The silver lining is that by the time this project goes through study after study, development, testing, and finally deployment 5-10 years will have passed and the Internet will fundamentally change in ways that either makes this instantly irrelevant or impossible to enforce.
We need a publicly-controlled identity infrastructure that's compatible with the Internet. The problem isn't that internet ID is somehow evil, but rather the government.
We are going to end up with something sooner or later.
The fact is that we want (and can) enter into contracts on the Internet. In order to enforce contracts we must have identities. Since the Government (specifically the judiciary) enforces contracts, this means that we must be entering into these contracts under Government-managed identities.
Currently we acquire and prove this Government-managed identity using an ad-hoc, decentralised, system with much duplication. I can use a passport or my driver's license or my birth certificate or perhaps some utility bills or some combination. This causes various problems, including fraud and waste.
If two parties mutually choose to enter into a contract over the Internet, and this contract is to be enforced by the judiciary, then it would be ideal for them to be able to verify each others' legal entities and authorisation. I think that properly implemented this could eliminate a large amount of online fraud.
Nothing about the principle of such a system inherently creates privacy problems, since when parties enter into a contract they already expect to reveal their identities to each other, and nothing would necessarily be forcing people to reveal their identities in any other situation, just the same as is the case at the moment.T here is a risk of a slippery slope of course; I can't deny that.
There's no reason such a system has to be centralised, though. X.509 certificates would work fine, for example, issued at the same time as a birth certificate, with each local office as a CA.
Unfortunately, the problem is with implementation. I don't think that any government is competent enough to put a system together that does meet privacy requirements, and there are too many self-interested parties who would influence and corrupt the design of such a system.
Sorry the Engadget piece is full of FUD and light on details. I was at the event and covered it for Wired.com.
This initiative is coming out of NIST inside the Commerce department, with smart folks there who know this 1) a tough problem, 2) needs to be an open standard and 3) that the feds role here is best as being the ones who convene the people in the room.
There's got to be a better way to prove you are real and legit, than giving some company the right to pull a sub-one dollar sum of money from your bank account and then confirming that to them online.
OpenID is fine, so far as it has gone, but right now it looks like Facebook is winning the war for identity and authentication. Having the feds behind an open standard hardly means you are getting the Real ID of the internet.
You've got a few choices of who's going to do this in the future. The feds, your bank, Facebook, PayPal or your mobile phone carrier. Personally, I'd prefer an open system where I have my choice of 10 providers all using open standards, than having to rely on multiple closed systems like giant bank or Facebook or Paypal.
The current system is full of waste and inefficiency, and the possibility of fraud.
As such people using it take great care and don't trust it.
This is actually a hidden benefit of the system.
If you introduce an ID that everyone 'trusts' implicitly (esp. relating to online commerce) then the scope for fraud widens greatly. You can assume the system will get corrupted because of the great benefits accruing to those who can breach it.
The vast majority of contracts entered don't need much; if it does go wrong, usually little damage is done. As the risk profile increases, then so does the amount of verification, purchasing a business requires reams of documentation, an iPhone cover shipped out of hong kong can stay anonymous.
As IT people, we all naturally love a world that fits into a relational model, one where all people have a unique ID. As citizens, however, we have to resist this because of the lopsided risk/reward profile for individuals. In cases if centralised ID, you gain a little but lose a lot.
> In order to enforce contracts we must have identities.
In theory - no, we don't, except for ephemeral one-time identities which are actually anonymous.
In real world - yes, (un)?fortunately we must. Still, there's no reason to require that anyone must have one and only one identity, and this identity must be state-issued.
Profile: Sebastian Marshall. Internet ID 353-808-A331. Known aliases: "lionhearted". Primary contact info: [email protected]
Political positions: A believer in liberty, pro-international travel and open borders, tends towards mild hostility towards regulation. Generally law-abiding.
Friendliness to American Interests Rating (FAIR): 72/100
That 353-808-A331 is the lower 64 bits of your ipv6 address anytime you do anything online. You won't have to login anywhere! If you need to do something important you'll just sign with your private key and the gov will graciously provide the public key keyserver. I've been trying to tell that to everybody for years.
Your Fair Score is actually your TerrorScore. Would you like to sort social media profiles by TerrorScore? They will undoubtedly use Google PageRank like Eigenvectors to calculate it based on who you're linked to and your ipv6 traffic profile.
