national security can detract from a longstanding, primary function of this aspect of population data collection: to serve as a public health tool.664 The National Research Council report notes that, “security may become so tight and participation sufficiently strained that it may be more difficult to move the system into the kind of social, public health surveillance system that is needed for detection of early disease or other health incidents.”665 By 2009, the birth registration process in the U.S. generated 60 unique data points on every birth, mostly covering data used for public health purposes, going beyond the basic information needed for civil registration purposes. (Canada, by contrast, collects just four: name, sex, and date and place of birth).666 Because birth certificates are breeder documents for identity verification purposes and serve as primary evidence of citizenship, the localized nature of the U.S. civil registration and documentation system will continue to face the strains of serving a national security function alongside its traditional role as a social security and public health tool. An increasingly centralized and securitized civil registration system in the United States would operate much like the passport system described in this section, including collective imputation of fraudulent behavior to members of specific racial or national groups. Experts in civil registration and national statistics currently confronting the need to maintain accessibility of vital statistics and breeder documents while improving the security of these documents generally agree on two key recommendations. These are to increase incrementally the uniformity of documents issued by local entities, and to ensure that the matching of death and birth records occurs accurately and more rapidly.667 Fraud prevention is the main technical justification for most of the measures discussed in this report. That is, of course, an important aim—but it cannot be used as a blank check. Recent allegations of massive fraud in the voter lists of the United States (such as the president’s abandoned election integrity commission668) have been criticized as elaborate and expensive hunts for “needles out of the haystack.”669 These election-related policy initiatives affected millions of Americans and made headlines. Yet the persistent assertions that U.S. foundational identification registries are illegitimate or unreliable are just as destructive as voter fraud allegations or the racist invective hurled from the president’s bully pulpit. More troubling still is the fact that for both denaturalizations and passport denial and revocation, measures are being applied retroactively spanning decades, with no fixed limits. In the case of voter fraud prevention measures, recourse to courts is relatively straightforward. But as the Technical Roadmap section above reveals, this is decidedly not the case when doubts arise as to an individual’s entitlement to citizenship in the first place. 148 UNMAKING AMERICANS