Digital Identity

This was on Slashdot today and in the NYTimes.

In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one’s off-hours can have career-altering consequences. Stacy Snyder, 25, who was a senior at Millersville University in Millersville, Pa., offers an instructive example. Last year, she was dismissed from the student teaching program at a nearby high school and denied her teaching credential after the school staff came across her photograph on her MySpace profile. She filed a lawsuit in April this year in federal court in Philadelphia contending that her rights to free expression under the First Amendment had been violated. No trial date has been set.

This came by Slashdot today from the NYTimes

Sometimes what they find is unsettling. But in the emerging communities of the genetically rare, more often it is sustaining.
For three families, the impulse to find others in the same situation was immediate.
A few months before the Lanes crossed the state to meet Taygen’s chromosomal cousin, Jennie Dopp, a mother in Utah, was scouring the Internet for families with “7q11.23,” the diagnosis that explained her son’s odd behavior and halting speech.
“I want someone to say ‘I know what you mean,’” Ms. Dopp told her husband, “and really mean it.”
Noa Ospenson’s parents flew from Boston to South Carolina for a meeting of 100 families with children who, like Noa, are also “22q13.” Hoping for more information about their daughter’s diagnosis, they emerged as lifetime members of what they call “Noa’s tribe.”
For each of them, a genetic mutation became the foundation for a new form of kinship.

I saw this add at the bottom of I Can Has Cheezburger – (for those of you who don’t know it is the ‘home’ of the LOL (Laugh Out Loud) Cats Genera of internet humor.)
So I clicked on it and found this

Now your child can write to Santa and receive a reply! Print out this personalized letter from Santa. Imagine the excitement when they read just how much Santa knows about them.
All you need to do is fill out the details below (the more information the better the letter) and we will instantly email you a letter from Santa. All you need to do is open the attachments and print using the best quality color you have available. The graphics are great and worthy of high quality color. To get the best results, For Present, please put a sentence to proceed the question “What could it be?” For example “A bike?” or “The doll house you love?”

Looking below the only fields that are required are your e-mail address your child’s name and your child’s birthday. I suspect this is so they can ping you before your child’s next birthday and remind you to buy something.
I just look and wonder at anyone who wants to know my birthday – and giving away my child’s birthday. Who knows where the information will go.
Diving into the site I find you can get books printed with your child playing a role in the story. Just in case your kids were not narcissistic enough already.

Last week I did an interview with Forum One Communications about Identity and OpenID. For those of you who don’t know about Forum one they are doing a lot of good work connecting online community managers and online community platform providers and companies who have online communities related to their business. They have the Online Community Research Network and publish the Online Community Report I helped facilitate the Online Community Unconference and recently attended the Online Community Summit.
I thought it was going to be a recorded interview – like a podcast. It was instead a sort of group live chat interview. The questions were good and build upon each other. You can see it here. I hope that some of the people actively involved in online community will come and participate in some of our activity addressing identity issues online.

This post by Phil who is pointing to Jim Harpers outing of RealID scheming by vendors who want to sell States their tools.

Bringing Your Public Onboard For Smoother Legislature Changes
… [E]very State DMV needs to find a way to educate their public so that they can ensure the legislature changes necessary to become Real ID compliant. So how exactly can you do this? This session will examine how you can change your public’s perception as quickly and as cost effectively as possible.
Listen to your people: Examining the direct impact on your public so that you understand the perception you are trying to change
Know which marketing methods will be most effective at reaching your public
Examine how much of your budget a public relations exercise is worth: Measuring cost against outcome

Highlights WHY we need user-centric and community centric identity to get clear about its message and to begin the real conversation about the implication NOT doing identity with these frameworks has.
This re-inspires my commitment to help catalyze with all of you the conversations and work that are happening and need to happen.

From the Stars and Stripes.
Biometric database helps U.S. track Iraqis, Afghans
Commentary by me below the article quotes

Many details of the database are classified, but according to Joint Multinational Readiness Center strategic planner Arnie Geisler, who helps train U.S. troops in Germany, it is being compiled by soldiers using equipment that scans an individual’s retina and fingerprints and takes a digital photograph of his or her face.
The equipment takes four measurements of each face and converts them into a biometric algorithm, which is stored in the database along with the retina scan, fingerprints and the person’s name and address, he said.
“It will show you if there is a match for someone who is wanted in the system,” Geisler said.
Vandal said soldiers add people to the database when they pass through entry control points, when they are detained or if they work on a coalition facility. Inputting the data and confirming it takes two to five minutes depending on the proficiency of the soldier using the equipment, he said.
The number of Iraqi and Afghan individuals in the database is classified, he added.
Geisler said biometrics are the cutting edge of military training.
“I don’t think a lot of nations are using biometric scenarios in training. We do individual biometric training here because it is so new. They are training soldiers on the latest biometric technology almost as soon as it comes out and it is available to the units,” he said.
JMRC’s biometric training was showcased to coalition partners from Europe, Canada and Australia at a conference in Hohenfels last week. The goal of the conference was for combat training centers from the various nations to compare best practice for training troops in the war on terrorism, Geisler said

When I read this what runs through my head is all about practicing on them so they can figure out how to do it ‘well’ and then impose it on us in the name of protecting us from terrorism. Let me put the dots together this week we found out that the FBI was using datamining ‘for more then just tracking terrorism.’ What we don’t know is how far the use of these tools go now and how far it will go in the future. Oh and I just got my first “CLEAR” card application while going through San Jose airport. I get to pay them $99 fill out the form – “take your photo and ‘capture’ your biometrics [fingerprint and Iris scan] along with two forms of government identifiecation, one of which must establish that you are a US citizen or permanent foreign resident. A US passport is strongly preferred.” Then your application will be submitted to TSA for a ‘security assessment.’ Once you have been approved for the program we will mail you a Clear card.
So this network is just starting to be built for all of us here in this free land of the United States.
Oh Yeah. As secrutity minded folks have pointed out it doesn’t make our airports more secure – it makes them less secure by giving a low security line – the one that would be terrorists are going to try and penetrate the airport by.

