[deleted]
Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans
61–70 of 199 posts
Re: Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans
#62I shared my thoughts in detail about this more than a year ago, we should get out in front or as now coming true my prediction was, "As private industry and a world society I hope we can take care of this ourselves before it gets so out of control Congress tries to figure out how to do it and we end up with some horrible mess of a “National ID and Digital Identity Act” that looks at it only from the perspective of the USA and makes it very difficult for non-US citizens to do anything online (as most of the major Internet properties are US based) creating a whole new barrier for 3rd world citizens to overcome."
http://www.bretpiatt.com/blog/2009/07/25/cloud-computing-mak...
Re: Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans
#63If it waddles like a national ID system and quacks like a national ID system, then it's probably a national ID system. Here in the UK we are fortunate to have recently dumped plans for a national ID system. Americans should do the same.
Just out of curiosity, if the national government in the UK doesn't issue IDs, who does? Counties? Cities?
There are identifying documents, such as passports, drivers licenses and credit cards. These are sufficient for any situation where you might need to verify an identity.
Re: Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans
#64If it waddles like a national ID system and quacks like a national ID system, then it's probably a national ID system. Here in the UK we are fortunate to have recently dumped plans for a national ID system. Americans should do the same.
Just out of curiosity, if the national government in the UK doesn't issue IDs, who does? Counties? Cities?
Passports are issued by the UK Passport Office, and driving licenses by the DVLA (Driving & Vehicles Licensing Association). These are both effectively government agencies.
However, as having a passport or a driving license is not compulsory, there were plans to have a national identity card, as is the case in many European countries that would be compulsory for all adults. This has fairly recently been scrapped before it was ever adopted. Partly because the cost ended up being estimated at £18B (US$30B). Quite how a database and some photo cards of 60M people(less if you only include adults) would cost that much is a mystery that only governments can solve!
Re: Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans
#65Is this done anywhere else in the world? It is the scariest of the scary Big Brother measures I've seen recently...
In Spain also.
Re: Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans
#66I can sympathize with discontent about this, but almost nobody has brought up the positive uses of unique Internet ID.
Suppose you want a system where you want to signal to all internet companies that you don't want your browsing data to be harbored without your consent. The ID system would allow the creation and enforcement of such system.
The support for this comes in part because of pressure from the groups who are concerned about privacy and fretting over how their browsing data is used. While infringement of privacy hampers the growth of ecommerce, complete ban on harboring data hurts e-businesses (they won't be able to advertise efficiently). The solution to it is to create a free market: assign everyone a unique id, to which your preferences about harboring date will be assigned. Even better, data associated with that id can be considered proprietary, and users can license it to companies who are willing to pay for it and users can sue companies that infringe on this proprietary data bc courts will recognize it as solely yours. This is a good start if government wants to step in to protect your privacy from the "evil" corporations, while not hindering the growth of e-businesses.
Ideally, you will be protected from corporations who are after your private data. Government, however, will surely continue using it the way you don't want.
Re: Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
A better REPUTATION system (??!!??!!) is the best you could come up with? I cannot think of a less important application of a national ID card. And even in this area, Amazon/Newegg have solved the pretty nicely with the "verified purchaser" tag. How is the national ID card system better? For Serious Stuff (TM) like opening a stock trading account, laws have already been passed to make an all-electronic signup as bind…
I think you are dismissing this on pretty unresolved ground. To claim that Amazon/Newegg solved it with "verified purchaser" is simply on unsubstantiated ground. I could find plenty of serious uses for reputation systems. In fact I would claim that reputation systems is going to be the future of verification.
Please explain why such a "serious" use cannot be implemented with today's technologies. You can trivially ask people to give you their license number and run a lookup to confirm that they're who they claim to be at signup time. Yes, it's not gratis (see publicdata.com). But you stipulated that this is "serious" use, so that shouldn't be a problem.
Re: Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans
#68There are so many incentives for legislators to restrict the internet as we know it today and effectively no lobby to protect it. I am wondering if 10 years from now we are going to have much more "regulation and security" for the networks than now. Not only in the US, on the global scale. Who knows, it might be that the 90s-00s will be remembered as the only period in the human history when the truly free unregulate…
The great firewall existed in the 90's and the 2000's right?
Re: Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans
#69This sounds very Orwellian, but I doubt much will become of this. Based on the statement the article attributes to Locke, it sounds like they're selling it to us as a single sign-on provider. Somehow, I doubt this will become as popular as current single sign-on providers such as Facebook or Google without legislation.
Couldn't they bully the ISPs to force everybody to use it? Seems like we should worry when they set up the groundwork for something like that, and not after the fact.
I don't see how this would be implemented at the ISP level, but maybe that's a failure of my imagination. I'm imagining something similar to Open ID.
With no details about the government's plan for an internet ID, we're left to our imaginations, which probably vary widely from person to person.
Re: Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans
#70Is this done anywhere else in the world? It is the scariest of the scary Big Brother measures I've seen recently...
Yes, Denmark: https://www.nemid.nu/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NemID Most public institutions as well as many private (including the banks) have switched to this system. Our government already know just about everything about us (e.g. few people need to fill out tax forms), so this has not been very controversial. The largest controversy has been with the security.
And that is a very large controversy. Governments can't even get voting machines that a) work correctly and b) are tamper resistant. It scares me to death that the same contract/bidding system that produces the many monstrosities that support a basic right are going to produce this.