Insufficient security at a national level has been frontpage of hnews all this week from various countries: Turkey, USA, Malaysia, Mexico, &c.

From this and many other leaks and breaches from companies, governments & institutions one could deduce security is imperfect & digitally massively so.

Identity theft is rampant; Biometrics are irrevocable - yet the solution is used by most people everyday.

Cryptography solves both the problem of identity and privacy simultaneously.

It is establishable as persona via chains of trust, e.g. PGP signing.

Apart from societal control there seems no good reason not to adopt a system whereby everyone is issued a private and public key - which signs every email, bank instruction, comminucation & vote.

Akin to good practice being to store only password hashes so only the individual posses the secret.

Ones identity would be ones own responsibility and huge leaks like this would reveal nothing but a list of public keys obtainable by crawling the web.

One can imagine a dystopian future nation where individuals must fight to protect their basic fundamental rights from state level adverseries operating outside the law - punchline is the worst threat is their own government.

Ever since Gibson the best science fiction is set in the present.