I can only speak from an Australian perspective, but you'd be surprised how sensitive many public servants (outside of the 'intelligence community') are to public backlash against a national identity system. Admittedly they're concerned for the wrong reason, political backlash, rather than the right reason, protection of citizen privacy. But their reasoning is unimportant as long as it drives them towards a privacy-enhancing solution.
Standards like OAuth (and profiles like Open ID Connect) lend themselves well to federated auth systems where user-authorised attribute disclosure by mutually trusted third-parties, rather than authenticated identity, forms the basis of access to government online services. This could even have privacy benefits outside of citizen to government transactions; an online bottleshop wouldn't need to ask for a scan of your driver's licence (causing information leakage), it would only need to ask a trusted attribute holder if the customer is over 18 (or 21).
I can only speak from an Australian perspective, but you'd be surprised how sensitive many public servants (outside of the 'intelligence community') are to public backlash against a national identity system. Admittedly they're concerned for the wrong reason, political backlash, rather than the right reason, protection of citizen privacy. But their reasoning is unimportant as long as it drives them towards a privacy-enhancing solution.
Standards like OAuth (and profiles like Open ID Connect) lend themselves well to federated auth systems where user-authorised attribute disclosure by mutually trusted third-parties, rather than authenticated identity, forms the basis of access to government online services. This could even have privacy benefits outside of citizen to government transactions; an online bottleshop wouldn't need to ask for a scan of your driver's licence (causing information leakage), it would only need to ask a trusted attribute holder if the customer is over 18 (or 21).
It looks like the US might be headed in the right direction: http://openidentityexchange.org/about/