Dangers of “decentralized” ID systems
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paper.wf
KYC is in no way any kind of problem that needs to be fixed, it's a necessary and Actually Good feature of any sufficiently broad financial system. Avoiding KYC-type stuff may make sense in the small, but is actively harmful in the large.
But the article suggests that relying on government issued IDs as a base lets government track all that we do. That's not the case, and is the point with all these systems. It should be possible for instance, using cryptography, to make a distributed chat room service where it's public who has signed up for a chat room, but not who of the posters in it are who.
To be able to selectively prove your identity, including connection to the government-accountable you, without directly involving the government or even anything licensed by the government, would make us more free online, not less.
The author seems unaware that DIDs are now removed from the latest specs from the OIDC Working Group and EU's eIDAS.
I suggest you start here: OpenID for Verifiable Credentials - Overview (https://openid.net/sg/openid4vc/)
There's a link there where it says: "European Digital Identity Architecture and Reference Frameworklists OID4VCI, OID4VP and SIOPv2 as required for certain use-cases"
The basic specs still have DIDs and the w3c VC model, but they're moving away both of those, as it seems... notice how all links to other specs are currently to ISO specs instead:
"The following draft ISO standards reference:"
– draft ISO/IEC TS 23220-4 profiles OID4VP to present mdocs
– draft ISO/IEC TS 18013-7 profiles OID4VP to present mDLs (mobile driving licence)
– draft ISO/IEC TS 23220-3 profiles OID4VCI to issue mdocs
The initial page has a tab with links to the specs... here's a direct link to the main Verifiable Credentials spec (Editor's Draft with latest changes - this can be updated at any time still):
https://openid.github.io/OpenID4VCI/openid-4-verifiable-cred...
This spec still supports formats which require the use of DIDs, but none of these formats are being used by the financial-grade profiles or by the EU's initiatives anymore (the whole ebsi thing seems to be a dead end).
That basically means there will be two very separate worlds: one where DID, w3C and blockchain technologies are used, and another one where OAuth, OIDC, mdocs are used (the one favoured by the EU and financial profiles, e.g. the high-assurance interoperability profile says that keys must be resolved from OIDC well-known metadata endpoints: https://openid.net/specs/openid4vc-high-assurance-interopera...).
No, it's a trade-off. No KYC makes it possible for people to lose their identity, but it's also the only way to guarantee full privacy/anonymity, and to make it so the identify-provider doesn't have the power to de-platform anyone. Historically speaking, governments and corporations silencing dissidents has done far far more harm to humanity than people losing their accounts due to forgetfulness etc.
"governments and corporations silencing dissidents has done far far more harm to humanity than people losing their accounts"
People can not loose their accounts, because they are governed which makes silencing possible.
e.g. a fly landing on a sheet of paper, blocking the print head long enough to generate "Tuttle" from "Buttle", resulting in a long chain of violent events for some unassuming individual…
Full privacy and anonymity are not virtues. They are actively bad. A system that is fully anonymous always becomes dominated by malicious users. De-platforming is a necessary capability of any system that expects to be used by a non-trivial segment of humanity.
> Historically speaking, governments and corporations silencing dissidents has done far far more harm to humanity than people losing their accounts due to forgetfulness etc.
This isn't complicated. If I have an account with some money in it, and I lose my private key, then it cannot be the case that I lose access to that money. There must be some phone number I can call, or some person I can reach, which can restore my access to my money. This is a table-stakes property of any system that can ever expect to be used by more than a tiny niche of humanity.
If you take "identity" to mean "the same thing", then you can certainly use a key-pair to show that two documents were signed by the same signing key. Of course, the owner could have lost control of their private key, but that could happen to government-issued ID as well.
If you want "identity" to mean "official persona", then there can only be one of those per person, which means government-issued. I think government ID should only be used for interacting with government; online purchases shouldn't rely on government ID.
Banking is awkward. To get a bank account, you usually have to produce government ID. But then the bank issues you with a bank-issued ID, which is effectively just a proxy for your government ID. It's weird because banks are not part of government, but they have quasi-governmental obligations, e.g. KYC. Even government departments do this; to sign up for self-assessment with HMRC, I have to prove I am who I say I am with government ID; but then HMRC issues me with an HMRC ID. That is nuts.
I want to be able to have multiple IDs that are not linked. I shouldn't have to give government ID to make an online purchase. And I shouldn't have to risk exposing my purchase history when I sign a post to an online forum. It's perfectly legal (here, at least) to have multiple real names; for example, I mainly go by my nickname, which doesn't appear on any official document. Online identity should mirror that.
But how will your benevolent rulers be able to socially gamify your behaviour and direct who gets to interact and mate with you? If social credit systems are to work, we need KYC and centralized ID.
I think we need KYC. That doesn't mean centralized ID. As far as social credit systems is concerned, I take it you are being humorous, but I don't think there's much that's amusing about "social credit".
Regulation is not synonymous with tyranny. This is a dumb position and the people who hold it are dumb.
