1. United States
2. Calif.
3. Letter

Vote no on any legislation mandating digital IDs or age verification systems. These proposals create centralized points of failure that put millions of Americans at risk while handing more control to big tech companies. Sweden's recent breach shows exactly what happens when identity systems centralize. A hacker group called ByteToBreach posted source code stolen from CGI's Swedish division, including the codebase powering BankID logins for the Swedish Tax Agency. BankID serves 8.6 million people out of Sweden's 10 million population. When it went down during a DDoS attack last year, those 8.6 million people couldn't access banking, government services, or verify their identities online simultaneously. The leaked material includes source code, passwords, and encryption keys that reveal exactly how authentication flows work, giving attackers a roadmap to production systems. Digital ID and age verification laws don't protect children or empower parents. They force families to hand sensitive data to the same tech platforms we're told to worry about, creating databases that link government ID, online behavior, and personal information in one queryable system. When centralized identity fails, it fails at scale. Parents lose power when verification moves from the home to corporate servers. Vote no.