On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 12:59:23PM -0300, hellekin wrote:
> As I'm not a government official, I am in no position to trust
> the validity of any government-issued identification

15ish years ago, while strolling on the Stadion Dziesięciolecia (by then
mostly a bazaar), a guy approached me offering to make "real" fake IDs.
On a whim, I enquired, and the price was ~$25 for one, as the guy claimed,
made on an authentic booklet (Poland switched to the credit card style
only later), stamped with authentic stamps. I expect the same gentleman
to provide you with holograms on plastic today.

This is stuff you need to fool government officials doing real checks.
For a keysigning event all you need is to pass a piece of plastic through
your home colour printer.

And it doesn't even need to claim to be government-issued, as proved by
Martin F. Krafft who used a "Transnational Republic" card on DebConf 6 and
7 with over 90% success rate.

> All I can do is certify that the person I exchange my cryptographic
> information with is actually the person owning the email address attached
> to it.

Yes, using checks a tool like caff provides (encrypted mail sent to the
address) gives far more assurance than waving a bad photo on plastic.

> I would not trust anyone to be who a government-issued
> identification claims they are, because of that nasty habit of
> intelligence services to infiltrate any movements.

A govt goon can easily subvert such an ID, but they can get a valid email
address too.

One thing they can't easily subvert is having done some work with you
before. It is possible, but the time and cost involved are higher than
those of hacking or suborning an existing member of a project.

--
// If you believe in so-called "intellectual property", please immediately
// cease using counterfeit alphabets. Instead, contact the nearest temple
// of Amon, whose priests will provide you with scribal services for all
// your writing needs, for Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory prices.