If you take "the bonafide original" to mean the government-issued ID, then obviously only the government-issued ID is boner-fido. But there's no reason why that should be my only ID; I could, for example, generate my own keypair, and hire a notary public to attest that the holder of the keypair is (select any):
[] Good for ten-grand
[] Older than 18/21
[] The person shown in the accompanying (signed) photo
[] The author of xyz.blog
[] The same person as government-ID xxxxx
Only the last needs to be linked to a government ID, but all the others are authentic, bonafide attestations.
And such an ID would not be a duplicate of anything (not sure why you mentioned duplicates; passports, bus-passes and driving licences can all be duplicated).
Never heard of it. Is it an extension of FIDO2?
They could produce their parents, or any witness of their birth.
They could (if they were born wealthy) produce a hallmarked silver spoon engraved with their name. Not proof, but persuasive.
They could produce their 21-year-old younger sister, who has government ID (yeah, I know, that is a resort to government ID).
Best of all: they could produce a birth certificate, signed by a doctor (not itself government ID, just a prerequisite to getting a government ID).
1. How would you verify that's actually their relative and not a friend or stranger? 2. How do you verify that they are in fact the older sibling and not just saying they are?
I don't.
> If you want "identity" to mean "official persona"
Well, I want identity to mean me as a human being.
> I want to be able to have multiple IDs that are not linked.
Fine, but realize that statistically zero other people want this feature in, well, anything. No system which expects to serve more than a statistically zero percent slice of humanity can define identity in this way.
Web of trust protocols are a decades-long solved problem (albeit without a prevailing deployment yet). It seems like your comment is meant to be quietly denigrating toward them (or do I have that wrong?). May I ask why?
It seems like eventually a web of trust model is going to arise and win over a critical mass.
Solved in a technical sense, maybe, but not in any meaningful sense. Statistically zero people use any web-of-trust based system for anything useful.
But we've already played this game, over the last couple of thousand years. That evolutionary process, however messy it may have been, has already produced a web of trust, to which we all delegate authority and responsibility. It's usually called "government".
I disagree with this because it breaks the notion of innocent until proven guilty that is the cornerstone of a fair justice system. If the bank has any suspicions about where you get your bags of money that you deposit daily, they can inform the police and the police, without questioning you about where you get your money from, must prove that you are doing something illegal.
KYC and all other legislation of the same kind put the burden of proof on you to prove you're a good citizen. And this is wrong on so many levels.
KYC is about establishing identity, not establishing innocence or guilt or goodness or badness. You don't get to participate in society anonymously. That's a feature, not a bug.
Is someone calling these "decentralized"? To me, decentralized ID is OIDC, which is "being developed" it's mostly not catching on at all, in favor of sadly centralized system like "login with [Google|Facebook]".
Is there some weird crypto-blockchain-something-something that I'm not aware of?
I have no idea what the bitcoin people mean by decentralized. It sounds like PKI with extra steps. shrug
By contrast, a "centralized" digital ID phones home every time it presents and verifies. I don't know any standards, but most digital identities in China are of this form.
The CA is a single point of failure that can arbitrarily issue or fail to issue an identity certificate.
If you use lots of interchangeable CAs, then it “fails open”, in that any one CA can issue certificates for everyone. That’s still a single point of failure.
If you tie the ID to the Certificate Authority (e.g. gmail offers certs for gmail addresses), each person still is impacted by some single point of failure.
I’d say all these schemes are centralized.
I’d call the things you describe “offline identity verification”, though there is an additional nuance: the scheme could work offline, but still send a log of what happens when it reconnects. With that, the privacy properties are as bad as online schemes.
Everybody else just looks at poorly-photographed jpeg and is like "yes, this dude is named like this". Even banks this days open accounts without ever touching sacred piece of plastic with human hands, let alone scanning it with crypto-mumbo-jumbo.
Why indeed.
There is an adventure novel "The Count of Monte Cristo" in which, as a small subplot, two ex-convicts are made to pose as Italian nobility in the Parisian upper society. Of course, nobody would believe such claims just on their own word for obvious reasons, which is why an "introduction to the society" was a custom. It still could be faked, of course, which is exactly what happened.
Also, why link it all to a single persistent physical identity? Because, no matter how many digital identities you use, you are still a single physical person, and it's actually noticeable.
The con tricks are as old as humanity, even if they take different forms in different eras, but the ground problem is the same: if someone approcaches you and claims to be e.g. an important noble named such and such from the overseas, they could very well be telling truth—or they could be lying, and there is almost no way to tell for certain, even though there are some good heuristics (their wealth is one, as you allude to).
This is literally how it works in majority of the real world; except for things where government has a role to play; most common case is taxes. If you are a landlord and collect rent from tenant and if either of you want to make tax related claims to the government, then you will have to provide/quote each other's government recognized identity in your tax returns.
For large parts of the population in the lower socio-economic strata, even this won't be relevant. And that reliance on that web-of-trust is the problem for them due to class discrimination etc. Hence, having a government issued identity (as a universal right) which acts as an anchor to which trusted attestations can be attached to is critical to make a difference in the life of the last person in that socio-economic line.
