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this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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okay so in absence of federal ID how do you authenticate anything when dealing with govt things? just by SSN? we have something similar, but years of security malpractice by people who were not trained to do this made these numbers public to probable attackers, so authentication with just that is not considered secure for a couple of years by now. instead, with anything important (like taking a loan, opening bank account, buying a car or real estate etc), you have to also provide your ID number which doesn't have this problem
but wait there's more
on top of that, for a year of so, govt implemented a switch in that service from upthread, you can also access it offline. this switch allows you to deactivate your SSN-like number so that anything authenticated with that when it's off is considered legally void, and probably won't work in the first place because it's supposed to be checked in national db. when you have to authenticate something legitimately, you can switch it on for a day, then switch it off again. this was in response to incidents of identity theftUsually SSN yes. In recent years airports and secure federal buildings are starting to require "real IDs" / star cards which are state IDs which meet federal identity verification requirements. I couldn't be bothered with all that since I already have a passport so my driver's license says "Federal Limits Apply".
For thinks like bank loans, state IDs are widely accepted.
Your SSN is often used as a federal registration number even though the card has "do not use for identification" on it in great big letters. Most functions just trust state ID for authentication purposes and use SSN as a label. An identifier in the database sense rather than the authentication sense. At least in theory.
See also how so many of the laws governing this are frankly archaic at this stage, with congress to busy fighting over whether the government should exist or not to actually govern anything effectively. (Note: government inefficiency has never been treated as a reason to govern better, only to govern less and assign more functions to for-profit private entities.