If you don't feel like the world needed grand scale changes at a societal level with all the global problems we're unable to solve, you haven't been paying attention. Income inequality, corporate greed, political apathy, global warming.
The movie War Games came out 36 years ago, so the claim that no-one was even asking themselves about the value of authentication in public services all these years seems preposterous.
Even more worrisome is that the OP came up with a clever way to solve the problem but didn't bother to leave a comment on the code explaining how it works. As a result, everyone that copied the code, did so without any comments as well.
Each logical line of a makefile is executed in its own shell. This means that variables cannot be set across lines and directory changes cannot be changed across lines.