This is in essence the basis for India's identity system Aadhaar[1] – which is super minimal identity system – just biometrics (fingerprint, iris scan, head/shoulder photo, gender) – mapped to a a 12 digit number (basically a unique key in its database); plus 3 additional demographic fields – name, age (date of birth), address – which require external anchor proofs (which are very weak proofs). Here's the full list of accepted proofs - https://uidai.gov.in/images/commdoc/valid_documents_list.pdf
Cryptocurrency and friends really have no bearing on the problem. The known solutions are the same as they always were - web of trust, pki, tofu, pre-shared keys, or just give up and ignore the outside world. All have tradeoffs and are very far from satisfactory.
If you take a subpar solution and wrap it in 10 layers of cryptocurrency and magical thinking, you are just left with a complex version of the same subpar solution.
If someone steals my passport, i tell the gov and they cancel the old one. If someone steals your fingerprint, you are just screwed.
There are some systems that verify things like bloodflow to ensure that the finger belongs to a live person instead of a cut-off hand. However then you end up having the problem of needing to trust hardware, which is fine for an iphone unlock feature but not so fine for this magical decentralized web3 stuff.
I think fundamentally the issue is you can't create trust out of nothing. Once you have something you trust, you can use cryptography to extend that trust in all sorts of complex ways. However you always need a starting point to bootstrap the system.
I feel like there is a big connection between this problem and trying to prove things in pure logic.
PKI is basically starting from axioms (i trust the following CA's as a starting point)
Tofu is the reflexive property - we know that x=x
Web of trust is some sort of coherence model (in the sense of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherentism )
I think to make real progress on this problem, we need to make progress in epistomology.
It would be like asking for many usernames that are semi public instead of a username and password.
e.g. multiple fingerprints plus iris scan plus voice print plus facial scan.
So even if a few get stolen and successfully replicated somehow to fool the system into thinking it's a living person, it still won't be enough to steal the identity.
Within the Polykey network, each node can host vaults that safeguard sensitive information. By integrating identity verification directly into this decentralized framework, Polykey enables users to discover, trust, and securely share cryptographic keys with other verified nodes. This system departs from traditional methods that depend on anonymized wallet addresses for user discovery, offering instead a mechanism for direct interaction within users’ operational environments, provided their identities have been linked to their nodes.
This approach aims to tackle foundational challenges in key management and identity binding. Do you think integrating identity verification in this way could improve the management and security of cryptographic identities? Are there any potential advantages or drawbacks you foresee with this model?
If it works for your usecase, great. But lets not pretend its any different from the things we were doing in the 90s.
We reused PKI and extended it to achieve peer to peer web of trust. So there's both vertical trust chains via certificate signing and horizontal trust chains via a sigchain.
If you’ve got a peer-to-peer network of information nodes, where each person is able to assert information about themselves in their node, but the whole trust is based on the polykey binding at setup, I see 3 key challenges:
1) Where’s the real world verification of any identity attributes stored in the node? 2) How do we detect when/if the root key has been compromised, allowing arbitrary new vaults and identity attributes to be automatically trusted within the network?
3) How does this meaningfully improve the experience over having a CA sign a certificate that contains attributes about you? (sibling poster’s argument).
2) Root key compromise can be resolved through revocations on the trust network. It's the same as how PKI works right now but in a decentralized manner. This isn't possible yet on PolyKey (PK) but it's something we are working on.
3) Actually we enable CAs to sign the PK certificate. This is in our roadmap.
I’d do a deep dive on verifiable credentials and ask yourself truthfully what PolyKey offers to both users and relying parties.
> If decentralized ID is just an extension of the existing government ID system, it provides neither privacy nor financial inclusion.
VC is a spec built on top of DID, in no way shape or form is VC required for DID.
This statement alone shows the author doesn't understand (or is intentionally misrepresenting) the relationship between DID and VC (which is kind of crucial to write an entire blog post on either topic)
> And just like the existing system, it continues to exclude millions of people who can’t get government ID
VC is a technology for convenience, not solving social problems. It's basically just to enable technologies like Tap to Pay but for your Gov IDs.
E.g. rather than having to carry your drivers license you just carry your phone. It's almost as if the article misses the entire purpose for which VC is designed (but then again, what can one expect when they're criticizing DIDs yet -actually- talking about VC throughout the entire post)
Also, biometrics to verify ID? Hard pass. Would rather not have to be fingerprinted or swabbed at the gas station for cancer sticks.
In the USA, non-citizens (legal permanent residents aka "green card" holders) can't get passports. They can get state-level drivers licenses but only citizens can get passports from the centralized-level Federal government.
Green cards are effectively entry-only passports (from the perspective of the US). You can enter the country by land with just the GC with no passport. Additionally, if you arrive by air and you have global entry they don't look at your passport at all, just the GC.
Is there a reason they can't get a passport from their country of citizenship?
Plus, passports are fully standardized, at least the biometric ones are. It's possible to read and verify the data on a biometric passport entirely offline using open source applications that implement the documented processes.
Yes, but legal permanent residents (and some other legally resident aliens) also have federally-issued ID, and its not optional the way passports are for citizens. (For LPRs, the Permanent Resident Card, for others the Employment Authorization Document or Immigrant Visa.)
