If you read about the history of the institution, this is really what was intended in its constitutional incorporation. It really wasn't about physical mail per se, and you can't hold the founders accountable to something that was outside the realm of imagination at the time.
There's all sorts of information-structural things that are in the bounds of the USPS per the intent of its creation.
I'm guessing most Americans do not realize that going back more than a decade, the USPS has scanned and stored imagery and metadata for every single piece of mail that passes through their automated sorting machines.
Look closely at the images they email you of mail coming into your mailbox and you'll notice that very often, the scans reveal the nature of the documents inside even without messing with contrast/levels.
Also, I would be concerned if all the private ISPs disappeared also. Ideally I'd like to see something like is the case with physical delivery, where you have the USPS, FexEx, UPS, DHL, etc. Having the USPS be an ISP of sorts would hopefully not kill private offerings, along the same lines. Especially so given that we're in a de facto monopoly situation at the level of specific geographic locations often now. Introducing competition where the market has failed to do so shouldn't be a problem, and if it is, there are larger issues.
If anything I could see this being selling point for private ISPs, "use us and don't worry about the government because we have everything locked down in X, Y, and Z manner."
Though an official united states citizen email address has its own pitfalls for abuse, scams, and fraud.
Many services would want to use your PKI token as identification, we would likely give up a lot of privacy because of its existence/ease-of-use.
It’s going to be an uphill battle or impossible as PKIs are too obscure for the average citizen to understand the benefits and any whiff of a federal ID card will be treated like the mark of the communist coup beast.
It's also because most of those lists are ordered by a "perception index", that is the kind of bullshit that increases if your government does an awareness program and if corruption fighting gets on the news.
One of the problems is that some of these checks can only be performed much later.
The most common currency of choice, for modern bribes, is the promise of a fat gig in the private sector when the political career ends. As the public demands younger and younger political classes, with lower and lower salaries, while maintaining an appetite for career-ending scandals and relatively short terms in office, it's inevitable that individuals will tend towards ensuring their future survival. Such promises need no paper trail, are trivial to keep, and are effectively invisible for years. When they're realized, it's typically too late to do anything about the original source of corruption, and the new guys in power have no incentive to cut that income source for them; in fact, they now know it works and are more likely to tap it for themselves.
Looking into the US senate, I fail to see that trend. In the last presidential election, both candidates were older than my grandparents.
Even in my country, seeing a really young person in a political position is very rare. They exist (if you define "young" as under 40), but they are rare. I don't think age worries are a factor at all.
Look at the pay for members of the House and Senate, in real dollars, over the last 50 years. Also pay attention to how much stupid noise there is about how members of Congress are supposedly overpaid. The pay for all US Senators combined (under $18M) is less than half of what LeBron James makes (over $41M) in salary alone in a year.
> They exist (if you define "young" as under 40)
In political terms, at the (European) national level, "young" is typically under 50, and "old" is over 70. Acquiring reputation and solid power base takes time.
Looking at the UK: Tony Blair was considered very young when he became PM at 44; Thatcher was 53, Major 57, Brown 56, and most of their predecessors were much older. Cameron was 43 but again May was 59 and Johnson 55. Backbenchers will typically enter Parliament around 35-40.
In Italy you can basically add 10 to all those numbers; the current PM (or PdCM, for the purists) is 73.
But then would has the potential of misdirection. Your believed set of would's might be entirely separate from the realized would's of the individual. Could is wider but has less room for interpretation or propagandizing. Exactly my point in the above post: why wouldn't they be able to transfer money. My set of would's include those deliberate obvious actions, especially if all kinds of other things happen on golf courses. Anyways, I'm rambling, have a nice day. :)
If I'm Fujitsu or Accenture and I lose $BigCountryContract, it's a Big Deal and somebody is not going to get his fat bonus. If I lose Estonia, "Whatever, it was pennies anyway". Smaller orgs also don't have the sort of complex bespoke requirements that allow consulting firms to really entrench themselves.
We also get state issued ID card with PKI. We can access tons of services. Last I read I can buy a house, fully remotely. Including notary services via video call + all parties need to sign stuff with our ID card.
We get health results via email as an encrypted pdf, where password is given at the time when I submit samples.
Many business also use ID card to sign contracts between parties.
Bank transactions involve Smart-ID, 2FA app that I have to authorize via ID card for remote setup for any new device. (It involves generating new certificates) Smart-ID is developed by Estonia and is very convenient, secure way to authorize payments.
As of communication, no state issued email. However we usually get email notifications, for example from state tax service, that we should log in and read whatever we have to.