I hate to be an Ipv6 cynic but after all, Ipv4 NAT is the best thing that ever happened to online anonymity.
I would like to see more local (at the town level) shared networks. Something like cheap wi-fi base stations (really cheap!) that could link up a local area and have a good directory of what material people host to be shared, local bulletin boards, etc.
I live in a rural area and several of my friends are going the self sufficient route and my wife and I are at least putting in enough solar panels to generate about 3/4 of the electricity that we currently use.
The country I live in (USA) is in rapid decline and it would be naive to believe that all utilities and infrastructure will stay online 100% of the time. Having a useful local "localnet" would be a good idea, and could be fun also as a community activity. Perhaps libraires would be good hubs and meeting places to set this up. Even better to also get the local police, fire department and city government involved: something to bring the whole community together.
I don't understand, will this ID be required to connect to the Internet? If not (say it's only used like SSNs are now) I don't see how starting your own internet would help.
Can someone explain to me how this post is still getting so many upvotes? Unless I'm badly mistaken the ID system will not be in any way mandatory to connect to the Internet. Even if it becomes de facto mandatory (e.g. e-commerce sites deciding to require it) making a second internet wouldn't change anything...
This article is pretty light on details. Here's a quote from the White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt:
Schmidt stressed today that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain possible on the Internet. "I don't have to get a credential, if I don't want to," he said. There's no chance that "a centralized database will emerge," and "we need the private sector to lead the implementation of this," he said.
They said something similar to this about the proposed UK national ID system, then shortly afterwards unveiled plans for an incredibly centralised system with a slow transition leading from voluntary to mandatory. Fortunately these plans were recently scrapped.
I think the big picture here is that various governments for a variety of reasons foresee difficult times ahead and are trying, falteringly and often swimming against public opinion, to move towards a state of affairs where they have a greater degree of authoritarian control than was the case in the past - perhaps similar to China, which may become the new model state/economy which others seek to emulate.
If 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.
I 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."
This headline is actually pretty misleading. From what I've seen of the project, it is not about the government issuing online identities. Rather they've realized that people already have identities from services like Facebook and Google as well as banks.
This project is aimed at making it possible for people to interact with government agencies using identities they already have. Some interactions require very little security and knowledge of who a person is (leaving a comment here for example) while others (paying your taxes) require quite a bit.
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.
The new german ID is supposed to serve for online idenfication (only if the user wants to). The accompanying closed-source "ID app" was broken on the day of its release, they were not handling SSL certificates properly.
Most South Korean discussion sites and forums more or less require you to supply your national ID number before you can register.
Until recently, a lot of SK banks also used ActiveX plugins for "security" instead of SSL, making it basically impossible to use anything other than Internet Explorer. I get the impression this is changing.
Norway has a unified authentication scheme for government sites, but that's as far as it goes. --If the US wants to do that, fine, but if they think private sites are really going to go for it, they're dreaming.
I wouldn't trust the government to handle identification across multiple sites any more than I trust Facebook or Google.
Note that if [generic scary three letter agency] wants to spy on you it's already quite easy for them to do so (see FISA, CALEA, NSLs, Sugar Grove, etc).
I 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.
The trouble is who has both ownership over and is able to exercise control over your identity data? I do like your idea of using licensing as a possible mechanism.
It's one thing to say the government will host the ID data for free, for every American. (Or at least every American they deem worthy of a proof-of-online-identity certificate.)
But possession is often viewed as 9/10ths of the law. Calling it "my" data is misleading if they really mean "data about me."
Would I like to have a permanent, personal and authenticated key value store to in conjunction in some interpersonal or person-machine transactions? Absolutely.
But I don't see how having a government issued identity solves the problem of how my browsing data might be misused elsewhere.
It would seem that it only adds more personally-identifiable metadata that could be intercepted, tracked, or stolen along the way.
How would such an ID system enable the creation and enforcement of a do-not-track list? That sounds appealing, but how does my identity being tracked stop me from being tracked?
To those who would say "it'll be optional - you won't need one to search Google, check you email, etc." I point out that there are already huge efforts to track people across domains and build profiles of them. Private companies are ALREADY slobbering over this, and paying good money for even anonymized datasets. If this system goes into practice, it will simply be good business for websites to require your ID as part of the signup process. Also, open networks (like attwifi, etc.) may begin to require these as well. They could build nice juicy datasets of the Starbucks laptop crowd, and believe me they'd be hot selling items.
