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Is this just because you don't trust the government not to use your secret key for nefarious purposes? Because if that's the case I feel like you wouldn't parti
by j2kun 10y ago
Is this just because you don't trust the government not to use your secret key for nefarious purposes? Because if that's the case I feel like you wouldn't participate in the civic system at all... Like forget signing your vote you just wouldn't vote.
- shshhdhs 10y agoI think OP is just saying that non-repudiation is a really important component for using key pairs, and so key pairs should be generated by the owner.
- lisper 10y ago> Is this just because you don't trust the government not to use your secret key for nefarious purposes? That too. But mainly it's because I don't trust the government (or anyone else for that matter) to keep my secret key secret.
- j2kun 10y agoBut you trust them to keep your vote secret, you trust them to keep national secrets secret, etc. I get that this is a big single point of failure that would be really difficult to fix if it was leaked. But the general default trust in the government to not, e.g, leak your SSN or vote... if you don't have that then the whole conversation is a nonstarter.
- lisper 10y agoActually, no, I generally do not trust the government to keep secrets. That is why I would be very upset if my ballot had my name on it. As for SSN's, they were never intended to be secret, and using them as an authenticator is a Really Bad Idea (not that that stops anyone). But anyone who wanted to know my SSN could find it easily. Defense secrets are a little different. It's not so much that I trust the government to keep them as that I believe that the government is incentivized to keep them because that advances the government's interests. But even then there are exceptions when the stakes are high, c.f. Ed Snowden.