I can give up. Since so many third-parties continue to act as if these are "secret" (relying on them for "authentication") giving up does me no good. I guess I

I can give up. Since so many third-parties continue to act as if these are "secret" (relying on them for "authentication") giving up does me no good. I guess I can try to avoid doing business with companies who insist on using these "secrets". Sometimes I don't have a choice, though. It would be wonderful to have ubiquitous PKI for every citizen in the United States. I don't trust private companies to do it. A large segment of the electorate would never trust the government to do it. (I like the idea of the USPS leveraging their tremendous physical presence and delivery infrastructure to do it, personally, but I think that would meet about the same level of opposition as the government doing it.) I guess we'll just continue with this ridiculous charade of "secret" numbers, the silly idea of "identity theft", and most of the consequences applying to the individual.