That's a different bar. Probably doesn't work is much easier to meet, and narrower. The person didn't ask for provably works. They are probably comfortable with "might work might not, but at least it's not provably wrong".
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Why did the US gov decide to rely on a TLD controlled by Montenegro for this seemingly important and sensitive service?
It’s not even a government service. It’s a private business they have entrusted with authentication for the government.
textbook fascism (marriage of corporations and government).
doesn’t id.me predate trump? i could totally be wrong about that, but it’s not new.
Trump didn't invent fascism.
Queue the flag/downvote storm for callimg out the system that provably doesn’t work.
No system has ever provably worked; otherwise we wouldn’t have had revolutions.
That's a different bar. Probably doesn't work is much easier to meet, and narrower. The person didn't ask for provably works. They are probably comfortable with "might work might not, but at least it's not provably wrong".
and?
Nah, I’m downvoting for the ludicrous claim that government paying a private company to provide a service is necessarily fascism.
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."'?
I'll now quote from https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fascism-corporations-corpo... , which thoroughly rejects that interpretation:
"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."
Thanks for that. That quote was not something I ever lost sleep over, but it also never seemed correct.
> 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.
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.
Under the prior administration things were moving slowly toward login.gov for every federal service.
I’m really sad to see that’s yet another thing the current administration is destroying
In our NIH-related project, we were offered both.
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!
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.
> Glad I don't actually need to login to my irs account lately.
I still pay my taxes by physical check, because they won’t let me pay digitally unless I sign in with ID.me.
> US gov decide to rely on a TLD controlled by Montenegro
Let's be honest, the US government can control basically any domain it wants. I doubt Montenegro is going to cause any problems for it.
It’s funny… In Finland they went with hightrust.id (Indonesia) too.
I'd also be concerned that the rest of the domain is in English.
They didn’t. The federal government has login.gov which things were slowly consolidating towards.
ID.me is a private third party system, that I won’t ever use.
The IRS backed off from using "ID.me" back in 2022.[1] But apparently it is back. Is Treasury requiring face recognition, like last time?
And of course this will be used to track down illegal aliens.
[1] https://www.biometricupdate.com/202202/downwind-of-irs-decis...
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.
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.
In case anyone is interested in using TOTP two-factor authentication with their ID.md account, I made a script for setting that up: https://github.com/chenxiaolong/id-me-otpauth
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunate it’s not login.gov but definitely an improvement over their bespoke customer identity and access management 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.
With Firefox you can set to false the about:config setting "dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled" and websites can no longer block paste.
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.
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.
I’ve compiled the entire sordid history of TreasuryDirect authentication in their Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TreasuryDirect
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.
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.
I still have mine! It was really excellent before camera phones.
Yes, I had one of those cards. It made you feel like you were accessing government secrets. In 2007.
> 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.
https://legis1.com/news/logingov-technical-issues-gsas-platf...
> 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.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-109261
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.
The arc of progress is like the visibility curve over the horizon. We keep sailing.
This makes me so angry.
> To set up a new ID.me account, you’ll need two government-issued forms of identity ready.
That will be rolled out before anyone can access the world wide web. And they will continue to claim it is for the protection of kids ...