What's with not solving electronic identity problems?

There are a lot of interesting technical problems involved in figuring out a way to reliably identify people online, but none of the ones I'm aware of are insurmountable. At this point, it's ridiculous that we don't have a good way of saying (online, electronically):

1. I trust identities from entity A, B and Monkey. Anyone they vouch for as being who they say that are I'll (mostly) believe.
2. If you want me to buy into who you tell me you are, you need to go through the hoops of A, B or Monkey. I don't care if you are already identity registered with C, D and Unicorn. I only trust the list I gave you (via a simple registration, not by answering any of your silly questions...)
3. I get to choose what identity authority I trust for what purposes and which items of my identity they get to publish.

For example, I would like the State of Washington to issue me a drivers license / Washington resident identity. They get to use that for traffic stops and maybe border crossings, plus I can at my discretion use that identity to authenticate myself to other places that trust the state of WA.

I also would like the Postal Service to issue me an identity which I will keep for a lifetime (or until I believe it's been compromised) I can use portions of that identity code to tell people how to physically mail stuff to me without telling them where I live. There's no reason someone mailing me a rebate coupon needs to know where I physically reside, and if the USPS was tracking a PKI which internally linked to physical addresses, I could give out a code that only the USPS could use to find me. It also means I could change that physical location without much trouble, and for only myself. In the best of all worlds, it also means that I could produce one-time-use physical mailing addresses and get a LOT less junk mail. Abusive spouses could send child support checks directly to the recipient without danger to the abused...

We're currently defaulting to trusting lots and lots of identity managers (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc) who:

• Don't think of themselves as identity managers (with the exception of Google)
• Aren't checking that you really are even a human, much less the human you claim to be
• Aren't interested in providing this service

If you don't think we are trusting these places to identify people, just look at some of the friends lists and tell me that every person individually qualifies each request by some other means. Law enforcement and others (like the press) are using the lack of authentication to gather information as they go to press, or prepare indictments. I'm all for supporting good law enforcement, but these are examples of where the current state of affairs is biting people in the hiney.

It would be great to see:

1. A good cryptographic API that addresses key exchange with multiple PKIs is open source and non proprietary
2. PKI which conforms to #1 (the more the better) and allows for multiple levels of trust and multi-key encryption providing for field level access to identity information based on the key issued as well as quorum based decryption (three of these 7 keys are required for actions A, D and F)
3. Open, free access to multiple services (public and private) which use such a system
4. Integration into online services which use identity in some way

Note that I'm not calling for the death of immunity on the Internet here, just for application of some level of trust for identities that we care about knowing. For those of you that might respond with "Hey, OATH or OpenAuth provides these things" you are partially correct. What's being looked at now is the management of authentication and authorization, rather than identity. It's an important step in the right direction, but essentially does not address the problem that authentication is not identity and identity is a complex object with dozens, possibly hundreds of attributes.