They (like any other entity) can attest, but such attestation should hold as few of any special value as possible.
An unusual position, as historically governments have provided birth and death registries [0], passports, identity cards, etc, etc
[0]: or, earlier, in the West at least, the church
They maintained census, but for government functions (like accounting and taxes), and actual identity communication almost never involved government.
Passports use for anything except international travel is a very modern thing as well.
For most of the history the source of identify was individual themselves (as it should be), that is, one told their name and origin and others accepted that, unless someone knew otherwise.
Or maybe someday we’ll have some interesting revelations about personal identity and sybil resistance won’t be necessary. But that’ll probably be only some centuries later.
I get that identity is a sort of last holdout for the tech libertarians of old. But after years working in KYC, what I saw was the accumulation of vast amounts of sensitive information held by private actors in a way that was completely democratically unaccountable and couldn't be corrected by the average citizen. It's time to bring identity out of the shadows and make it ours to control.