Background checks are based on the dangerous myth that we can somehow pick terrorists out of a crowd if we could identify everyone. Unfortunately, there isn’t any terrorist profile that prescreening can uncover. Timothy McVeigh could probably have gotten one of these cards. So could have Eric Rudolph, the pipe bomber at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. There isn’t even a good list of known terrorists to check people against; the government list used by the airlines has been the butt of jokes for years.
And have we forgotten how prevalent identity theft is these days? If you think having a criminal impersonating you to your bank is bad, wait until they start impersonating you to the Transportation Security Administration.
The truth is that whenever you create two paths through security — a high-security path and a low-security path — you have to assume that the bad guys will find a way to exploit the low-security path. It may be counterintuitive, but we are all safer if the people chosen for more thorough screening are truly random and not based on an error-filled database or a cursory background check.

These systems and networks can be used to track us for ALL kinds of reasons including really BAD ones just as the Nazi’s did in Germany to track down the people they wanted to exterminate. This may sound ‘extreme’ to worry about this – our government would never do ‘that’ but there are conversations about how to deal with illegal immigrants that include mass deportation. This year the Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. It highlights and important point – it is not that some how…there are a few evil people – it is that all people can turn evil because of the nature of human nature. With these Digital tools and systems about people the capacity to do harm increases. It worries me to have biometric databases of all of us in government hands. It worries me that all this information can be correlated across all my activities relating to government. It worries me it could be correlated to private sector databases about me. I think we have A LOT of work to address the social implications of the tools and systems proposed.

This story is interesting for a few reasons. It raises the question about plain old names. I think this is going to become more and more of an issue with google ranks and potentially other social networks mattering so much. More commentary on a tangent below.
A Porn Star Stole My Name:Texas woman claims old teen pal hijacked her moniker for stage name

JULY 3–Lara Madden is a 25-year-old porn movie actress who uses the stage name Syvette Wimberly when starring in films like “Anal Camera 19.” While Madden’s professional alias is catchy and distinctive, the name is identical to that of a former Texas high school pal of the X-rated performer. As a result, Kristen Syvette Wimberly, 25, has filed a lawsuit against Madden and the porn distributor Vivid Entertainment for the misappropriation of her name. In a June 26 complaint filed in Harris County District Court, Wimberly notes that she and Madden became friends after meeting at the beginning of ninth grade in Kingwood, Texas. That friendship, however, “ended due to conflict,” according to the lawsuit, a copy of which you’ll find below. The complaint adds that Madden (who is pictured at right) married while in high school and did not graduate with Wimberly, who lost contact with her former friend. Until recently, that is, when Wimberly discovered that, “there was a woman appearing in multiple explicit pornographic videos” using her name. Wimberly soon learned, the lawsuit reports, that the porn actress who boosted her name “was her former high school friend Lara Madden.” The porn star, Wimberly alleges, deliberately chose to use her name, despite realizing that it would cause “extreme embarrassment and unsubstantiated association with the pornography industry and other consequences.” Wimberly claims that Madden’s actions have caused her emotional distress and mental anguish, for which she is seeking monetary damages. Wimberly also wants a permanent injunction barring Madden and Vivid from continuing the use of her name. In a TSG interview, Madden acknowledged appropriating Wimberly’s name because she thought it was “really cool.” Madden, who said that her first name is actually Laura, denied ever being friends with Wimberly and said that she did not marry in high school. She added that her porn career ended in 2005 after she appeared in 13 films. (6 pages)

What if someone where to pretend to be ‘me’ in a social network and accumulate ‘my’ friends. I am sure this is happening somewhere to some people. The thing is that it becomes obvious you are not actually connected to the real person when you send the ‘fake person’ a virtual good. Then you run into them at a physical event and ask them about getting it. Well if they didn’t get the item you know you are not actually connected to them. I never link to people I don’t know in social networks (I have about 15 “friend requests” in facebook that are from this category of people). It is as some geeks in my network have talked about – what your PGP signing policy matterrs – is is based on knowing the person over time or just because you saw their easily faked ‘government documents’ and have no idea who they are because you have never interacted with them. These sorts of social norms.

Besides facilitating at the Online Community Unconference last week I also lead a session about. OpenID and the potential for persistent Identity. I asked the audience what they wanted to know about – 1/2 had heard of OpenID and wanted to explore what it would mean to adopt it. Another 1/2 wanted the basics of how it worked – so we started with that on the whiteboard.
I began talking about identifier options – second or third level domains for URL’s and top level or second level domains for i-names (XRI). We talked about how in each case there is one you pay for and one you don’t but then are beholden to the site you get your delegated name from. Then I introduced the Relying Party where the user presents their identifier to login. The RP has the code to figure out where to redirect the user to their OpenID Provider or host….the user is prompted to authenticate and if successful redirected back to the RP. We did not get into the phishing hole really at all. Once this was clear we moved into a circle and talked about more of the issues involved. Thomas Kriese from the Omidyar Network continued the next session about how community managers should share reputation.
There was also a session about Keeping the Party Rolling that had a lot of resonance with creating good face-to-face meetings but also has something to do with why user-centric Identity is cool. It keeps things moving smoothly on the web.