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Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

In the United States the US Postal Service would be a great fit for a job like this. They already have good infrastructure for identity verification and physical distribution.

I wouldn't want escrow of private keys, however. I'd rather the USPS just act as a certification authority that provides strong guarantees of identity verification.

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Yes, definitely. USPS + Login.gov could act as trust anchors, with cryptographic keys reprovisioned upon proofing, versus storing them. I am open to whatever is the optimal balance between security and practicality.

https://www.uspsoig.gov/document/role-postal-service-identit...

> The Postal Service Reform Act of 2022 has recently expanded the Postal Service’s ability to provide identity verification to all levels of government. A window of opportunity is currently open for USPS to contribute to closing gaps in government identity verification processes.

Except that here in the US a non-trivial number of politicians of a particular persuasion[1] actually believe that government issued ID, of any kind, is the "mark of the beast". There's a reason that Real ID had a lot of push back. Having USPS, already a political bogey-man for that same crowd, become a holder of "identity" is probably going to face a lot of pushback.

[1] just one, recent example... https://www.al.com/news/2022/10/alabama-gop-chairman-made-th...

because simple, easy-to-use ID lowers the barrier for demanding ID in more places and attacking anonymity. the easier we make it to demand id, the more people will demand it. wanna use a fake name/not divulge your identity? doing something politically sensitive where you may need some protection? just like your privacy? tough shit show your id or GTFO.

Shouldn't we instead solve the problem that you might "need some protection" because you're doing something political - instead of relying on security-through-obscurity which honestly doesn't even really work anymore, IDs or no IDs. There's so many other ways for governments to track people of interest these days.

i disagree with the assumption that it's a solvable problem. people remain fallible and the correct solution is to mitigate our downside by minimizing state power. not disagreeing with the idea that we also need to work on lots of other ways to reduce its power and ability to track people btw.

I can assure you that a lot more constituencies than just the Christian coalittion are concerned about universal government-issued IDs as passports for online participation.

I think it's mostly because easily obtainable government ID will make it easy for Black and Latino people to register for vote, which means Republicans will never win any election ever again :)

Pass it anyway. Happy to see them refuse to participate.

i don't want this because then more websites will start expecting strong identity verification. the last thing we need are more attacks on anonymity. at least with a private key i can say i'm joe biden or crazy horse or whoever. i may not be eligible for "government escrow" but who cares.

It's a double-edged sword for sure.

My bank is already regulated and required to have strong identity verification for some operations. They won't let use any sensible multi-factor authentication, however. Requiring they use such a government mandated authentication infrastructure would be a major "win" for my piece-of-mind.

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