In Context

At RSA Ely Kahn (Director of Cybersecurity Policy at National Security Staff) and some of his contractors/staff met with members of the ICF board as well as with members of the OIDF and OIX boards. During the meeting the foundations were asked to respond to a questionnaire that was designed inform the “National Strategy for Secure Online Transactions” (NS-SOT) –a name chosen to sidestep the big brother alarm raised whenever words like identity management are used by the feds. He mentioned that Obama would be announcing this strategy in June.

Instead of answering the questionnaire the ICF board decided to write and send this NS-SOT ICF Response to Ely. Ely is one of the good guys, so I’m glad to spend time on this sort of thing. The jist of the paper is that relatively small, short term (not FY12 !) investment in turning a few Federal agencies into buyers of federated/externalized identities would jump-start an entire ecosystem. It would be particularly good for i-cards and OpenID.

The White House has completed its 60 day Cyber Policy Review and published it as a 76 page PDF. This was announced on the whitehouse.gov blog post Securing Our Digital Future. I co-authored with Kim Taipale, Bill Coleman and John Clippinger of an invited paper entitled Identity and Resiliance (PDF), one of the 100 papers mentioned in that blog post that informed their recommendations.

Slowly but surely the understanding is growing in various pockets within our government that a user-centered, distributed, open identity layer (bus or metasystem, pick your poison) is critical infrastructure for both security and collaboration.