[0] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09523987.2020.17...
Quite apart from that, if they really took cyberattacks seriously theyd be voting with pen and paper.
The e-vote thing seems like an issue of reputation now. I don't think any politician would dare to change this. It would be possible only if a huge campaign involving a foreign interference becomes successful among the voters.
What works for a tiny state isn't always appropriate for a big state.
1. An ID card you can use to access some services (carta di identità digitale)
2. Another card you can use to access healthcare related services and some other services (carta nazionale servizi)
3. SPID: your digital ID to access yet some other services, and also some of the above services. It is not released by the government but by other authorized entities such as banks, the national mail service and others. You need to pay a small fee for the verification, and sometimes an annual fee. There are different SPID levels but no one actually knows the difference between them.
4. PEC (posta elettronica certificata): a digitally signed email box you can use to send/receive documents, invoices, etc. or simply messages. Those are legally attributed to you and you can use it to talk to government agencies instead of sending registered paper mail. As SPID it is issued by an authorized third party.
We also have some smartphone apps that work as a combination of the above, and need some of the above to work.
As you can see it is a mess, a waste of tax money and we will need to waste more money in the future to make this mess work.
Nice :)
Edit: and by the way when you need something really important all the above are useless: you either need to start hopping from a public office to another (we have a lot of them) and/or go to a notary (a kind of medieval bureaucrat you pay a lot of money to sign and stamp sheets of paper)
Btw, a nice insight into email is also that it is one of the very few systems that decouples protocol from provider (Matrix and xmpp do that too, not widely adopted sadly) AND also has critical adoption (which Whatsapp also has in my country, sadly we are stuck with Meta there). We should never give up email because we will likely never get an open and free system like that back without some kind of government intervention. (Even though we all know email is a sub-optimal pile of hacks.)
The notifications you can set up to a normal email address invariably only say that institution X sent you a message, but never specify the topic. That means you have to login to see if it is actually important and actionable or just something you already knew or a confirmation of something you submitted.
Even worse is this common scenario:
* Get notification that X sent something to Berichtenbox
* Login to Berichtenbox (first get mobile phone for required 2FA)
* Message says new information is available in X's web portal
* Login to X's web portal (mijn.somethingsomething.nl)
* Read totally pointless message that could even have been sent in plain email
Compare this to the postal flow:
* Get letter, read it
I think these days you can deactivate Berichtenbox and receive important information via post again, but this was not an option in the first year or so, so even experimenting with it was risky.
* email notifications are unreliable * messages are considered delivered a week after landing in your data box, regardless of you reading them * old messages are automatically deleted after 90 days (!!!) unless you pay for an expensive and cumbersome archive addon service
Especially point number three makes the whole thing quite dangerous, not just liability - you might get an important message/request from the state while on long vacation/loose the notification and it will self erase - mission impossible style! And you will only find out when you re in trouble for not doing something important later...
Unless you plan to work with the data box daily and manually check the messages its really dangerous to use it.
1. You can an email in your regular email stating that there is a new message in your Berichteninbox. (No clickable link, presumably to avoid phishing.)
2. You go to mijn.overheid.nl to access your Berichteninbox. You sign in with DigID.
3. You open the mentioned message, which says a PDF with the actual letter is attached.
4. You open the PDF.
5. The PDF says you'll be able to file your tax returns a month from now.
BTW, if said PDF contains an iDeal payment link, you can switch to yet another app (your banking app) and back (probably via website in between) and immediately pay things. Which is nice, but again watching over the shoulder of someone going through these actions it may seem that the phone is going crazy switching between apps :)
Ofc in this case feldrim above pointed us to the mac/linux/etc downloads so the estonian government has actually heard there are other platforms besides Windows.
I don't know about Estonia in particular but I'm guessing "$SOME_GOVERNMENT's interfaces" for most places is going to be HTTPS.
So, with that in mind, I've used a Nitrokey HSM and a Taglio PIVKey with Firefox on Linux using the OpenSC tools PKCS 11 module. I would suspect any smart card supported by OpenSC will work fine in Firefox.
From my reading, OpenSC is being distributed by the government of Estonia, so I suspect using it in a browser that supports PKCS 11 modules compatible with OpenSC on a Linux PC would work fine.
The app is used for changing PINs and there's another one for signing documents.
Signing in the browser uses a extension, code here https://github.com/open-eid/chrome-token-signing
Side note: Denmark has a one time pad instead of a smartcard. A smart phone app has since been added, and the one time pad will be discontinued in about a year, sadly.
