> For things like house, car, and life savings, I'm perfectly glad to go somewhere with physical ID. Heck, I'd love to see police stations offering this as a municipal service. Lying via internet form is pretty easy. Walking into a building with 100 cops bearing fake ID is a whole different level.

This is a great idea. Not only can the police verify that a given photo ID matches the person in front of them, they can also verify that the ID is valid and unaltered by verifying that the details on the ID match the details in the DMV's database, eliminating fake IDs from being an issue. This wouldn't be 100% perfect -- maybe a really determined ID thief could get the DMV to issue them an ID in someone else's name -- but it would dramatically increase the risk and makes ID theft much harder to scale.

A federal effort to standardize an identity verification service across federal and local offices nationwide would be helpful. The service should be available to any entity (not only banks or financial entities) who wishes to verify the identity of a counterparty. The process and fee should be standardized nationwide, with the fee being break-even and paid by the entity requesting the verification.

Post offices are a good candidate to offer such a service, but would need some work to set up (unlike police agencies, I presume post offices don't have access to DMV databases).

The idea sounds nice in theory, but the only reason any administration would implement this would be to remove anonymity from the internet. Your ability to recover accounts would just be a side effect of the system designed to allow the government to track everything you do.

> This wouldn't be 100% perfect -- maybe a really determined ID thief could get the DMV to issue them an ID in someone else's name

This is much more common than you might think. I believe in Illinois there was some sort of ongoing problem with people at the DMV selling licenses to truckers who didn't actually pass their tests[0]. I'm sure any criminal with a wad of cash could get them to make a fake ID.

[0]: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-991009license-story.h...

This is true, but I think there's an important distinction.

Driving a truck is generally legal. Stealing somebody's life savings generally isn't.

This matters because once an underqualified truck driver is on the road, they're going to be hard to distinguish from a normal truck driver. You have to issue a lot of licenses before the pattern of fake licenses becomes obvious enough to trigger an investigation.

Granting fake licenses for serious theft, though, is another matter. Every single one of those will trigger a police investigation. It's much higher risk, meaning it'd be very hard to sustain an ongoing business in fake licenses for theft.