). Data security becomes permissions for thousands of people to access one database rather than for thousands of people to access hundreds of databases.
If you ship data it also loses its security because by the very nature of the shipping process you are letting the data go out of a controlled area. Sure it might be encrypted etc, but at some point it will be decrypted for use, and probably printed out and left for the cleaner to dispose of in some small contract IT company. Something that would never actually happen in a data owner's premesis.
I work in financial IT and one of the pains in the arse of the world of finance is ID - because there is no real standard you have to offer new customers options as to the ID they can use. All of the choices are rubbish apart from a passport (proof of ID only, not address). Yet one of the things customers are most concerned about is ID theft - so which do you want?
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