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...

Why did the US gov decide to rely on a TLD controlled by Montenegro for this seemingly important and sensitive service?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Unfortunate it’s not login.gov but definitely an improvement over their bespoke customer identity and access management solution.

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 ...

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.