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0 pointsTerr_1y ago0 comments

I dimly recall some sci-fi quantum-technobabble book where a character is reminiscing that a collapsed government's most important duties were (A) identity and (B) official timekeeping.

The US Federal Constitution, back in 1787, immediately authorized a government-run postal service. If a similar scenario was echoed today, I think it would/should contain a government-run identity service.

Governments already have a compelling interest to identify people for the purposes of the legal system, property ownership, etc. With all that happening anyway, might as well have an API that allows for attestation and Single-Sign-On.

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P.S.: Not having it isn't really an option, since it's a void that will still get filled, just differently... Either with a hodgepodge of half-broken systems, or an abusive private monopoly, and no accountability or good appeals process.

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space_fountain1y ago

Obama briefly pitched the idea of this. A lot of people worried that the government providing services with the ability to verify identities would kill anomenlty online and it died.

pphysch1y ago

And yet anonymity/privacy is already dead for the average consumer, and we don't get to benefit from a public, reputable SSO service...

Terr_OP1y ago

For example, the IRS's free online filing thingy this year involves a third-party private company doing the ID checking and proprietary facial recognition database shit.

Hell, they didn't even white-label it behind a .gov domain and UI, which means they're training taxpayers to fall for phishing scams by disclosing their most sensitive data to any dang company with a spiffy web page and plausible-sounding domain name and a "Trusted By The IRS!" image sticker.

akira25011y ago

> a government-run identity service.

Sponsored and standardized, maybe, /run/ definitely not.

These entities love creating things like "No Fly Lists" I can only imagine what their greedy little hands would do with the authority to strip one of the ability prove their identity.

krapp1y ago

I wanted to step in and make fun of the Mark of the Beast people and paranoid gun owners who always freak out about things like this but then I considered what half the country would do if they had control over the immutable legal identities of gay and transgendered people, and I realize they might actually have a point.

It's not that a national identity service is a bad idea, it's a good idea and the US should have it, like it should have nationalized healthcare, education, UBI and gun control that's actually effective. It's that the United States government specifically can't be trusted to implement it at any level and in any way that won't lead to undesirables in mass graves. We just can't have nice things here.

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