She was sixteen and SINless, Mona, and this older trick had told her once that that was a song, 'Sixteen and SINless'. Meant she hadn't been assigned a SIN when she was born, a Single Identification Number, so she'd grow up on the outside of most official systems. She knew that it was supposed to be possible to get a SIN, if you didn't have one, but it stood to reason you'd have to go into a building somewhere and talk to a suit, and that was a long way from Mona's idea of a good time or even normal behavior.
(Gibson: p. 64)
If anything, what I find most peculiar is the fact that it's precisely in those countries where there was no tradition of national ID that the governments are perhaps the ones who have gone the furthest making an excessive use of their powers in order to preserve national security: the United Kingdom allows for the Government to interfere with any sort of private communication, the United States does that and it also creates an international prison in a legal no-man's zone in Guantanamo Bay... Only a decade ago, these very same countries proudly emphasized their commitment to the liberties and pointed their fingers to continental Europe as an example of overgrown Governments gone wild. Ten years later, one could hardly believe the things most American and British commentators wrote about Germany or France when it comes to these issues. It's almost as if the pendulum swung from one extreme to the other. Let's just hope that, sooner or later, it stops somewhere in the wise and sensible middle.
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