The PKI thing includes a physical ID card, a software solution called Smart-ID and a mobile solutions called Mobile ID. The software solutions are just authenticator apps that you've matched with your ID.
This is the biggest flaw in the design. Tying the ID card to a single identity.
If you're using it with a bank, it needs to be tied to your bank account. If you're using it for physical access control at your company's building, it needs to be tied to your employee account. These are different things, and should be different things, for security.
You don't want a single system for everything. It makes the incentive to break it stronger, so it gets broken more often. It makes the consequences of it getting broken larger, so the damage when it happens multiplies. And it gets integrated into everything, so the amount of time it takes to roll out fixes increases. It's a security nightmare, and it gets polynomially worse the bigger the country is that tries to do it that way. (For reference, the GDP of Estonia is less than one third the revenue of Costco.)
No, it's solid design. It's a very simple safe primitive. You can build endless infrastructure on top of it. Similar to subkeys.
For example a lot of businesses use Smart-ID on top of that. You need to tie the smartid stuff to your PKI identity. But after that you can just use that as identity.
It has nothing to do with the primitive. Someone will find a flaw in the implementation, or human flaws in the bureaucracy that administers it.
And building infrastructure on top of it is the flaw. These things should all be independent of one another.
1. Contrary to systems such as the German one this identity system actually has a working upgrade and revokation path. The German one was is assuming that it's safe by design and the identity being fixed. The German ID keys don't have a revokation system and they don't expire either.
2. The baltic system has expiry's on these private keys. They are authenticated against your physical government issued ID with background checks being done by the current existing police/interpol infrastructure.
These private keys are not isolated from your identity. You receive them from government institutions that use the exist physical identity infrastructure.
The problem with people here is that they want the digital identity to be completely self contained. I get that sentiment and I don't disagree with it, but it's a completely different goal from what is being solved here.
This solves - in a much better fashion - what a lot of "crypto" fanatics want governments to use.
Systems without this are even more broken, but this is hardly the main problem.
The problem is that with a system like this, if you can compromise one person, you can compromise them totally. You compromise every part of their life that uses this system instead of just one when it's isolated from the others.
And if you can compromise that system itself, even temporarily, you can compromise everyone that comprehensively at once. Everyone's health records, stolen. Bank accounts drained. Trade secrets published or sold to foreign competitors.
Canceling their credentials after the fact doesn't undo all the damage.
> These private keys are not isolated from your identity. You receive them from government institutions that use the exist physical identity infrastructure.
In most cases this is a liability rather than an asset. It's only useful if you for some reason need to prove your physical government identity, e.g. so you can vote. But those few things can use the same process you use to bootstrap into this identity system to begin with.
If all you want to do is sign into a website or acquire a book or a contraceptive or travel, having that tied to your government identity is bad.
Banks require your ID whether it's smart or not. But it's not for payment purposes but for authentication. And they are not state bodies, but private commercial entities. They are not part of the PKI ecosystem of the state.
It's not clear why any of these things should be tied together even when they're all provided by the government.
You may have to identify yourself to your employer for taxes, but why should they get the identity used for your healthcare when it isn't any of their business? All it does is create the potential for that to leak. Or vice versa. Your tax returns are none of the business of the doctor you asked out, so these things should not be tied together in any way.
And the only reason the bank wants your government identification is that they're required to by law. Otherwise banks would widely offer numbered accounts. Even then this should only require the identity used for taxes and not the one used for healthcare or military service or professional licensing, none of which is any business of the bank.
> You can't use it for other purposes. No RFC defined email address is shared with you
This is not entirely true. You get both:
* [email protected] can only be used by government senders.
* you also get [email protected] which works as a regular email address.
In France, we are not as advanced as Estonia when it comes to e-government services, but we have an official identification system called "France connect", and government services have private messaging systems to communicate with them. And I think many countries have similar systems. The only difference seems to be that it is better integrated in Estonia.
1. If you are a citizen or a resident, you get an ID card to use for every public service. It's just a smart card with a government PKI.
2. The public services provide an email account that can only be used within the e-government services. The card is used for accessing those services.
3. The email service accepts either identity number or registry number of the recipient. So the recipient can be a legal entity.
4. You can and almost always do provide a forwarding address, so that you don't need to check.
5. You can't use it for other purposes. No RFC defined email address is shared with you. And it's just an internal system for official issues.
I've heard some countries issue mailboxes for citizens but I am not aware of the general use of these. Also, email services were designed to be decentralized but evolved into centralized systems, a current and unsolved problem. I am not sure about the privacy and security of government provided email services.