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They should consider something like this:

https://www.cipheredtrust.com/using-irs/

Every citizen can generate cryptographic certs that they can verify their identities with, even anonymously.

The proper way of doing this is to have a trusted* (because the process is open, monitored, and audited) observer (probably run by the government) that consumes messages enciphered to it which contain a signed delegation. It would then (daily, weekly?) release a signed batch of public keys with designated metadata.

Metadata might include simple yes/no statements or very short string tags.

    * Country
    * State/Provence
    * County/Locality
    * City
    * Is Locally Contract Age
    * Is Locally Unrestricted Purchases (alcohol/tobacco/etc)
    * Is a Driver
    * Is a Voter (might not be registered or might be serving time for crimes)
    * etc

Ideally someone would have a unique key for each slot, and of course their primary (high security) civic key could be used for cases where proof of identity is required anyway.

No. Including this metadata would make it trivial to de-anonymize.

You've misunderstood the way to publish the data:

"These keys are X" (for each type of metadata flag).

If a given user keeps their metadata keys operationally separate from their full ID, and also updates them at random intervals, then it would be possible to have unique 'cards' (of sorts) for each given type of check.

The locality specific checks imply outer levels, obviously, but different keys might still be desired and it would be best practice for all to keep different keys to make it harder to de-identify by virtue of being one of the paranoid users.

To be clear, in a world where people still haven't solved password security, you're proposing a solution that has people generating multiple functionally composable metadata keys in order to retain anonymity on an otherwise massive public ledger?

The original problem is that it's too easy to make fake comments on a basic website. You're talking about users keeping their metadata keys "operationally separate from their full IDs" and "updating them at random intervals." How did we get here?

Yeah, that's not even the hard part for the average user...

How could (should?) they use these things securely? You need to trust the hardware that's handling the keys too.

I can't escape the need for something like a no-closed-blobs dongle that /only/ does digital wallet stuff (and maybe storing files) which MUST have at least a method for the user to read the text of what they're signing, and if it has that use that to also control the 'presentation mode' of that device to the attached system.

I remain skeptical.

> Every citizen can generate cryptographic certs that they can verify their identities with, even anonymously.

We had one problem. Now we have two problems.

Nobody should ever type the words “every citizen can generate cryptographic certificates” in that order. That’s like saying every citizen can compose jazz; technically true, which engineers love, but basically a lie that evidences how distant the engineering mindset is from an average person. Every citizen would instead reply what is a certificate? You mean the one I got for my marriage? Do I have to go wait in line for it? It involves my computer? Oh, you mean the computer that has spyware on it to lift the private key as soon as it’s created because TPM is still, you know, only deemed worthy of corporate security?

The gap between engineering and regular human beings continues to widen. Passwords remain difficult for people, but don’t let me stop the whiteboarding of a solution to the problem that will undoubtedly involve machine learning, Facebook OAuth, and GKE at some point. Add blockchain and pitch it to USDS before Thiel guts them and you’ve got yourself a hot party!

> Nobody should ever type the words “every citizen can generate cryptographic certificates” in that order.

This is equivalent to "Only some citizens are able to obtain the secret identifier that their government knows them as."

I'm not saying that's wrong or right, but just making an observation.

As a Citizen I'd want to submit comments with some superficial guarantee of anonymity.

I dunno, I want the FCC et al to know who I am when I comment. I want them to know I care and I'm willing to stand up and name myself, and that I'm not some internet bot.

Comments are not votes. They are an opportunity to start meaningful discourse.

The only damage fake comments caused was to skew the ratio of opinion, and drown out real discourse.

> Will the politicians still ignore the desires of its constituents vs special interests? No question.

It seems like none of this actually matters until we can solve that problem.

I disagree. If the wishes of the electorate were unambiguously publicly available, then it would be much more obvious when elected representatives are not serving them.

Right now we're reliant on things like polls or the FCC's farcical comment system, which can easily be gamed.

> ...until we can solve that problem.

There are two basic primary levers in US politics. Money. Votes. That's pretty much it.

If you are able to organize a consistent voting bloc that reliably votes the way you promote, and that bloc swamps all money-based efforts to sway them in any other direction, your voice carries more weight than the money. Period.

Even more terrifying to career politicians is the ability to organize so many voters that you can successfully mount a recall and force the recall on demand; in the US, recall power only rises from local to state level, but does not hold at the federal level, though.

The trick is to continue as that voice, and not step into the ring to play politician. Thus far, no one who was able to organize votes has been able to resist that siren call. That's why vanity is listed as one of the sins. This is also why money steadily overtakes voting power on a long enough time span.

> There are two basic primary levers in US politics. Money. Votes. That's pretty much it.

There's at least three: money, votes, and committed foot soldiers (it's easy to think the laaf two are the same, but they don't overlap more than any other pair—whilw commanding votes and commanding people that will work for the cause (and thus move money and other votes) are loosely correlated, they aren't the same thing. One of the particular values form which religious communities are targeted as such is that they often command foot soldiers at a level beyond what is true of groups that deliver similar committed votes.

May I ask why should the FCC restrict comments? Isn't an argument valid or invalid no matter who or what posted it?

Sure it matters. Let's say there's a local zoning board meeting, asking for comments on a new landfill that'll go in just a few blocks from your house. You and your whole neighborhood put in your anonymous comments (~50), but the landfill company hires a bot network to overwhelm the site with tens or hundreds of thousands of comments. Your local board cannot possibly individually read all the comments, so they just sample from it. The comments of the folks it'll actually affect are completely lost in the noise.

Thank you for the explanation. Those are valid and understandable points.

I'm however kind of worried that the comments are sampled. I'm sure there are tools out there that will find duplicates, cluster similar comments together, etc

In my opinion we (as world citizen) should find a way to organize millions of comments rather than building barriers. Twitter probably already does it to some extend, it should be technologically accessible today.

Trying to deny the access to bots on the palteform can't hurt, but that's a temporary patch to the real problem of opinion aggregation.

Is there a complete dataset of the past comments freely downloadable? Some civic data scientist and dev may look at it to try new solution for comments aggregation

Edit : so, there are also works on comments aggregation. Even a Kaggle : https://www.kaggle.com/jeffkao/proc_17_108_unique_comments_t... and https://github.com/sajacy/fcc-ecfs-scrape

Immediate solution would be to restrict comments, but new methods of comment aggregation maybe used in the future