61–70 of 76 posts
A centralized federal ID system, I'm sure there's no historical precedent for how this could go wrong.
ID is a basic component of pretty much any functioning bureaucracy. Further, we already have near universal ID at the state level, what about the federal government makes it so much more magically tyrannical than the states?
> Five years later and more than $187 million in government investment later, however, it still hasn’t been widely rolled out. I know anything like this is going to be more complicated than it seems. Integration of lots of legacy systems, of which the federla government is probably about as complicated as it gets, with the most security-sensitive application possible. Still, and I'm really not an expert here, but I a…
$187M = $37M per year At average FAANG salaries with overhead (benefits, space, equipment both desk and datacenter/cloud, internal workplace support functions like Recruiting, IT, HR, ER, DEI...) that's 60 people. That's not many when dealing with multiple massive counterparties. You'll see ratios of non-dev to dev easily 10:1 to 30:1. Yes, they could genuinely spend $187M so far on a project accomplishing only 2 dev…
Yes, there's a solution, it's called one's social security number. If people are fraudulently abusing the social security number system, stealing other people's numbers and so on, then they should be prosecuted for fraud. Implementing a Chinese-style facial recognition and social credit score program in order to keep tabs on everyone is just another authoritarian fantasy project, and government incompetence during th…
Who is doing this?
Also, even the “social credit score” system in China has been greatly overblown and misinterpreted in western media. [0]
[0] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-e...
how about everyone gets a pgp key to establish a long term online identity... kinda like keybase sought to do. Not so great for sending secret messages, but really great for an identity toehold.
- Go to the post office, have ID verified, papers verified, pictures taken, GPG keys created multiple so you can revoke one and leap-frog to another without being in an orphaned state, ID card printed that has a GPG signed PDF417 [1] code on both sides and a color picture.
- Lost card? Go back to post office and have them revoke your card and your active GPG key. Get new card that uses one of your unused GPG public keys that have already been uploaded to the various government servers.
- No RFID, no NFC, no Magstrip, no eco-friendly plastic. Make this thing nearly indestructible and only the PDF417 is used by sensors and can be scanned or photographed by someone paying their taxes or filing other government forms.
- Braille dots along top of card to make it easy to find the card and to show which way to hold and insert card in readers that should also have corresponding braille dots.
> Five years later and more than $187 million in government investment later, however, it still hasn’t been widely rolled out. I know anything like this is going to be more complicated than it seems. Integration of lots of legacy systems, of which the federla government is probably about as complicated as it gets, with the most security-sensitive application possible. Still, and I'm really not an expert here, but I a…
> Or maybe the quote is wrong that it "hasn't been widely rolled out"? I think it's wrong in some senses: Login.gov has been rolled out to the SSA, OSHA, Treasury, RRB, VA, DHS, and quite a few other orgs and agencies. There's no one good metric for these things, but if you measure it by org/agency size and/or budget, Login.gov looks very good. I agree that $187 million is an eye-popping number, and I wish we had the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Or maybe the quote is wrong that it "hasn't been widely rolled out"? I think it's wrong in some senses: Login.gov has been rolled out to the SSA, OSHA, Treasury, RRB, VA, DHS, and quite a few other orgs and agencies. There's no one good metric for these things, but if you measure it by org/agency size and/or budget, Login.gov looks very good. I agree that $187 million is an eye-popping number, and I wish we had the…
Agree with jrochkind1 that it doesn't matter whether it's worth it or not. I suppose chairs and desks for all US Government employees pay for their cost 1000x over, but I would hope people would still not let their costs balloon to more than, say, 2x what they "should" cost by some common-sense metric.
As posted elsewhere in the thread: this is ~$40m/year for an IdP/login scheme for the entire USG (and, increasingly, state and local governments). That's significantly less than the engineering talent at companies like Okta and Authy probably cost each year, even before factoring in overhead and non-engineering roles.
All things considered, this looks like a very efficient use of taxpayer money to me. Particularly since it seems to have been primarily paid for on GS pay grades, not with private contractors.
A centralized federal ID system, I'm sure there's no historical precedent for how this could go wrong.
The problem with historical totalitarian states was that they were totalitarian, not that they had identification. ID is a basic component of pretty much any functioning bureaucracy. Further, we already have near universal ID at the state level, what about the federal government makes it so much more magically tyrannical than the states?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with historical totalitarian states was that they were totalitarian, not that they had identification. ID is a basic component of pretty much any functioning bureaucracy. Further, we already have near universal ID at the state level, what about the federal government makes it so much more magically tyrannical than the states?
Germany had identification record systems before they became totalitarian, when Jews were treated as citizens and decorated veterans of WW1 under the law. A person does not know when their government will become totalitarian and cannot rely on legal solutions to data problems.
Name a government in existence that functions without a central identification infrastructure of some sort. Having ID isn’t what leads to totalitarianism, it is a ubiquitous fact of having a bureaucracy that delivers services to its citizens.
In most instance, having government id is not a harbinger of risk of totalitarianism. There are more important things to focus on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm skeptical of the number that Rettig quotes. I'd like to know where he got those numbers. Also, the code that runs Login.gov is (mostly) in the public domain: https://github.com/18F/identity-idp – anybody with a $2/mo VPS could run the code and do their own load testing.
> If you are getting the error: > > LoadError: cannot load such file -- sassc > > Try make run for a short time, then use Ctrl+C to kill it That's.. confidence making.