Thursday, November 14, 2013

The Federal Internet Identity Service

I have been doing some learning about Trust and Identity on the internet recently, particularly the new web-style standards like OpenID, Information Cards, etc. This got me thinking (dangerous, I know)...

What if the US Government acted as trusted 3rd party? They could assign a public/private key pair to every citizen (almost like a social security number) in order to provide verification services.
Maybe they could even offer something like an OpenId server as well.

If every citizen had a secret private key, that would enable you to digitally sign anything and anyone could verify it with a high degree of trust. In fact, verifying someone's identity would be as simple as checking their signature with the government service.


Then again, pretty sure no one trusts the government except me...

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