The Government Internet ID Proposal

An anonymous reader writes "Is it the beginning of government tracking? An expert on electronic privacy walks through the possibilities and perils of a national online security system run, in part, by the US Department of Homeland Security."

Thank god you're reading slashdot

[iluvcapra]

...Where a link to an article about computer credentials can become an 800-count thread where people don't talk about the article, and prefer to spin yarns about Hangar 18 conspiracies all the while claiming the exact opposite of what's actually going on.

“That’s what a lot of people feared — that the government was going to take REAL ID and put it on the Internet and be able to track everybody’s Internet activity,” Stepanovich said.

That is not what’s contained in the NSTIC proposal, to the relief of privacy advocacy groups.

The government has set out principles — chief among them “choice, efficiency, security and privacy” — more than mechanics. But the basic idea is that you could have your offline identity verified online by a company of your choosing. That company would then provide you with a single credential you could then present (when you don’t want to be anonymous online) to Amazon, or VA.gov, instead of having to re-establish that you are who you say you are with every online transaction.

The device carrying your credential — a flash drive, a cellphone, a smart card of some kind — would authenticate itself, rather than referring Amazon to the company that vouches for you. Amazon would know the buyer was secure, and the credential would know it was communicating with a bookseller, but the authentication provider would never learn that you just bought Bob Woodward’s new book.

You can see why private industry would hate this proposal: it robs third parties of the ability to collect advertising and customer data through user authentication. So naturally they'll use scaremongering and useful idiots civil libertarians to claim this isn't what it is, and that we're much better off with a completely private system with no rules as to who can collect what data about what.

Re:Dupe -- yes. Good to repeat often.

[icebike]

More importantly, make sure they read AT LEAST THIS FAR:

The government has set out principles — chief among them “choice, efficiency, security and privacy” — more than mechanics. But the basic idea is that you could have your offline identity verified online by a company of your choosing. That company would then provide you with a single credential you could then present (when you don’t want to be anonymous online) to Amazon, or VA.gov, instead of having to re-establish that you are who you say you are with every online transaction.
The device carrying your credential — a flash drive, a cellphone, a smart card of some kind — would authenticate itself, rather than referring Amazon to the company that vouches for you. Amazon would know the buyer was secure, and the credential would know it was communicating with a bookseller, but the authentication provider would never learn that you just bought Bob Woodward’s new book. In this way, all of the parties involved would never freely communicate with each other, preventing precisely the web of information that you probably don’t want anyone — private company or government agency — to track.

In short it is a strictly voluntary program of obtaining authentication credentials which only YOU say what you share with each. Like your PGP signature with a somewhat more reliable web of trust than some guy in Slovenia that signed your key.

Seriously, you can tell the author simply skimmed, and never read the actual government release on this idea, which can be found in pdf form here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/NSTICstrategy_041511.pdf [whitehouse.gov]

The biggest problem I see is the mentioned "Mission Creep", where such an ID becomes mandatory in order to purchase anything on line. I could easily see that happening at the insistence of credit card companies.

Re:The government can't do anything right?

[dkleinsc]

I haven't seen the good old anarcho-capitalist argument in a while, but it's easy to take apart.

Based on your declared philosophy, your desire no taxes to exist, because any taxes that did exist would be an unjust theft. Therefor, the government can't do anything, because in a capitalist economy anything that anybody does is done either for themselves or in exchange for money, and you've just made sure that the government has no money, making them just another guy on the block. Ergo, your tax-free country has no functional government whatsoever.

If the government doesn't exist or is in the very least rendered completely impotent due to its lack of funds, then the capitalist side of your ideal world also falls apart, because I make a deal with you to buy, say, 10 bushels of apples for 1 ounce of gold, and when you give me the apples the economically rational thing to do is shoot you and keep the gold. And by making many such deals, I eventually acquire both enough stuff and gold to be able to raise my own private army, and before you know it we've got a bunch of warlords with armies running around trying to slaughter each other.

Even if you don't make any bad deals with people, you still have to deal with the large number of people who don't have anything of value to start with who can and will do what it takes to survive. So at the very least, you end up with large hordes of bandits running around trying to steal stuff from whoever has it.

With that being my other option, I'll take paying taxes. Nobody likes paying taxes, but it sure beats the alternative.