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The US DoD and the GSA Join the Liberty Project
An anonymous reader writes "The Liberty Alliance Project announced today that the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) have joined the Liberty Alliance in its pursuit to develop open and interoperable standards for electronically managing identity information."
links:
0 7003 0 0.asp
http://www.idg.com.hk/cw/readstory.asp?aid=200303
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,109730,
This is a valid concern. However, You need to remember the alternative: everyone developing their own standard and their own implementation, which may or may not be well done. Ultimately, this has been shown not to work: how many cases have we heard of where someone has broken into an ISP and stolen fifty billion accounts? Worse, how many have have there been that we have NOT heard of? With a federated system like this, the quality of implementations should be much better and, more importantly, the quality of standards should be much better. Encryption is not for the faint of heart - there are probably only a few dozen people in the world who know how to do this kind of thing right - and none of them work for joesautorepair.com. Best of all, as someone has pointed out, with a large scale system like this, bugs will be big enough news to make the papers - instead of the current situation where it has to be 50000 people affected to even hear about.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Because THEY will be the ones, the corporations, the government and the DOD, who control our indentities. Any digital identity should exist to empower the individual to become a better, more informed customer, not a manipulated consumer.
I highly recommend you read Doc Searles and David Wienbergers views on this to see why any implementation of DigID that is corporate centered rather than individual centered is PURE EVIL, and will be used for all sorts of nefarois things, from total erasure of shopping anonymonity, total profiling, and even BLACKLISTING. This is bad stuff, pure and simple.
Planet P Blog
www.enthea.org
Q: What is the Liberty Alliance Project?
A: The vision of the Liberty Alliance Project is to enable a networked world in which individuals and businesses can more easily conduct transactions while protecting the privacy and security of vital identity information. To accomplish its vision, the Liberty Alliance will establish an open standard for federated network identity through open technical specifications that will:
Support a broad range of identity-based products and services
Enable commercial and non-commercial organizations to realize new revenue and cost saving opportunities that economically leverage their relationships with customers, business partners, and employees
Provide consumers with choice of identity provider(s), the ability to link accounts through account federation, and the convenience of single sign-on, when using any network of connected services and devices
Increase ease-of-use for consumers to help stimulate e-commerce
Yeah, yeah. The gub'ment gonna undermine all those goals and blah blah conspiracy blah blah.
This is going to happen, and it's best it emerge as an open standard. Sane citizens of the 21st century want a secure and verifiable identity for e-commerce (which extends past the net, swiping your card for a bag of Doritos at the 7-11 really crosses into e-commerce)
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
some good reading here
The antidote for misuse of freedom of speech is more freedom of speech.
-- Molly Ivins