> So I hand you a piece of paper saying I'm so and so and you just take it on face value? Why do we even have photos on licenses and passports?

We have photos on licenses and passports so that if you're an ethnic Russian in your 20s and you present an ID with a photo of a black man in his 70s, we can be confident that this is not you.

If you're an ethnic Russian in your 20s and there is another ethnic Russian in their 20s on some kind of list, that is very much not conclusive proof that you're them, because there could be any number of people who look similar enough to each other to cause a false positive for both a person looking at an ID and a computer vision system.