i understand that, but i also didn’t feel facism taking hold before trump. probably a bad lumping of things, but my experience with id.me has been largely positive.
I believe you are referring to the misquote described by McKay as 'Benito Mussolini created the word "fascism." He defined it as "the merging of the state and the corporation."'?
"In other words, corporatism in Mussolini's fascism was not a free-market capitalist system. Far from it. It did not allow for the kind of competition, innovation, market entry, and research and development characteristic of modern capitalism, and it was closely ruled in every way by the state with Mussolini at its head.
Anything that draws a direct link between what are now referred to as corporations (large, powerful private companies operating in a modern free-market capitalist system) and Mussolini's corporatism, is founded on a misunderstanding — most likely caused by the similarity between the words."
> It did not allow for the kind of competition, innovation, market entry, and research and development characteristic of modern capitalism, and it was closely ruled in every way by the state with Mussolini at its head
That is precisely what is happening with Western economies. Big multinational corporations dominate procurement and dictate regulation to limit competition, create barriers to enter the market and research and development out of reach for SMEs. As in marriage of corporations and the state.
But that is still not "corporatism" ("corporativismo" in Italian), as used in Mussolini's fascism. From the Snopes page:
> In his Dictionary of Political Thought, Roger Scruton describes corporatism in this way:
> The economy was divided into associations (called 'syndicates') of workers, employers and the professions; only one syndicate was allowed in each branch of industry, and all officials were either fascist politicians or else loyal to the fascist cause. According to law the syndicates were autonomous, but in fact they were run by the state. The 'corporations' united the syndicates in a given industry, but made no pretence at autonomy from the state.
That is nothing at all like what is happening with Western economies, so it is not "corporatism", so it is not "textbook fascism".
And we even have login.gov, too! (… which I really hope replaces ID.montengro one of these days, but … I guess not, if the Treasury is adopting it now.)
Personally I think its a poor choice to go with ID.me instead of login.gov when it comes to security. Primary reason is the completeness of the product and reliability. A security product does not needs all the bells and whistles and can be well defined for governments use case. Any security product with ongoing development is just an open door for possible vulnerabilities being introduced.
For IAL2 identity proofing, Login.gov is only for US persons, i.e. validating US-issued credentials. Meanwhile. ID.me has support to validate foreign passports.
So, if TreasuryDirect supports foreign customers, it makes sense to offer ID.me, but it seems inappropriate not to offer Login.gov for customers who are US persons!
Does login.gov require photos, videos, fingerprints, smartphone apps, or similar nonsense as ID.me does?
Or does it offer less invasive ways to confirm identity, like mailing a code sent to one's long-established postal address, or an in-person visit to a local social services office?
Personally, I love that you go to irs.gov and the top tells you it's a us govenrment sit eand how to know (tld is .gov) ... But then you try to login and get hijacked by a site affiliated with a different country.
Glad I don't actually need to login to my irs account lately.
It is not only the .me TLD we should think about. Before .me and even during, there was also the .me.gov back when domains and such things were more delineated. There is the peril of not only contending with Montenegro but also the outside chance of Maine. Let's face it, .me was never a safe choice as a top-level domain for any country (or locality). It seems like a vanity TLD to too many people and it competes for a name space it has no place in. What we probably need is a whole new TLD specifically and only for something like this. I am sure IANA is capable, though policing it would be a nightmare, unless it were handed off to something like the defense department.
TreasuryDirect's login and account recovery experience has been notorious for years, both for user experience and for people easily getting locked out for weeks. It's good they're being careful with this rollout, as it serves both individual and institutional accounts where dollar amounts involved are epic even by bank standards, and rarely checked by hand, so even single account breaches are serious.
They used to support TOTP directly, but removed it in favor of their proprietary mobile apps. It's still TOTP under the hood though, just requires a couple API calls to "activate" it.
Though they recommend their own app, id.me directly supports any standard compatible authenticator app. I use it with Google Authenticator TOTP. It's also SOTA for creating and accepting passkeys on ChromeOS as well as Android. Probably Apple, too!
Other built-in available MFA methods include: security key; NFC mobile security key; Push Notifications (id.me app); text message or phone call; and passkeys.
I don't know if it's an A/B test, but they no longer allow adding new TOTP authenticators for my family member's account. Existing setups continue to work fine.
That's why I had to do the hackery of having the script pretend to be the mobile app to set that up.
Does anyone know if there are any reasonable alternatives here if I don't want to create an ID.me account and hand my PII over to them? Do I just need to liquidate my positions and close my account out, or can I manage it offline via correspondence somehow? Seems absurd to have so quick a turnaround on this with no alternative options.
That is a lie. The IRS provides offline/paper-based methods for requesting transcripts and information. There is a very obvious link, right next to the ID.me link, that offers you alternatives if you don't want to deal with them online. Here it is.
Are you suggesting that a person can request a copy of a 1099, for the current tax year, via the IRS? I don't know if this is possible. It is an interesting suggestion, if that is what you had in mind. This interpretation required steel-manning as your actual comment suggests that you may not realize that Treasury Direct and the IRS are two different things.
I contacted Treasury Direct, after receiving the email notification about their plans to migrate to id.me, asking how to get a 1099 without an id.me account. But, I haven't received any response from Treasury Direct yet.
Please tone down your aggression if you reply to this, "This is a lie." is both incorrect and highly aggressive. If, ultimately, a way is demonstrated to get access to a 1099, for a Treasury Direct account, without having to create an id.me account, that will be a good thing.