But I was merely rebutting the parent's statement that there is no centrally issued ID in the USA, in the context of ironic use for a base layer for "decentralized" identity.
It's too bad the article focused on that nonsense instead of, what good is a decentralized identity -- if it can't assert your actual physical identity.
Do you know which state governments?
(Also I have writers block).
This all happened because back in the early 2000s there was an attempt at a single “Australia ID” but geriatrics had their brains pickled in decades of anti-communist propaganda and voted against it.
The logic is: “Only communist governments know who their citizens are.”
Democracies apparently have to be ignorant and easily exploited by criminals falsely claiming pensions and other benefits using easily forged identity papers.
This is similar to how the U.S. has a certain amount of opposition from Christian sects who believe any sort of national ID number would be the biblical mark of the beast. There’s a certain dark humor in the way privacy is used to complain about identification cards but that only leads to the semi-regulated private data brokers being used by everyone, including the government, with purchased access to far more data.
Isn’t the CCP’s behaviour still one of the best arguments against universal government ID?
A number on a piece of paper is not the root cause of secret police brutally cracking down on dissidents!
But knowledge of the full population is particularly corrosive kind of power. It can reveal negative information - one can query for all people without a donation to political party, for example.
The primary key is just a number, and tells you nothing other than perhaps roughly when you were born (if it is sequentially allocated).
That's how your local CCTV camera catching you jaywalking could communicate to your bank that you should be fined.
The logic is actually "That which I wish to control or destroy, I must first enumerate/name."
A Government that exists only to administer (and not control the populace), has no need to know who all it's citizen's are. Merely to know who is involved in the limited processes being administered.
Sadly, all common sense around that seems to have evaporated since 2001 in the U.S. It seems like only those of us left who experienced the pre-9/11 world are doing a terrible job at instilling a picture of a government that's not all "Big Brother is watching" in the younger generations. The gluttony of Law Enforcement and the IC for a Single Identification Number to unify and enumerate every flesh and blood person wandering around cannot be overstated.
In practice, all government departments in all countries have databases with primary key identifiers in them.
We can do this accurately and efficiently, or we can continue to insist on doing it inaccurately and inefficiently because of "Red Scare" propaganda.
You are proposing that you prefer your government to be slow, inefficient, inept, and vulnerable to fraud and corruption.
I prefer my government agencies to not waste my time, not confuse me with similarly named people, etc...
This is a real problem that occurs every day, versus the slippery-slope arguments that derive from anti-communist hysteria.
Here's a real situation: Identical twins with the same name, because "John Sr is the son of John Sr for ten generations, and he didn't want to give up the tradition just because he had twins." That's a real story from a public school system where the kids were living at the same address, attending the same school, were born on the same day, in the same hospital, etc...
How would you disambiguate them? You would start with... assigning... a... unique... number perhaps?
Yep. That's how. Now lets see what inevitably gets built once you do that.
Now do you that mapping to a Federal system, which maps that ID to a set of tables including a map to every other every other organization's ids relevant to that individual such that one can essentially completely hose someone via the "Sanction this individual in particular where (subquery). This system has already been built in the Financial sector, it's called OFAC. More advanced integrations are in progress. Look up "Fusion Centers".
Do I think that's a worthy trade in case that gets in the wrong hands? Fuck no.
Should those same systems be free to be "privately built and transacted for business purposes" in a way that utterly sidesteps prohibitions against the Government directly building that dataset themselves, resulting in 3rd party SaaS queries through Data Brokers? See LexisNexis, Palantir, or any of the Credit Bureaus or other data brokers. Also telecoms selling location data. Or automotive manufacturers feeding telematics to insurers or Law Enforcement.
Worthy trade for the risk? ?Hell no.
You can have a world where nightmare abuses of these types of systems are outright impossible, or you can have a world that's incrementally more efficient, but you must accept these abuses being realizable. That's an XOR there. There is no escaping it.
Certainty of abuse has probability 1. How do I know? Because I've been tempted to do as much before, and I know that I am an uncharacteristically extreme example of someone that thinks something through before committing to it, and it's only by doing so that I've managed to avoid implementing that very thing. 98% of people will not hold themselves to at least the the rigor I have. There are people far too pragmatic to be bothered by such things as ideals or edge cases; which is necessary to deal with when you're talking about enabling top down practicable social targeting systems. We are not special. It will not be different this time. Our nature is not such that we can safely discount these sorts of things.
The enemy is among us, and they are us. I don't fear communists. I fear the paperclip maximizing zealots among us who will sacrifice everything in pursuit of thrir goal. I've been one of them.
I will not subject those down the road to a working Panopticon. I will not build that lever. I'm sorry. I will consign you to a fate wherein you suffer from an occasional bureacratic mixup, but you will never once need worry that some madman is sitting on the button that causes you to lose access to everything instantly. That will allow a faceless bureaucracy to control your access in real time. To know your every move, all the time. I'd rather you be free. That you be unmanageable. That the mechanisms of external social coercion not be perfect. For without those spaces, there is no room for freedom. Only not currently having your chain jerked. Know that if ever you are subdued by the machinations of the technophile, it will not have been I that forged those chains.
