I can see a future in which there is no online trust at all. Not news, not proclamations, not even previously trusted sources. This trust erosion threatens the very fabric of government.
If I stop trusting remote sources, who can I actually trust? City government with a physical presence, well known physical police and government officials known personally to me, and no others.
This troubling trend does not end well.
What happens when you try to fake being an Estonian who holds a national ID card that utilizes cryptographic primitives? Along those same lines, this infrastructure is the very same needed for business to transact (think document/agreement execution, bank accounts, brokerage accounts, payment processing, real estate ownership record systems, etc).
If I can't prove who I am, that's a gap to be solved for by government (and many have already solved for this, it is a well worn path [1]). If you require me to attest to my identity, that's a regulatory, governance, and oversight issue. As glib as is sounds, fight misinformation/disinformation with trust (infra). Make trust the default, not the exception.
EDIT: Login.gov [2] provides authentication services for DHS' Global Entry. Why can we not use that to attest identity facts elsewhere? Why can't any citizen get a CAC [3] to use with this system? (I frequently see Login.gov is hiring for SREs, but no internal advocates/champions; why?) Why can I pay with Apple Pay but can't prove my identity without a paper birth certificate and social security card (or a passport if you're among the well heeled)?
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_identity_card... [2] https://login.gov [3] https://www.cac.mil/common-access-card/
So the death of anonymity. I already hear the defenders of such a proposal: "If you don't want to give Facebook your federally issued ID then you still have the darkweb!" Followed by an endless stream of hit pieces equating everyone fleeing to non-privacy invasive platforms as nazis/pedos, and mobs of idiots demanding that infrastructure providers null-route wrong-thinkers.
Are you sure that really want a CAC? The OPM gave my biometrics and SSB to China, as well as every other military/gov employee. Except the CIA - the only one who managed to fight off the administrative record merge. If only they didn't draw so heavily from the veteran pool...
Facebook already requires you to use a government issued ID to identify yourself if they question your profile [1]. Not a legal requirement, Facebook's requirement. Twitter also requires government ID to get a blue verified checkbox [2], or to report fraud.
TLDR: I will take a somewhat ineffective government, warts and all, with the understanding work is necessary to improve it over fatalism and apathy that brings about total dysfunction.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/help/159096464162185
[2] https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/twitter-ve...
> I'm not here to advocate either way for anonymity
Is trust and anonymity somehow disconnected in your mind? Before you answer that, I'll point out that I didn't say pseudo-anonymity.
> No problems with my CAC, despite OPM's failure.
So you're either a post breach boot or you haven't yet noticed a personal impact. While I've never had the desire, due to the contents of my OPM file, I could never do any business in China under my own name without drawing a disruptive amount of attention. That may or may not be a problem in the future, nobody can say. But it can be said it should have never happened in the first place, as there was ample well reasoned warning and precedent. Anybody else remember the clipper chip? What about that "golden key" stupidity?
Whatever policy Facebook has at the moment is completely beside the point. What you are talking about would require the force of law. This proposal has been floated numerous times, tying online activity to a federally issued identifier.
> Elect better legislators...
lol
Those seeking to verify identities and personas are free to ignore whatever roots or trust chains they choose. Edge cases aside, the US government (in the case of your example) still holds and projects trust value (not sure how many US passports per day are used to validate citizenship, employment eligibility, and entry requirements at nation state borders, I assume it's quite a bit).
Trust is hard (there are entire industries around it), but the notion that it's impossible should not be entertained. It's a core component of modern civilization.
Geopolitical entities have been using the Internet to undermine trust in "the West," broadly speaking, for at least half a decade. Warfare has always included disinformation campaigns (they called it "propaganda"), but never has it been so viral.
I could at least envision a world where cryptographic identity is taken for granted. Think Keybase for publications. Sign articles to prove authenticity.
The cryptography involved is largely a solved problem. Software engineers did it with Keybase, and it's easy enough to use that people with very little cryptographic ability can prove who they are to the Internet (assuming they're an established identity with social accounts, or they have trustworthy people willing to vouch for their identity). But we'd need browsers/clients that have the ability to display proof status on messages, and it would have to be nearly as easy to use as existing clients like Twitter.
I hope we start building businesses that repair trust, rather than harm it. Making everyone distrust everything might benefit a few opportunistic parties in the short term, but in the long run everyone loses.
In 2009, a man arrived at the world-famous Sun Studio in Memphis, TN for a private tour. He told David Brookings, the young, aspiring musician giving the private tour, that his name was Steve Eason. David had been briefed that Eason was a big figure in the music industry, very famous, and so Sun would have to be very careful to preserve his privacy. Eason was also darn ill; he'd been hooked up to some gear that followed him around the studio.
The kid had never heard of Steve Eason, but he gave a passionate tour. At the end, David handed Steve a CD with music on it, hoping to land a record deal. A month later, Brookings got a message from Apple, asking him to come join iTunes to curate Rock & Roll playlists.
And Steve Eason? He wasn't a musician, or even a record producer. The man receiving the Sun Studio tour was Steve Jobs, who had been in Memphis to receive a kidney transplant for pancreatic cancer. He was staying in a house bought by a man named Eason, but Eason was - in fact - the doctor Jobs had scheduled to perform the transplant surgery.
Brookings has worked at Apple to this day.
In truth, more people go by alias names than you'd expect. Without checking a driver's license (and, depending on the sensitivity, maybe some utility bills), you may never know if someone is who they say they are.
Also, I have friends I've met offline, who have moved around to different countries and swapped devices. It's always a big pain trying to establish trust once your physical relationships go digital. There are only so many challenge-response questions to ask them (i.e., things only the two of you know). In reality, our digital and offline lives are intermingled; they each inseparably affect the other, and sometimes it feels like identity problems are turtles all the way down.
I mean, you have to understand that the actions of the globally dominant "West" (North America, EU, Australia, and their allies) in the past 20 (and further beyond that) years have done a lot to undermine trust in them also.
Fake news to lead people into the Iraq War (a 20 year quagmire which only cost millions of lives and trillions of dollars for minute changes on the ground), an inability to defeat ISIS which meant the US had to rely on Iranian militias to beat them. On that note, I think the whole history of US-Iran relations is enough to undermine faith in the "West" as it stands.
I'm not saying other axes of power are better, but trust isn't a competition, it's very possible for people to trust no one outside their few close acquaintances. Trust has to be earned, and the "West" doesn't do a good job of it.
Do you mean Library of Babel [1]?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel: "In any case, a library containing all possible books, arranged at random, might as well be a library containing zero books, as any true information would be buried in, and rendered indistinguishable from, all possible forms of false information..."
Borges' story on the Library of Babel is in conversation with this much older story.
Maybe not that bad of a thing.
At least with online sources it's up to you to decide.