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> Multiple times throughout the hearing, Brazil’s Infraestrutura de Chaves Públicas system of citizen IDs through digital certificates came up as a potential mo
by eggpy 9y ago
> Multiple times throughout the hearing, Brazil’s Infraestrutura de Chaves Públicas system of citizen IDs through digital certificates came up as a potential model for the U.S. as it moves forward. In this model, a certificate lasts for three years at maximum and can be used to issue a digital signature much like written signatures are used now. Unlike its counterpart in the U.S., these identity accounts can be revoked and reissued easily through an established national protocol.
I believe most Americans are opposed to a national ID, so SSNs have been used as a (utterly terrible) workaround. Some reasoning for this, to quote an ACLU article on the subject[0], 'Former Senator Alan Cranston has described the national I.D. card as "a primary tool of totalitarian governments to restrict the freedom of their citizens." '
The Brazil solution mentioned seems pretty reasonable though. I like the built in expiration and ease of reissue. Anyone have experience with or thoughts about this sort of system?
[0] https://www.aclu.org/other/national-identification-cards-why-does-aclu-oppose-national-id-system https://www.aclu.org/other/national-identification-cards-why...
- Spooky23 9y agoIt would be incredibly expensive to implement. I personally would make a lot of money on it, but the complexities are almost unlimited. The GOP would never let it happen because it would make it too difficult to suppress black and poor voters by making registration unnecessary.
- AckSyn 9y agoStop spreading lies. An ID isn't about disenfranchisement.
- tpallarino 9y agoWait, I thought GOP was in support of voter ID to suppress voting?
- Spooky23 9y agoIf you replaced SSN with a universal ID, that would imply that anyone filing a tax return would need one. The purpose of voter ID laws is to suppress voting by poor people, especially African Americans, who lack ID because they do not drive, or have a difficult time meeting the standard of proof for getting an ID, or have difficulty going to the one DMV that supports their geography an hit away without a car. It’s the most recent of techniques used to suppress voting since the poll taxing and literacy tests of the reconstruction era. Unfortunately my comment wasn’t well-received, but that doesn’t take away from the reality. A federal ID, unencumbered by the bullshittery imposed in many states, would be opposed bitterly.
- Retra 9y agoThe idea that people have a single, unambiguous identity is fallacious, in my opinion. If you're interacting with people, you usually only need their identity for the purpose of that interaction. The main place it becomes critical seems to be when you have a system that is driven by number bias rather than consideration of reasoned, adaptive alternatives.
- solotronics 9y agohow do you stop fraud from people opening a new ID and taking out loans with it instead of their "main" ID ?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mLuby 9y agoWhat lender would trust a new id with no history?
- bhhaskin 9y agoHow would you get history if no one trusts an id with no history?
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_for_tat
- jeremyjh 9y agoThis is not a new problem. The solution is the same as it is today, you must build a history with small limit revolving lines, cosigners and guarantors.
- groby_b 9y agoSlowly. Ask anybody who immigrated to the US, it's a royal pain. (Especially since you have global brands - like e.g. Mastercard - incapable of referencing their data from outside the US). You start with a secured credit card for $200. Next, you buy a clunker of a car for all-cash. At that point, you have enough history to get a CC with $500-$1,000 limit. Now you pay everything through that CC. And make damn sure you're always 100% on time - a single slip costs you a lot of time setting up that history. After a year or two of that, you usually get a CC covering one or two months of income. Keep building. It's a really painful process.
- sooper 9y agoNew Zealand has RealMe (https://www.realme.govt.nz/ https://www.realme.govt.nz/) which is an opt-in system you can use to identify yourself when interacting with various government departments and other entities.
- djsumdog 9y agoRealMe is a shitty non-compliant SAML2 (not really) identity provider that's impossible to interact with correctly. I worked on a contract where RealMe was giving us different unique IDs for the same people. It's a joke and a piece of rubbish. It's from the government who brought you Novapay and it's a piece of shit. No one uses it to manage identities and you don't really need to because there are only 4 million people there anyway. Their problem set is much more manageable. Please never use RealMe as a real world example of anything done right. Please also never use RealMe if you can avoid it.
- toomanybeersies 9y agoI think I have 2 RealMe accounts, and they're linked to different services, I have no idea which ones though. I'm not really sure what's up with them. The only government service I really use online is the IRD, who don't even use RealMe, they have their own login system. NZTA don't even bother, and just require your drivers license number and version, which is useless security, I could change ownership of anybodies car, just to be a dick, or possibly even to steal a car. RealMe is a RealMess. I find it's usually easier to just ring up the relevant department that requires me to login to RealMe.
- averagewall 9y agoNew Zealand is a bit funny because people don't (or didn't) want a national identity system. There was public concern when photo drivers licenses were introduced because they might become a de-facto national ID card. The privacy commissioner (that's a thing) had this to say: "the proposal to oblige drivers to carry the licence at all times while driving would mean, in effect, ... provide ideal conditions for government agencies, police officers, retailers and other businesses, to ask for the card as standard identification in a variety of dealings unrelated to road safety." https://privacy.org.nz/news-and-publications/reports-to-parliament-and-government/land-transport-bill-photo-id-driver-licences/ https://privacy.org.nz/news-and-publications/reports-to-parl...
- bkeroack 9y ago> I believe most Americans are opposed to a national ID, so SSNs have been used as a (utterly terrible) workaround. The federal government was never intended to administer services or benefits directly to all US citizens. The US Constitution enumerates a very limited set of federal powers: defense, foreign policy and regulation of interstate commerce, none of which concerns the average citizen day to day. It was intended for state and local governments to directly serve the people in almost all circumstances. The New Deal was a terrible imposition of big government on the country and we're dealing with the cascade of problems and constitutional issues to this day, SSNs being a very visible example.