Just because you can build something, doesn't mean you should.
Just because you can measure something, doesn't mean you should build the yardstick.
It does not follow that something you can't currently measure must have a measure built, and then as a consequence of it's measurability then be managed.
Those that seek power will beseech you to build these things for them. It is your job to see these things for what they are, and learn to be able to say "No."
Conversely, it is trivial to identify foreigners influenced by propaganda. You see the effect, but are not subject to the cause. It's like seeing a fish in a body water. You immediately think to yourself: "There's a fish in the water", but the fish doesn't think it's swimming in water. If you could ask it somehow, it would ask: "What is water?"
PS: There are quite a few topics like this where if you ask any American, you get some specific propaganda in response, but if you ask literally anybody else on the entire planet -- the other 96% of the human population -- you'll get slow blinking and maybe a "wtf!?" instead.
E.g.: Iraq caused 9/11, gun control, states-rights, and publicly-funded ("free") healthcare.
All three of them are very heavily propogandised for decades now by very-well funded lobby groups... in the US. Elsewhere people are like: "No, the Saudis did!", "Illegal!", "Wat!?", and "Of course!"
I have spent decades watching the ways human beings interact with and use computers. I've made it my life's work to pick apart technological systems and how they have been applied to societal problems, and what the various outcomes are.
It is a fact that automation which removes dependence on other humans acts as a power multiplier to it's owner. It is a fact that as we remove more individual actors from things, decisions will be skewed more and more to the extremes of the component actors of the system. It is a fact that since the industrial revolution, and the introduction of industrial business machines, the acts of artifice and processes we are capable of creating have become more and more capable of facilitating industry fuelled process pipelines capable of generating great casualties. The last century having some very shining examples of how things can go wrong, and the bloody U.S. from 2016-2020 having gone through it's first brush with a certifiable psychopath in the Chief Executive seat.
I have had the everloving shit scared out of me, and much of my naive techno-optimism knocked out of me. I've now had a shining example of "what could a smart psychotic, amoral person do with this system" added to my "should I make this system?" calculus.
I look at cases of "everything is just fine..." non-U.S. posters entertain, and I just end up affixing "for now. Your psychopath in charge just hasn't come up yet.
India has it's Modi. China jas Xi. Putin's saber rattling again. Britain is chasing itself through fear into becoming what Orwell had nightmares of more and more every year. I listen to elders who think that "oh, just trust everyone else", that I then half to clean up the mess of afterward when their implicit trust in others ends up being violated.
I wish my misgivings were as easy to cure as innoculation to Red Scare propaganda. That was easy. I saw through that before getting out of middle school. This is much harder. My generation hasn't faired well in managing to build trust or emotional stability which scares the crap out of me for the odds of not leveraging technical advancement to unmake something beautiful that ultimately I still believe, or try to believe in. I love the American Experiment. I want to believe we are by and large good, virtuous, and comparatively enlightened people capable of maintaining a government that places as a priority maintaining a state of Liberty without degenerating into a mess social control mechanisms laying around waiting for the sufficiently motivated and intelligent psychopaths to pick up and orchestrate.
So again, sorry to bust your bubble. I could write volumes on this topic, but I don't feel like letting this degenerate into rambling anymore than it already has.
We only have these systems implemented currently in places like finance or immigration, or National Civil Service, but by and large, most people are relatively ignorant of the increasingly broad reach of these systems, while at the same time, these systems grow to become more and more attractive targets for both hostile subversion, or just those seeking a means to power.
Historically, we had in built safeties to these sorts of systems because they consisted largely of individual human beings. Each component weighing in in such a way where even the most extreme individual at the top setting off the action potential would on average be damped. Either by non-cooperation of constituent parts (conscientious objection), dropping of signal (not enough people or resources to execute).
With computerization, we're removing more and more of that damping; we're entering a phase of civilization where we're increasingly in danger of our technological capability outstripping our civilizational capability to introspect all the links in the chain for one, and to restore things. It ain't a case of "a man can't do much damage in 4 years" anymore.
It's a fair trade off if your target KPI is having zero genocides enabled by extensive records-keeping.
The entire line of thought is straight up propaganda from weird Christians who have a really weird cult belief that some id number is the mark of the beast and saw a great opportunity to lie about the holocaust (plenty of jews were murdered using no better data than "Wilhelm says he saw them praying last Saturday").
You can see the same stupidity in the talking point from 2nd amendment maximalists that the jews were only genocided because they gave up rights to own guns, or something to that effect, as if a population experiencing genocide would have qualms about illegal firearms.
How is centralized identity necessary or sufficient to solve this? If you have an ID card issued by e.g. your brokerage, it can use strong cryptography and be no easier to forge than any government ID. If you lost your card you could use any mechanism you could use in the event that you lose your government ID. Some of these methods have poor security properties but that's the same in both cases.
The only thing you get from centralization is non-consensual tracking.