That's probably a best case scenario by the way. How long until it's mandated that your ISP has your internet ID, and public networks (attwifi, etc.) are required to get it to let you out into the internet?
This 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.
An individual learns of a new and more secure way to
access online services using a strong credential
provided by a trustworthy service provider.
Running this past my parents was met with a blank stare, followed by "what?". And they're significantly better about their online habits than most people, especially the ones they're targeting with a system like this. Anyone interested in identity online already has several means of proving they are who they say they are, and can generate X.509 certificates to provide ridiculous-quality proof for individual transactions.
While I fully expect something along these lines to exist eventually, I'm honestly scared by the sunshine-and-ponies descriptions in that document. They're also making enormous claims of universal interoperability that reek to me of XML/SOAP/etc evangelization - it never works that well.
This is a waste of time. Any good intelligence organization can already gain most or all or probably too much of the information they need from online actions, transactions, networks, posts/comments, protocol sniffing, ISP/ad network data, re-routing/copying traffic, social hacking, infected pcs, etc. And if you are encrypting, proxying, spoofing then you are Anonymous and already on the radar.
So far as I can tell what is actually being discussed is an official certification scheme for third-party identity providers. This would make it more feasible for third-party IDs to be accepted in contexts where they're currently not. I don't see how that can be reasonably characterized as a "unique Internet ID for all Americans", but whatevs.
This was a minor plot device in the book Ender's Game, where two super-intelligent children needed to borrow their father's network citizen access to post on the forums about their ideas. Obviously this isn't what the administration is suggesting, but it seems like a dangerous first step. I don't like it.
I'm happy with an optional OpenID-like system for stronger authentication and convenient access to account logins, but the system should be 100% optional. There's no way I'm going to trust anyone with the ability to masquerade as me through a closed system. Imagine using Facebook Connect or Google to log in to your bank. Facebook has no business involving me and my bank. It is between me and my bank only. And there is no reason for me to risk my full, unlimited online identity to a single provider like Facebook or Google. The government also has no business knowing who my bank or email provider of choice are.
There 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 unregulated GLOBAL internet was possible.
This view might look naive and hype-provoking and indeed the internet proved to be very robust on the big scale so far. However I have read recently about the very limited visa regulations for travelling around the most of the world in the 19th century. kind of puts things into perspective.
[+] [-] flyt|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Alex3917|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rlpb|15 years ago|reply
The fact is that we want (and can) enter into contracts on the Internet. In order to enforce contracts we must have identities. Since the Government (specifically the judiciary) enforces contracts, this means that we must be entering into these contracts under Government-managed identities.
Currently we acquire and prove this Government-managed identity using an ad-hoc, decentralised, system with much duplication. I can use a passport or my driver's license or my birth certificate or perhaps some utility bills or some combination. This causes various problems, including fraud and waste.
If two parties mutually choose to enter into a contract over the Internet, and this contract is to be enforced by the judiciary, then it would be ideal for them to be able to verify each others' legal entities and authorisation. I think that properly implemented this could eliminate a large amount of online fraud.
Nothing about the principle of such a system inherently creates privacy problems, since when parties enter into a contract they already expect to reveal their identities to each other, and nothing would necessarily be forcing people to reveal their identities in any other situation, just the same as is the case at the moment.T here is a risk of a slippery slope of course; I can't deny that.
There's no reason such a system has to be centralised, though. X.509 certificates would work fine, for example, issued at the same time as a birth certificate, with each local office as a CA.
Unfortunately, the problem is with implementation. I don't think that any government is competent enough to put a system together that does meet privacy requirements, and there are too many self-interested parties who would influence and corrupt the design of such a system.
[+] [-] rsingel|15 years ago|reply
This initiative is coming out of NIST inside the Commerce department, with smart folks there who know this 1) a tough problem, 2) needs to be an open standard and 3) that the feds role here is best as being the ones who convene the people in the room.
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/01/obama-strategy-for-on...
There's got to be a better way to prove you are real and legit, than giving some company the right to pull a sub-one dollar sum of money from your bank account and then confirming that to them online.
