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One area the US government could really make a difference in cyber security is making identify theft more difficult. Currently all you have to do to defraud ban

One area the US government could really make a difference in cyber security is making identify theft more difficult. Currently all you have to do to defraud banks is get your hands on some government issued numbers (social security numbers and driver licenses). If the government created an identify system that was no so easy to impersonate, some types of hacking and data leaks would not longer cause problems to the public.

mc32 5y ago
Given the push to have vaccination passports and people not pushing back hard on that aspect of privacy, probably pushing through a digital national ID might be as ripe as it’s ever going to be.
- mariojv 5y ago
  I think a regular national ID was attempted under the Obama administration but failed due to pushback, if I'm remembering correctly. The closest we got was Real ID, passed in 2005, which is barely being implemented fully now, over 15 years later. It makes me wonder how long it would take a true national ID system with digital verification, maybe something similar to Estonia's, to take to actually implement. It would have to be something not left to each state to handle, or it'd suffer the length and per-state disparities of Real ID.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > I think a regular national ID was attempted under the Obama administration but failed due to pushback, if I'm remembering correctly. Not really. There was some discussion of it during the period of the Bush Administration which turned into Real ID (2005 was well before Obama was elected), but it's a stretch to call even that, much less any murmurings during the Obama Administration, an “attempt”. > It makes me wonder how long it would take a true national ID system with digital verification If you mean a mandatory one, mandatory ID faces Constitutional issues that are central to the US conception of liberty, so probably a collapse of the Constitutional order. If you mean available standardized digital ID with digital verification, well, TSA had an RFI that closed in June preparatory to a rulemaking on adding digital ID, including digital verification, standards into the Real ID standards, because a number of states have digital ID efforts and there is a demand for them to qualify as Real IDs, because of the uses for which Real IDs already are (and the more that thet will be in the next couple years) mandated for l.
supertrope 5y ago
Even more fundamental than national ID or PKI is incentives. If the burden of proof is clearly on the creditor, they will very quickly tighten up their anti-fraud measures. The current equilibrium of creditors being able to burden random people with the cost of proving they're not responsible for fraudulent loans is Kafkaesque.
- supertrope 5y ago
  For many years retail stores didn't care about stolen credit card information being used to buy gift cards. The banking sector ate those fraud losses. Once the payment card oligopoly shifted the liability onto merchants, retailers had to eat way more fraud. Retailers immediately took down gift card displays, rushed to upgrade to chip terminals, and when they put the displays back they stopped selling $500 cards.
olivermarks 5y ago
I'd be a lot more interested in an id system that was controlled by the individual rights holder: a verified system granting or revoking access to their data. Individuals have far more incentive to protect their data than state apparatus.
- judge2020 5y ago
  login.gov would be great for this, with the obvious caveat being that it ties a persistent user identifier to sites you login with. Maybe there could be two login flows - one that generates a unique pseudo-identity for each service, and another that actually beams over your PII for identity verification purposes.
  - olivermarks 5y ago
    I'd really like to see a data permissions system that was outside government controls, no idea how that could happen though, definitely not globalist corporate controlled

mc32 5y ago

Given the push to have vaccination passports and people not pushing back hard on that aspect of privacy, probably pushing through a digital national ID might be as ripe as it’s ever going to be.

mariojv 5y ago
I think a regular national ID was attempted under the Obama administration but failed due to pushback, if I'm remembering correctly. The closest we got was Real ID, passed in 2005, which is barely being implemented fully now, over 15 years later. It makes me wonder how long it would take a true national ID system with digital verification, maybe something similar to Estonia's, to take to actually implement. It would have to be something not left to each state to handle, or it'd suffer the length and per-state disparities of Real ID.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > I think a regular national ID was attempted under the Obama administration but failed due to pushback, if I'm remembering correctly. Not really. There was some discussion of it during the period of the Bush Administration which turned into Real ID (2005 was well before Obama was elected), but it's a stretch to call even that, much less any murmurings during the Obama Administration, an “attempt”. > It makes me wonder how long it would take a true national ID system with digital verification If you mean a mandatory one, mandatory ID faces Constitutional issues that are central to the US conception of liberty, so probably a collapse of the Constitutional order. If you mean available standardized digital ID with digital verification, well, TSA had an RFI that closed in June preparatory to a rulemaking on adding digital ID, including digital verification, standards into the Real ID standards, because a number of states have digital ID efforts and there is a demand for them to qualify as Real IDs, because of the uses for which Real IDs already are (and the more that thet will be in the next couple years) mandated for l.

supertrope 5y ago

Even more fundamental than national ID or PKI is incentives. If the burden of proof is clearly on the creditor, they will very quickly tighten up their anti-fraud measures. The current equilibrium of creditors being able to burden random people with the cost of proving they're not responsible for fraudulent loans is Kafkaesque.

supertrope 5y ago
For many years retail stores didn't care about stolen credit card information being used to buy gift cards. The banking sector ate those fraud losses. Once the payment card oligopoly shifted the liability onto merchants, retailers had to eat way more fraud. Retailers immediately took down gift card displays, rushed to upgrade to chip terminals, and when they put the displays back they stopped selling $500 cards.

olivermarks 5y ago

I'd be a lot more interested in an id system that was controlled by the individual rights holder: a verified system granting or revoking access to their data. Individuals have far more incentive to protect their data than state apparatus.

judge2020 5y ago
login.gov would be great for this, with the obvious caveat being that it ties a persistent user identifier to sites you login with. Maybe there could be two login flows - one that generates a unique pseudo-identity for each service, and another that actually beams over your PII for identity verification purposes.
- olivermarks 5y ago
  I'd really like to see a data permissions system that was outside government controls, no idea how that could happen though, definitely not globalist corporate controlled