To give you an idea of just how low the fruit is hanging, approximately 100K fake children "vanished" from Australia's welfare system when the government introduced a system where you had to list each dependent child's Tax File Number (TFN) to claim welfare benefits. (Prior to that, you just had to put down how many children you were claiming benefits for.)
If you can get ID papers from random brokerages, then how is the government to perform a simple uniqueness check across brokerages?
It always boils down to the same thing: Someone, somewhere has to have a table with a primary key on it.
The assumption here is that they're all fake rather than there being a non-trivial number of people who don't understand how to fill out the new forms, or aren't willing to admit to an association with an out-of-wedlock child on an official form even though the child is real and actually being supported etc.
> If you can get ID papers from random brokerages, then how is the government to perform a simple uniqueness check across brokerages?
Nobody other than the brokerage uses the brokerage's ID. That's what decentralized is. Children typically wouldn't have an ID from a brokerage anyway. The welfare agency would provide recipients with its own IDs. How does it establish uniqueness for this? The same way as the institution issuing a Tax File Number.
As others have mentioned, the US Federal government issues passports and passport cards, yet it's entirely up to the agency that wants ID what IDs they will accept. I've been turned down for using a passport card for some Washington State government activities ("the card doesn't have a signature"), using a passport to buy an age-restricted item from a store ("we can't scan it"), and a passport card with the state's largest credit union ("too much fraud with passport cards").
Yet none of these are documented anywhere. Everyone just assumes you'll have a state-issued driver license and if you don't, well, you're obviously up to something nefarious. (Before anyone asks, I do have a state-issued enhanced identification card. It looks identical to a driver license, except it says "identification" on it. I've still been told "that's not a driver's license, I can't take that.")
It doesn't help that some clerks are confused by the zoo of government issued IDs that exist in the US. IDs in the US are a mess, the legal barriers to making it possible to have an organized identity system are very high, and both the Democrats and Republicans are resistant to removing those legal barriers, so this situation is unlikely to change.
Who gets to choose the they?
Do they also have a right to build a database of every time I utilize my ID? What's stopping them?
I think there is already a large group of people who would prefer to live in a society without ceding that much power to a centralized authority.
Whether you need an ID to do certain things or are tracked doing certain things is also a very separate issue.
What is stopping "them" is that "them" in liberal democracies (as a technical term) isn't free to do whatever they please nor beyond control/recall/etc. If you want to live in a society, there will be rules, implicit or explicit, on how people interact, delegate, etc.
Your government needs to know who everybody is. That means illegal immigrants can't get drivers licenses, and that's kind of the point.
> Even IDs for undocumented people (such as Californian AB 60 driver’s licenses) require a foreign passport, national ID card or birth certificate, and can’t help people who have no state-issued identity documents at all.
> This existing ID system is harmful, inaccessible and a single point of failure
The post reads a little bit overblown.
I will go down screaming, fighting, kicking, biting, and faxing my tax returns to the IRS, really doing everything lawful in my power to drag the whole system to a halt if digital ID gets forced on me. I don't care if I have to write a script that's going to trade bitcoin 800 times a second on 12 different exchanges, I don't care if I have to make my tax return 200,000 pages long and deliberately reorder the stack so that every single sheet is out of order, and it's all in a font that was deliberately chosen to be incompatible with OCR systems. If the US government will let me submit my tax returns in Farsi, Urdu, or Esperanto, or some other obscure language that the IRS would need to hire someone to translate, I will, just to add all of the absolute maximum pain, inefficiency, and suffering into this process.
Keep pushing this shit on people who don't want it. Malicious compliance is like reflected DDoS attacks with huge asymmetric I/O sizes: I alone can easily force the government to waste 10,000+ hours of effort for each hour I put in, and what's more, I can and will write tutorials, open source all of this, and advertise it everywhere if digital ID does get forced on society.
Problem with this? Stop pushing digital ID or start pushing to let me renounce my American citizenship without posessing another citizenship.
Seems to me, the whole reason ID cards have photos on is because they get lost/stolen/borrowed all the time.
Even if the government had the inclination to run a big national IT project so I could use zero knowledge proofs to verify my age for pornhub by scanning my driving license NFC chip, they'd still end up needing a webcam face check to make sure I wasn't some kid using dad's driving license. At which point the privacy angle becomes a joke anyway.
The idea of a completely anonymous citizen that can bank, buy, and talk with others with full control of what other people know about them is pretty much a modern invention and is slowly disappearing again and society adapts to a technological world.
That is a change in the structure, the unwritten expectations of society, that I agree we should resist that change.
The previously unwritten expectations should be codified into rules that should be followed.
Anyway, a good analogy is photo radar. Speed limits are set knowing everybody speeds. We could now easily enforce them everywhere. But if we do, we need to raise them to an appropriate level, not the "we know you're breaking them" level. Same with what you're saying about privacy, as the cost of invading it goes down, we need different controls, we can't just be cool with it because it was always hypothetically possible to hire a private investigator to stalk someone.
Somehow I feel the same about all the privacy discussions. Are people really understanding and would be impacted in the same why by privacy issues or is this just a fight between various interests with no connection with the actual people?
