It's meaningful to a bored police officer in a less-than-democratic country who has nothing better to do than make my life annoying.
I'm not denying that it's security theater or claiming that it's more meaningful; I'm saying solely that there are physical expectations that are going to be very hard to shake once you go off the beaten path.
> It's meaningful to a bored police officer in a less-than-democratic country who has nothing better to do than make my life annoying.
I've found that money is more meaningful than anything else to those bored officers. Either they don't actually care that much about your documents, or if they do, they're simply looking for a bribe. At least that's been my experience at out of the way border crossings in southern Africa.
The most ridiculous experience I had was crossing into Zimbabwe with my 11 year old son. The officer wanted to see his birth certificate, which was still in the car that had already been driven across the border. So I had to leave the building, walk across the border, which nobody batted an eye at, get the document, walk back across the border, re-enter the building, and then present the document to the officer who didn't even look at it before letting me proceed to leave the building and walk across the border once again.
I’m curious about your experience with this. A friend did a big tour through Africa about 15 years ago and when he got home he commented that you had to be careful to right-size your bribe: if your bribe was missing it not big enough, you’d get hassled about paperwork or maybe have to pay a “fine” or “document processing fee” to make up for it; if your bribe was too big, though, then you and the people you were travelling with would be subject to intense scrutiny. From what I recall about $5 USD was about right and $20 USD could result in the contents of your suitcase getting dumped in the dirt and very thoroughly rummaged through.
I took 'could possibly' + reference to cell service to mean that there is some sort of technical/infrastructural limitation. If your point is that the world is big and any effort to do this would take a long, long time to fully penetrate beyond a few highly developed Western countries, then I definitely agree.
I think things generally start off as experiments in first world countries then trickle down eventually to third world countries. That's just the reality. 20 years ago not everything could be digitized because internet/smartphone access isn't widespread, but now more or less every single person on the planet has some sort of internet access. Things change eventually, they gotta start somewhere.
I'm not denying that it's security theater or claiming that it's more meaningful; I'm saying solely that there are physical expectations that are going to be very hard to shake once you go off the beaten path.