I didn't take that as he wanted legislative representatives and the like to solve it, so much as to make it a matter of focus to enlist the kinds of people you're recommending to provide a solution like this.

Personally, I really feel we need a private/public-key kind of system in place for certain things like Social Security Numbers (SSNs) in the US. Such that if a leak also includes an SSN (essentially a public key), it could then be regenerated and some apparatus to manage filtering it to the parties it was assigned to prevent needing to redistribute it manually as a consumer/user (like using your Google, Facebook, or whatever OpenID as credentials for another site and it is stored in the account showing that it is being used as such). If they could automatically detect said public keys being exposed and automate the resetting and distribution process, even better (users should still be able to manually do it if they feel it is compromised though).

SSN should be just an unique number per person, nothing more, nothing less, never used for identification, only for having an unique number per person. It's impossible to ensure such a number doesn't leak so there also must be 0 consequences in that happening. That would require major legislative change.

Of course. There are plenty of different ways to build such a platform (or contract it out) - I'm not advocating any in particular.

The UK has a rather interesting example in the GOV.UK Verify service, which federates the identity verification and authentication out to third parties. The user can then choose which provider (e.g. Barclays, Post Office) they want to prove their identity through. Experian is also one of the providers, which perhaps illustrates some of the flaws with this design...