To give an (extreme) example: without social networks elections will be influenced by newspapers and television. Would "the actual person" be much better of because he is influenced "by different people"?
Sometimes I wonder how it would be if some things would be less private. (for example if wealth information would be less private, would it be harder for some people to do "dubious stuff", from straight illegal, to huge bonuses, etc.). I mean look at open source - is open source a result of "let's keep everything private and separate" idea or exactly the opposite... ?
We do. Approved half a decade ago - https://www.sae.org/news/2019/04/eu-to-mandate-intelligent-s...
With this in mind, outright calling people that notice this gaslighters is immature. Make your point or don't.
Anyone trying to convince you there is no difference between the two states is trying to make you ignore that difference in the world, and convince you that your perception of that difference is faulty or mistaken.
How is that not gaslighting?
But - the difference in effect is that, under the old system, the government could not immediately get a summary of that information from everyone in the village, and do so without possibility of word getting back to you. Nor could a prospective employer. Or a bank manager. Or someone half-way round the world wanting to scam you out of your life savings. Or someone wanting to run for political office. Or someone wanting to persecute cheaters/unwed mothers/"sexual deviants"/etc... for personal gain.
Yeah, back then your private life might not have been private, strictly speaking. But at least it wasn't for sale, in bulk, at bargain basement prices, to anyone looking for any kind of leverage over you.
The bitter pill to swallow is society needs to learn to tolerate some amount of crime in order to maintain their freedom. They want the government to be all powerful so that it can stop crime before it even happens. They don't want the responsibility for themselves. The responsibility that freedom requires, the responsibility to personally defend themselves when the bad guys come knocking. No, they want to delegate it all to some authorities. They better hope they don't end up as serfs in somebody's fiefdom.
I invite you to live in Haiti for a little while and then come back and let us know how that went for you.
Gotta actually have something worth defending in order to justify risking one's life. A family, a community, a nation. Even if you told me I could bring an entire army with me, I wouldn't step foot there. There's nothing in there for me.
I would go a step further and say that society needs some level of crime in order to gain freedoms, not just keep the ones they have. As a thought experiment, imagine you had a machine that would magically prevent anyone who would violate the law from doing so from the moment its activated for the rest of time. Is there any point in all of history that you think would be a good time to activate that machine? Certainly you would want to avoid activating it any time that slavery was legal. Probably be a good idea to skip the world wars era. Civil rights era would be another good time to avoid. The Troubles wouldn't be a great time either I wouldn't think. And if you believe in the benefits of medical usage of various schedule I drugs, I wouldn't recommend turning it on today either.
Sure, a reduction in crime might be a great thing for society, and there's no telling how many lives would be improved if truly bad people were prevented from doing their crimes. But the flip side of that is I can't think of a single point in history where some group or action was criminalized that later turned out to be something that should not have been so. And I don't have faith that we'd make nearly as much progress on things without people willing to break the law and bring those injustices to our attention.
If you have them "backed" with governmentally issued ID's, they allow the government ID monopoly to continue (with all its claimed faults). If they are instead completely separate they will not be considered "valid" in most situations where ID's are required.
Then the author warn against the whole idea of having one, single, strong identifier connected to your person at all, and urges for the option of creating multiple identities.
In almost all circumstances where identification is required, the whole point of requiring ID falls apart of you can create a new one whenever you want. We can of course argue that the whole surveillance society is wrong. KYC requirements, no fly lists, credit scores etc, but any proposed system need to have these in consideration or forever only be applicable in niche environments.
Feels like DID is just keybase.com (pre coin-spam and zoom acquisition) or pgp.mit.edu wrapped in a pyramid scheme.
I'm having a hard time thinking of one such system though.
The “Decentralised” part of DID should give a hint that this is yet another attempt to make crypto relevant to the real world outside of bypassing sanctions, paying for drugs, or extorting hacking victims.
Web 3.0 failed because cryptocurrencies can’t support the high bandwidth and low latency required. So the same people came up with DID, which can tolerate multi-hour transaction delays and storage capacities measured in single-digit kilobytes.
Most of the criticisms against Web 3.0 still apply to DID. It can be impossible to revoke, as the article stated. Which means if grandma’s wallet is hacked, she can be impersonated forever by the hacker, and not even the government can help her with this.
“Yay, censorship resistant!” many will proclaim. (Loudly)
Okay, name me one instance (1) where a citizen of a western country had their identity censored in any sense by their government.
I don't think this is the problem DID is trying to solve, but the article mentions illegal immigrants and stateless people.
Agreed this isn't the problem DID is trying to solve from what I can tell though.
As an aside, it's hard for me to read DID as anything other than disassociative identity disorder
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_identity_disord...
But we still have to trust who enforces the protocol. If we rely on trusts and exchanges to any degree, for example, to enable faster, more convenient transactions, or for user experience, then those trusts (banks) cannot be running off with the customer deposits like BitConnect and FTX did. The trust should be insured and should have to follow normal bank and currency exchange regulations. When you add in all the banking infrastructure that would be needed to bring cryptocurrencies up to speed we'd end up with a clunkier version of what we have (we already have fast digital banking, and cash is already anonymous and instant).
