[throwawaythrow1]

It's interesting that no one here has yet mentioned the UK government system "Verify". Fundamentally there are different authentication mechanisms and idealogies at work, but it's the same UK CESG GPG implementation as Verify. I genuinely wonder if the US people understand the privacy implications of a central authenticating party as opposed to many federated ones?

[Edmond]

Yeah I think USDS is taking motivation from Verify.

I actually contacted the Verify folks about leveraging a privacy-preserving approached as outlined here: https://www.cipheredtrust.com/doc/

I believe they were involved in some sort of porn regulation effort launched in the house of commons with a lot of privacy implication, a mechanism as described above would address all of that privacy problem.

[toomuchtodo]

USDS does take motivation from and works with the UK version of the USDS.

Source: Interviewed with USDS.