Digital identity cards: Estonia takes the plunge

The failure modes Scheier describes would still be applicable, of course. But as a developer, I might still appreciate having the system available. I couldn't trust its responses beyond a reasonable doubt. But still it might be valuable to have some extra degree of certainty about a user's identity, in some scenarios.

Let's say, for example, I'm developing an online liquor store. Let's say I accept various forms of payment, some of which don't come with age verification. I might appreciate a simple, unified ID API for that purpose. Granted, it would still be possible for minors to exploit the vulnerabilities Schneier describes and buy alcohol from me. But conceivably, if that happened, the law might grant me immunity, because I checked against the government API and the failure was on the government's part. Which would be a valuable assurance for me as the developer or business owner.

I wish my country emulated this instead of having this corporate conglomerate that takes major cash to let anyone use the same system as is used for banking identification.

At any given time less than half of Americans have valid passports.

Your passport can't really be used for online identification. An ID card can. But this also means your online activity can potentially be tracked. Who will have access to this data and for what purpose will it be used? What control will users have over their data? Lot's of peeople (including me) don't trust the competence or goodwill of our governments over such matters.

But there are also many instances where we readily give up some of our most personal information. For example, a lot of European countries require your fingerprints when you apply for a passport. This is stored as biometric information on the passport. When you travel, some countries will also take your fingerprints before allowing you into their country. Many travellers are happy to do that. So yes, when it comes to privacy and identity we often exhibit contradictory behaviour and opinions.

http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/reading/mckie.html

"The main theme of the two principal Jorj X. McKie stories, Whipping Star and The Dosadi Experiment, is the Bureau of Sabotage, an interesting concept in government that is kind of like a ninja GAO.

The idea is that all governments and other bureaucracies tend to snowball over time, finally becoming juggernauts that crush mere humans unthinkingly. So the Bureau of Sabotage was founded with a legal right to throw wrenches into the gears of bureaucracies. No agency can sabotage the BuSab itself.

So what keeps the BuSab from turning into a juggernaut? Their promotion policy. The way you get promoted is to sabotage your boss."

1) The underlying identity info such as SSN, photo, name, birthdate, etc. Which most governments already have even without this system.

2) A record of each request from a third party to authenticate a user. E.g. if I user my government ID to sign up for Facebook, that signup event will be logged.

Again, it depends on the implementation. The above two would almost certainly be collected in even the most privacy-respecting implementation. But, it's certainly possible to devise an implementation that enables the government to collect far more.

A textbook example of Poe's Law :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

The level of tracking and privacy violations online is already disturbing and downright creepy

This would take it to a whole new level.

There are other bad things possible, for example, I can already see Media Industry lawyers rubbing their hands, tie National ID cards to ISP database and overnight suing people would become easier.

We already have solid methods for identifying ourselves as the same person as we used to be (various public keys, for example), and if we want to establish a consistent identity across multiple contexts/domains, we also have that option. This really doesn't benefit consumers in any way.