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Comment by T-R | Hacker News Reader

Atwood and others have been praising the idea of a centralized identification system for a while, and tying it to a government identification system makes sense, but tying this to the Obama administration could be a marketing disaster. I can already hear Glenn Beck associating it with Nazi Germany and advocating against its use. Similarly, its association with Verizon, AT&T, Paypal, Symantec, and Google is likely to bring its own breed of distrust. This strikes me as a project that doesn't deserve the politicization it's going to get.

This is why we can't have nice things.

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I don't think this is just for the Tin-Foil Hat crowd. Beck is on the extreme "gov't isn't natural, do away with it all!", but the other end of the spectrum is just as nutty in thinking that we can really control the US's corporatist system via the same gov't our big business use to gain their own influence. Am I crazy for not trusting the US to keep Corps. out of our internet?

It's not crazy at all, but it seems we've reached a point in the conversation where we can't produce anything meaningful without it getting drowned out by screams of "Fascism" and "Plutocracy".

I think that both Government and Business stand to benefit from it enough that it's possible that there weren't underhanded motivations involved, or at least that they won't come to fruition.

Underhanded? I agree, most likely not. Created by busybodies though? Highly likely.

EDIT: And I say this because I was reading something about this (can't find the link now) where it said something like the rate of on-line retail is growing and is now a 30 billion dollar business (I might be misremembering the numbers). And we must do something about this to protect it, protect it from fraud and a bunch of other "problems" that were presented like . If things like fraud were real threats to the rate of growth and our dependence on on-line transactions, would we be seeing the rates of growth we're seeing? Wouldn't vendors be scaling back their sales (being more picky about who they sell to, or going out of business due to fraud) and consumers not choosing to buy online because things like identity theft were more prevalent.

From the OP:

Under the new program, consumers would sign in just once and be able to move among other websites, eliminating the inconvenience that causes consumers to drop many transactions.

Are the number of transactions being dropped really a threat, especially considering the growth?

I'm all for making things actually more secure, but doing so under the guise that the current status-quo, which is on a growth curve, is under attack is disingenuous.

These are contrived reasons. Contrived by someone who wants to push this because they perceive a problem (legitimately or just because they like their solution) that is actually smaller than they make it out to be. Busybodies.

I have to say I agree with you, there. I think there are benefits to be had, but saying "This is going to cause a huge shift in consumer use of the Internet" can only be described as overblown.

Fraud is usually a lagging indicator of high growth. First you get the growth, then you get the fraud, then the fraud causes the growth to reverse.

It's quite possible that people are seeing a rise in fraud and pre-emptively trying to address the problem rather than wait until things become completely unusable.

... you think the reaction would be substantially different if the Bush administration seriously proposed this? Same script, different actors. The best measure of how much of our political arena our politicians aren't actually serious about is which opinions flip 180 when control passes from the demopublicans to the republicrats. "Hey, remember how we were against the idea of the Internet being controlled by the government? Now it's peachy keen!" "Remember how all that spending was like, terrible last year? Now it's our turn and we have a moral imperative to spend! Wheee!"

(And just to be clear, no, neither of those are targeted at one party in particular.)

It's interesting, in just about every successful organization I've been a part of, the defining factor has been trust. Communities that trust their members tend to thrive; those who assume their members are out to screw them tend to get screwed.

And as a society, we don't trust anyone.

I wonder what that says about America.

The reason why we can't have nice things is because some people are so willing to give up on certain ideas solely out of fear that people like Glenn Beck will criticize them.

You seem to think that this will be a disaster and fail because of some crackpot lunatic association Glenn Beck will make, not because of the actual merits or dis-merits of the actual system. Do we give up on ideas that easily now? If so, then that is the reason we can't have nice things.

Perhaps the fact that I dropped his name is overshadowing my point.

I think the politics surrounding it are likely to create a large amount of distrust from both ends of the political spectrum regardless of its technical merits, and that will put it at a severe disadvantage. This is assuming that its success is measured by its adoption rate, and that its adoption rate is dependent upon the level of trust in the system.

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