[Spivak]

What are you talking about? The government gets to cheat and use the IRL ID verification they do already for licenses.

* You create your account as part of your license renewal and have a normal-ass login. As part of that your account is manually marked as being 18+ (or just your age) by the person behind the counter.

* The government publishes a few public certs which will be used to verify.

* Then you go to your account page and click the button to generate a certificate signed by one of the government's private keys. The cert is valid for say 7 days.

* You upload the cert to the website you want to access and the website validates it.

Done. You make it illegal to provide your tokens to minors like it's illegal to provide booze to minors. Good enough for government work. It's literally just an EV cert.

The problem gets a lot easier when you have a country wide IRL ID system already in place and can write laws.

[dylan604]

> The problem gets a lot easier when you have a country wide IRL ID system already in place and can write laws.

every time a country wide ID comes up, people freak the fuck out about state's rights and it being a power grab. people are already freaking out about RealID. it will take a very authoritarian system to force this through, yet it's the supporters of that leader that are the most vocally against it.

[Terr_]

I don't think we can really trust in all those years of stated preferences, now that the revealed ones are so different. They folks who often say "States' rights" have always been the most willing to violate them if it gets them what they want.

Meanwhile, the rest of us should have new fears of a National ID feature. Republicans in administrator-roles recently started corrupting federal databases, fraudulently marking living people as dead [0] in order to kill their accounts, while firing the people who pointed out it was flagrantly illegal.

It doesn't require any imagination for the same bad administrators to illegally disable National ID logins because you posted something that hurt the cult-leader's feelings. The feature cannot be made safe if the framework is still open to crooks.

[0] https://www.cbpp.org/blog/trump-and-doge-claim-power-to-fals...

[Henchman21]

Hard disagree. The Right Wing Noise Machine freaks out. That is not what people generally think. That’s what they’re TOLD to think, by people who have an agenda to sew discontent.

[thfuran]

When you say "license renewal", you're referring to a driver's license? Not everyone has one of those.