A young relative of mine is having a miserable time cashing Treasury bonds that were gifted to her through TreasuryDirect for her tuition.
Treasury is requiring she get a medallion signature guarantee from a bank to access her funds but, like 40%+ of her generation, she uses online banking with no accessible branch. Treasury insists she can get this from any bank, but as the guarantor is liable for a loss, there's no way they will provide this to a non-client. They generally won't even make their ordinary notary public available.
So she is now switching financial institutions simply to access a modest amount in her TreasuryDirect account. If you are thinking about gifting saving bonds to someone: do them a favor and don't.
I had a real PITA with medallion signature a while back. The local branch couldn't do it and, in spite of providing all my documents, the central location also couldn't do it for some reason. Ended up having to drive 45 minutes to my brokerage and they handled in about 5 minutes (was a stock transfer) but it was a real nuisance. It seemed like a bunch of things were suddenly much easier during COVID but they seem to have mostly reverted.
I got some I bonds from Treasury Direct when interest rates were going crazy. It's not a lot in the scheme of things. I should clear them out and consolidate as I've done with other investments.
Brick-and-mortar banks often don't want to provide these to existing clients, either. I got the runaround from mine when I tried to open a TreasuryDirect account.
Does anyone remember their crazy Ovaltine-decoder-ring two factor auth that they had for a while? They mailed you a physical card with custom grid of numbers and letters and the login challenge would be to submit the letters an numbers at various grid points.
That type of system is actually still in use in a lot of industries—either as a primary factor or a fallback for folks who might need to log in without a working device. Think healthcare workers who forgot their phone but need to order a surgery, or outdoor safety workers updating the toughbook after a day of work that might damage phones.
So like a one-time-pad? Except not, since it sounds like they re-use it for each login. If they had sent you a pad of codes, with instructions to tear off the top page each time, that would be closer.
A one time pad would have a finite number of uses available, which could lead to logistical complexity if it was being used as a primary auth mechanism.
The card actually makes sense, as it amounts to a physical artifact that implements a unique encryption key. If there's enough entropy in generating the card, and the process of using it encodes enough bits of data, it's probably a reasonable solution.
I was happy when they got rid of the virtual keyboard you had to type your password onto, such a pain since you also couldn't paste into the password field to autocomplete from a password manager.
Had to constantly popup Chrome DevTools and "fix" the dom element to let paste work.
If they let you paste your password, you might use a long, randomly generated password stored in a password manager, instead of choosing a short, easy-to-type password and using the same one everywhere.
> definitely an improvement over their bespoke customer identity and access management solution
Is it though?
With a service-specific system, if the system gets compromised, you lose your data on that system. With a centralized system that still happens, but then on top of that, there is also a centralized service to get compromised where you also lose your data on that system and every other system using it. The centralized system also ossifies with whatever flaws were present in the naive early implementation like the ancient credit card networks have, because once untold agencies and private entities are using it, anyone who wants to change anything about it is inundated with objections from thousands of entities who don't want to have to redo their integrations.
Meanwhile your activity is then correlated between different accounts. You have retailers using id.me to "verify military, student, teacher, nurse, or first responder status" for discounts. Not only do they get your name via computer instead of a physical document you would object if they tried to copy, you're now using the same system you use for taxes and healthcare. Is ICE going to use this against people? Are foreign intelligence agencies going to silently compromise it and use it against the domestic population? That's inevitable once you allow a centralized system like that to exist.
If you want to do this properly then you publish a reference implementation for an authentication system and let every organization run their own independent instance of it. That way a) none of the accounts are tied together and b) you can improve the system whenever you want and people can adopt the new version independently instead of needing to coordinate the entire world before you can change a single API parameter.
Yeah, there's no mandate for government agencies to use login.gov AFAIK, so they can either go with login.gov or buy the private id.me solution. In general it's not a slamdunk to get agencies to cooperate and use their services, it seems.
Login.gov had/has some technical gaps for agency customer identity use cases, which is why you don’t see it used by some agencies yet (depending on their customer identity assurance requirements). The outstanding technical gaps will be closed eventually, at which point id.me can be phased out as a private for profit idp vendor.
> GSA has closed most of the gaps GAO identified in 2024 and 2025, but the remaining recommendation has a direct operational consequence. GSA has developed a public roadmap and created a Partner Advisory Group, but GAO says those steps do not demonstrate that the specific technical challenges agencies identified have been resolved or that mutually agreed-upon time frames have been established.
> GAO will continue monitoring GSA's progress. Until those time frames are established, the federal government's government-wide identity verification service retains an unresolved implementation gap as fraud and identity-theft threats continue to evolve.
And 1990s era website design (maybe). I'll have to retrieve my credentials from somewhere I guess. Not sure why they're not unifying it with other government websites.
Last time I filed state taxes, I didn't qualify to use free electronic filing, because I was too poor, so I mailed in my taxes. I was a little concerned that postal employees present a security risk, but I'm not convinced it's more than the increased attack surface from whatever third parties handle electronic submission.
The more third parties they throw into the mix, especially when it's just to increase security theater, the more convinced I am that I should be mailing in any financial government paperwork, even if I am eligible to do so electronically.
good grief. Guess I'll redeem my i series now. btw AI says print the redemption confirmation details while logged in prior to the cutover because you'll need them for taxes in 2027.
Many gov sites allow one or the other. Really neither is a good solution. Is it "safe" to have everyone in the country, citizen or not, in possession of a login on a .gov site?