OpenID is fine, so far as it has gone, but right now it looks like Facebook is winning the war for identity and authentication. Having the feds behind an open standard hardly means you are getting the Real ID of the internet.
You've got a few choices of who's going to do this in the future. The feds, your bank, Facebook, PayPal or your mobile phone carrier. Personally, I'd prefer an open system where I have my choice of 10 providers all using open standards, than having to rely on multiple closed systems like giant bank or Facebook or Paypal.
[+] [-] dantheman|15 years ago|reply
I think this type of attitude really hurts in a democracy. Every year people push bad ideas, and we must fight back against them.
[+] [-] brc|15 years ago|reply
As such people using it take great care and don't trust it.
This is actually a hidden benefit of the system.
If you introduce an ID that everyone 'trusts' implicitly (esp. relating to online commerce) then the scope for fraud widens greatly. You can assume the system will get corrupted because of the great benefits accruing to those who can breach it.
The vast majority of contracts entered don't need much; if it does go wrong, usually little damage is done. As the risk profile increases, then so does the amount of verification, purchasing a business requires reams of documentation, an iPhone cover shipped out of hong kong can stay anonymous.
As IT people, we all naturally love a world that fits into a relational model, one where all people have a unique ID. As citizens, however, we have to resist this because of the lopsided risk/reward profile for individuals. In cases if centralised ID, you gain a little but lose a lot.
[+] [-] fleitz|15 years ago|reply
Also, contract enforcement can occur with out ID, look at bringing suit under a John Doe or Richard Roe.
In the real world we have drivers licenses yet fraud still happens.
[+] [-] tarkin2|15 years ago|reply
A centralized system requires hardly any effort to gain a detailed profile of you = dangerous.
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] drdaeman|15 years ago|reply
In theory - no, we don't, except for ephemeral one-time identities which are actually anonymous.
In real world - yes, (un)?fortunately we must. Still, there's no reason to require that anyone must have one and only one identity, and this identity must be state-issued.
[+] [-] Strilanc|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lionhearted|15 years ago|reply
Political positions: A believer in liberty, pro-international travel and open borders, tends towards mild hostility towards regulation. Generally law-abiding.
Friendliness to American Interests Rating (FAIR): 72/100
[+] [-] narrator|15 years ago|reply
Your Fair Score is actually your TerrorScore. Would you like to sort social media profiles by TerrorScore? They will undoubtedly use Google PageRank like Eigenvectors to calculate it based on who you're linked to and your ipv6 traffic profile.
I hate to be an Ipv6 cynic but after all, Ipv4 NAT is the best thing that ever happened to online anonymity.
[+] [-] jrockway|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|15 years ago|reply
I live in a rural area and several of my friends are going the self sufficient route and my wife and I are at least putting in enough solar panels to generate about 3/4 of the electricity that we currently use.
The country I live in (USA) is in rapid decline and it would be naive to believe that all utilities and infrastructure will stay online 100% of the time. Having a useful local "localnet" would be a good idea, and could be fun also as a community activity. Perhaps libraires would be good hubs and meeting places to set this up. Even better to also get the local police, fire department and city government involved: something to bring the whole community together.
[+] [-] colanderman|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colanderman|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] feawgo|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bigsassy|15 years ago|reply
Schmidt stressed today that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain possible on the Internet. "I don't have to get a credential, if I don't want to," he said. There's no chance that "a centralized database will emerge," and "we need the private sector to lead the implementation of this," he said.
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20027800-281.html#ixzz1AZD...
[+] [-] motters|15 years ago|reply
I think the big picture here is that various governments for a variety of reasons foresee difficult times ahead and are trying, falteringly and often swimming against public opinion, to move towards a state of affairs where they have a greater degree of authoritarian control than was the case in the past - perhaps similar to China, which may become the new model state/economy which others seek to emulate.
[+] [-] redial|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sportsTAKES|15 years ago|reply
And saying there is no chance a centralized database will emerge is impossible to predict.
And what purpose does the ID serve if it's not able to be referenced via some sort of data base.
The White House's comments are nonsensical.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|15 years ago|reply
Cool. They've got the OK from me. It could turn out to be neat, and so long as it's optional I'm not worried.
[+] [-] motters|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Quarrelsome|15 years ago|reply
The major issues were:
* taking biometric information from the entire population including fingerprints.