Regarding crypto for content chains: Basically the same ideas, if certain peers are trusted to host, serve, and/or broker content in some way, how do you trust those parties, or if there are content "vaults" off-chain to enable faster access to data, how do we know it wasn't tampered with off-chain? Can't store it on chain feasibly either, especially if the content is say full-length films.
I think blockchain for both cryptocurrencies and content chains is better suited for smaller peer networks where you know you can trust the node hosts and the cryptography is used more for keeping nodes in sync, and for lower-level security, not as a replacement for trust. Or if you don't trust the node hosts, then the trusted party is whoever maintains the "peer list" - but that's just a road toward what our Federal Reserve, or our Wikipedia, can already do much better with consumer banking and open-source contributions (respectively).
Eugene Shvidler‘s sanctioning by the UK poisoned his identity. A UK-US dual citizen living in Britain who had Russian business dealings.
The sanctions are devastating to personal freedom. Beyond the direct financial impact, they make it very difficult to travel, engage in charity or use digital goods.
You might argue he deserved it for making money in Russia, but the lack of due process is astounding.
His commercial behaviour predates any legal prohibition and he didn’t get to argue his case in front of a judge/jury before a punishment was installed.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jul/19/sanctions-regime...
They’re poor tools as substitutes for criminal penalties for local residents.
He's a dual-citizen and presumably has his identifying papers on hand.
To quote Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Shvidler#Sanctions
Shvidler's sanctions take the form of a worldwide asset freeze,
and transport sanctions; they do not affect his British citizenship.
The problem with these rulings isn’t so much that no punishment is deserved, but that a government minister / civil service employee can declare somebody guilty. The only recourse is pursuing legal action to prove your own innocence.
This discourse is (very specifically!) about identity papers, not sanctions or any other form of government use and abuse of power.
It’s faithful to the original topic because strong government identity assists state actors who pursue those outcomes.
It's all a bit "temporarily embarrassed billionaire"
VCs have credentialStatus, the id property of which is supposed to be a URI resolving to an RDF defined object dictating the status.
This means the issuer can just update the entity living behind that URI to revoke bad credentials.
That's the opposite if the "distributed" in DID, at least in the sense that the pro-Web-3.0 crypto fans are claiming.
VC is an extension built on top of DID. It's not decentralized Verifiable Credentials, it's just Verifiable Credentials.
The entire article is about VC, and refers to VC as DID (which is also what you're wrongly doing).
It's like criticizing the collective web standard based on REST. REST is not the web.
Also, the part that makes VC decentralized is the alternative (OIDC authorization code flow). VC doesn't require the issuer for verification. (So basically the user has control over attestation of information about their identity, not some third party)
That means even though the Gov issued you an ID they can't track every time you have your credentials verified.. it works exactly like a physical ID. It's issued by the government, but the government isn't there every time you need to show ID. Some might consider that an invasion of privacy if they were.
Er, no.[1]
1) Identity is not supposed to be a secret, it is merely who you claim to be. It is no more secret than someone's name. Somewhat similar to the public key in a public key cryptosystem.
2) Authentication is the proving that who you claim to be is actually who you are. Many systems fail or don't even perform this step. Failure to do this causes wrong attribution of problems, it is why identity theft is not a failure of the victim but of the provider: a bank just took identity as if it was authentication and gave an unauthenticated user invalid access
3) Authorization: does the person who we've authenticated to be the person they claim to be actually have permissions to do what they're attempting to do. Not everyone with legitimate access to a system has the authorization to do everything. For example, maybe you can read a file, but not modify it.
My weight, height, eye color should only be as public as i make it. Thats all part of my identity.
A democratic State is owned by their Citizens, formally at least, so only Citizens can identify other Citizens. Not really a monopoly but a safeguard not to be bannable by Google ID because some "terms violation" with no appeal.
For really decentralized systems the classic chain-of-trust model is more than enough IF people really invest in it.
Having looked into it a little bit, web of trust (in the word of mouth / paper form) is already a legal proof of identity.
It was legalized again after WW2, and government ID made optional again rather than mandatory, because the people that forced mandatory IDs on everyone were literally the Nazis. (Related previous history : factory owners and workers.)
So looks like it's a matter of preservation of fundamental rights to insist on using web of trust rather than ID... and most specifically a question of everyday(ish) practice, so the question is how to best push back against the normalization of mandatory IDs ? (In which countries can you sue an administration / a business for refusing to work with you because you refused to provide them an ID ? Does it need to be escalated to civil disobedience and laws changed ? Other options ?)
Of note : this is perhaps only a step in the "Police State-ification" of our societies. At some point, you didn't have a fixed first name / surname / address. But then (for instance) Hausmann demolished your neighborhood, made one more legible to the state instead, and next time the (Paris Commune) riots happened, they failed. It also made you easier to tax, but also brought better sanitation and "foreign" firefighters and ambulance drivers could actually quickly find you. The question is : how much (by definition, unnatural) state legibility is too much, how little is too little, and how to maintain homeostasis in the right range ?