Identity Woman

Independent Advocate for the Rights and Dignity of our Digital Selves

Governmnet

Catalyst: Government Adoption of Federated Identity

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This is drawn from David Temoshok’s Talk. He is the Director of Identity Policy and Management GSA Office of Government Policy
Homeland security directive 12
“Policy for Common Identification Standard For Federal Employees and Contractors” – August 2004
HSPD 12 Requirements
1. Secure and reliable forms of personal identification that are:

  • Based on sound criteria to verify an individual employee’s identity
  • Strongly resistant to fraud, tampering, counterfeiting, and terrorist exploitation
  • Rapidly verified electronically
  • Issued only by providers whose reliability has been established by an official accreditation process

2. Applicable to all government organizations and contractors except National Security Systems
3. Used for access to federally-controlled facilities and logical access to federally-controlled information systems
4. Flexible in selecting appropriate security level – includes graduated criteria from least secure to most secure
5. Implemented in a manner that protects citizens’ privacy
Expanding Electronic Government
Needing Common Authentication Services for

  • 280 million Citizens
  • Millions of Businesses
  • Thousands of Government Entities
  • 10+ Million Federal Civilian and Military Personnel

You can learn more on the GSA website – http://www.gsa.gov/aces

FCC – They don't know what they are doing???

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This guest post on Discourse.net is quite interesting – the perspective of young folks working in government moving blindly through the system is an interesting one to remember. The highlighted part seems to highlight what is going on with the US government ( FCC & Commerce Department ) and the ICANN

The O’Connor resignation, though, has been reminding me of the year I spent, way back when, working for the Justice Department. Late in the year, Harry Blackmun announced his resignation, and I found myself part of an ad hoc team putting together a memo for a White House working group on the decisions of Richard Arnold, an Eighth Circuit judge then being considered for the top job. I got the gig helping to summarize Arnold’s jurisprudence not because of any merit of my own, and not because I’d done anything like this before (I hadn’t), and not even because I worked for a unit of the Justice Department that was concerned with such things (I didn’t), but pretty much by happenstance. I thought we wrote a pretty good memo, considering that none of us had ever vetted a potential Supreme Court Justice before, and we were making up our procedures as we went along.
What I began to realize then, and came to realize much more fully later on, is that government decision-making routinely is undertaken, with the best of intentions, by people who have never been in this situation before and are making it up as they go along. I was working for the government again a few years later — this time for the Federal Communications Commission — and found myself part of an interagency group trying to figure out what to do about the domain name system. That was the process that brought you ICANN. And the most salient facts about it were that (1) we had the best of intentions; (2) we didn’t have a lot of humility; and (3) we didn’t know what we were doing. And it showed.