* linking that information to an online identity
* joining up all government databases on said identities (health, law enforcement etc) enabling departments to cross reference information
* plans to use this identity as your only gateway to be able to receive a job, receive benefits etc
* plans to allow certain individuals at any moment to "quarantine" identities (preventing work, benefits etc)
The entire system looked so open to abuse it was scary. I'm v.glad we're rid of it.
[+] [-] j_baker|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brown9-2|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bretpiatt|15 years ago|reply
http://www.bretpiatt.com/blog/2009/07/25/cloud-computing-mak...
[+] [-] daveman692|15 years ago|reply
This project is aimed at making it possible for people to interact with government agencies using identities they already have. Some interactions require very little security and knowledge of who a person is (leaving a comment here for example) while others (paying your taxes) require quite a bit.
[+] [-] thwarted|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abrahamsen|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aw3c2|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drinian|15 years ago|reply
Until recently, a lot of SK banks also used ActiveX plugins for "security" instead of SSL, making it basically impossible to use anything other than Internet Explorer. I get the impression this is changing.
[+] [-] tallanvor|15 years ago|reply
I wouldn't trust the government to handle identification across multiple sites any more than I trust Facebook or Google.
[+] [-] crocowhile|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trotsky|15 years ago|reply
http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/ns_tic.pdf
Note that if [generic scary three letter agency] wants to spy on you it's already quite easy for them to do so (see FISA, CALEA, NSLs, Sugar Grove, etc).
[+] [-] ulugbek|15 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] shotgun|15 years ago|reply
It's one thing to say the government will host the ID data for free, for every American. (Or at least every American they deem worthy of a proof-of-online-identity certificate.)
But possession is often viewed as 9/10ths of the law. Calling it "my" data is misleading if they really mean "data about me."
Would I like to have a permanent, personal and authenticated key value store to in conjunction in some interpersonal or person-machine transactions? Absolutely.
But I don't see how having a government issued identity solves the problem of how my browsing data might be misused elsewhere.
It would seem that it only adds more personally-identifiable metadata that could be intercepted, tracked, or stolen along the way.
How would such an ID system enable the creation and enforcement of a do-not-track list? That sounds appealing, but how does my identity being tracked stop me from being tracked?
[+] [-] nlavezzo|15 years ago|reply
That's probably a best case scenario by the way. How long until it's mandated that your ISP has your internet ID, and public networks (attwifi, etc.) are required to get it to let you out into the internet?
[+] [-] davidcuddeback|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacoblyles|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Twisol|15 years ago|reply
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/11/your-internet-drive...
[+] [-] Groxx|15 years ago|reply
>Envision It!
An individual learns of a new and more secure way to access online services using a strong credential provided by a trustworthy service provider.
Running this past my parents was met with a blank stare, followed by "what?". And they're significantly better about their online habits than most people, especially the ones they're targeting with a system like this. Anyone interested in identity online already has several means of proving they are who they say they are, and can generate X.509 certificates to provide ridiculous-quality proof for individual transactions.
While I fully expect something along these lines to exist eventually, I'm honestly scared by the sunshine-and-ponies descriptions in that document. They're also making enormous claims of universal interoperability that reek to me of XML/SOAP/etc evangelization - it never works that well.
(Link thanks to trotsky: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2086135 )
[+] [-] younata|15 years ago|reply
After that, it becomes unconstitutional, far as I know.
So, in other words, it's unconstitutional, because it won't be used only for commerce.
[+] [-] forensic|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drawkbox|15 years ago|reply
This Internet ID would just be a show piece.
[+] [-] contextfree|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkokelley|15 years ago|reply
I'm happy with an optional OpenID-like system for stronger authentication and convenient access to account logins, but the system should be 100% optional. There's no way I'm going to trust anyone with the ability to masquerade as me through a closed system. Imagine using Facebook Connect or Google to log in to your bank. Facebook has no business involving me and my bank. It is between me and my bank only. And there is no reason for me to risk my full, unlimited online identity to a single provider like Facebook or Google. The government also has no business knowing who my bank or email provider of choice are.
[+] [-] knowledgesale|15 years ago|reply
This view might look naive and hype-provoking and indeed the internet proved to be very robust on the big scale so far. However I have read recently about the very limited visa regulations for travelling around the most of the world in the 19th century. kind of puts things into perspective.