- Aloha 9y agoWhile you're right, and I dont think you ought to be downvoted, governments evolve.
- door 9y agoyeah it sucks how we dont let old, sick and poor people just die libertarianism is inhumane
- djrobstep 9y agoActually, Social Security is a terrific program which has done more to reduce and prevent poverty than any other government program ever. It is the US Constitution that is bad, by making entrenching dysfunction and hindering reform.
- Aloha 9y agoHow does the US Constitution entrench dysfunction and hinder reform?
- jack9 9y agoThere are a number of issues that contributed. Predominantly a lack of clarity on federal vs state power which stems from a combination unnecessarily high barriers to change (other countries tend to change their Constitutions rather frequently) and a lack of accountability (very long election cycles). The patchwork nomic-style lawmaking that leads to eventual entrenched dysfunction and resistance to reform was assured. The US will not likely last half as long as Rome. We're 1 economic collapse away from fractionating into new aggregations.
- mtgx 9y agoDigital certificates sound like a terrible idea. I would prefer a smart token/card with a PIN on it. And the government should not do anything stupid like try to put a GPS on it "for security purposes", which even if it was technically a good feature for that and not just another backdoor through which intelligence agencies can spy on everyone, it would kill the whole idea immediately.
- icebraining 9y agoA smart card is just a carrier for a digital certificate.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y agoSo, you would prefer that your legal obligations be determined by a privately manufactured black box?
- alphaalpha101 9y agoWhy would it be privately manufactured?
- kobeya 9y ago> I would prefer a smart token/card with a PIN on it. What do you think is inside the token?
- Qub3d 9y agoHere's a relevant pop science video by CGP Grey[0] that explains all the various problems with SSNs. My favorite part is the fact that until quite recently (2011) you could decrement or increment a given SSN by 1 and get another valid SSN, since they were sequential. [0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus
- goialoq 9y agoSSNs are 9 digits, which means that mathematically 1 of 3 SSNs must be valid
- MarkPNeyer 9y agoUnpacking this for others who scratched their heads like I did: There are 1 billion possible social security numbers. There are roughly 300 million people in the USA. So roughly 1/3 possible SSN’s is currently in use.
- andruby 9y agoDoes the US re-use previously issues SSN's when people die? With such a limited numeric space, they probably have to, right?
- akvadrako 9y agoYes, they do.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- djrogers 9y agoHaven’t had to yet - they’ve only been around since the ‘30s and we haven’t quite used them all up yet.
- icebraining 9y ago
- pfisch 9y agoHow would you know you were issuing the certificate to the right person though?
- felipelemos 9y agoThe same way you do with any other document.
- vadimberman 9y ago> Former Senator Alan Cranston has described the national I.D. card as "a primary tool of totalitarian governments to restrict the freedom of their citizens." Ugh. National IDs are common in Europe as well as other places where identity theft is mostly an exotic concept featured in the news about America. It's hard to call Belgium a totalitarian regime. Whereas in countries without national IDs, people are forced to provide personal details to scores of vendors big and small who use these details for their purposes and may lose them to online criminals. But hey, we are protected against a hypothetical tyranny.
- MrRadar 9y agoIn this context wouldn't the EU be a better entity to compare against the US federal government? In that sense the ID situation in the US is pretty much the same as in Europe (each member state issues its own IDs), except the US has an extra ID number at the federal level that was never even intended to be a federal ID number (and is consequently terrible at being that).
- yxhuvud 9y agoNo, at least some of the IDs in Europe is valid in all or most of EU. In Sweden, the ones given out by the police is valid in EU, while for example drivers licenses is not (as an ID. They are valid to drive with).
- Dylan16807 9y agoWhat do you mean? I can use my driver's license as an ID in any state.
- Symbiote 9y agoAn EU driving licence is only proof of being qualified to drive, not proof of residence or nationality. That makes it ok for some identity purposes (age, name) but not sufficient for crossing a national border. (I'm not sure this is relevant, but I'm explaining the situation here.)
- kobeya 9y agoThere are crypto solutions that could make his much more interesting, such as bling signers, identity based encryption, zero knowledge proofs, etc. Most of the downsides could be worked around, if we innovate a teal solution instead of something off the shelf.
- kobeya 9y agoBlind signers. But I do wonder what a bling signer would do... And “an ideal solution”. How long until we have semantic awareness in autocorrect?
- syshum 9y agoNational ID is the first step to https://www.aclu.org/ordering-pizza https://www.aclu.org/ordering-pizza
- dmihal 9y ago> most Americans are opposed to a national ID Easy solution: make the national ID optional, just like a passport. Let financial institutions decide whether they want to risk extending credit to anybody, or just people with secure national IDs.
- njarboe 9y agoThey could require the passport right now. Financial institutions want to loan money to everyone with low friction, if they think they will make a profit.
- ropeladder 9y agoIt's funny in light of all the "cars are freedom!" posts in the Bob Luntz post that is also up on the front page, but we DO effectively have a state-level ID system in the form of driver's licences.
- kelnos 9y agoCertainly national IDs are a feature of totalitarian regimes, but I don't see how they necessarily lead to one. Plenty of free societies in the world have national IDs and live quite democratically.
- alphaalpha101 9y agoNational IDs are a feature of totalitarian regimes in the same sense that liking dogs is a feature of dictators. Sure, it might be in some cases, but it's also a feature of lots of people that aren't dictators. The US is already a totalitarian state. Remember McCarthy?
- Avamander 9y agoEstonians seem to do kind-of fine. Ignoring the weak random number generation thing ofc.
- BoppreH 9y agoBrazilian here, currently attending the Brazilian Symposium on Computer Security, and today's speakers include the people behind this proposed national ID (it's not widespread yet). If you have any questions I can relay it to them directly.