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."

Comments

Woo hoo

[MeanMF]

U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) have joined the Liberty Alliance

Great, that should really speed things up...

Enough of your Borax Poindextor

[Anonymous Coward]

The government supporting privacy kinda sounds like silicone implants supporting healthy breasts.

The problem with universal standards

[ObviousGuy]

The instant someone finds a security hole in this authentication system, everyone is vulnerable.

The opportunity for fraud in a universal system like this is just waiting to be exploited.

Umm, is this a Good Thing?

[offpath3]

I just watched the flash demo on their website. Their demo was all about being able to link up your data on various websites. Their example was linking your airlines account to a rental car account. This really just sounds like improved data mining couched in convenience to the consumer.

Government is getting a clue

[jonsmirl]

I'm glad to see the US government supporting an industry consortimum instead of endoring the single vendor solution from Microsoft (Passport). I hope MS' stock gets knocked down on Monday.

Re:Great!

[rusty0101]

As Heinlein pointed out through Lazarus Long,

"When a place gets crowded enough to require ID's, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about spce travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere."

Other useful quotes at http://www.musespace.com/musings/quotes/lazaruslon g.html

It could be MUCH worse

[Xtifr]

To all the people who are freaking out about this "evil" technology, please keep in mind, the Liberty Alliance is developing an OPEN alternative to Microsoft's own "Passport" system. So, the gummit getting behind Liberty Alliance is a Good Thing(tm), relatively speaking. They could be getting behind Passport instead. And then, instead of just needing to have your Liberty Alliance ID tatooed on your forehead, you would have to have your MS-Passport ID tatooed on your forehead, and you would be legally forbidden to run anything but MS-Winders, since only MS-Winders would come with the proper drivers to scan and process the information tatooed on your forehead.

Liberty Alliance has it backwards

[cosmosis]

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

Okay, here's the poop

[Anonymous Coward]

The government has lately become very VERY interested in making itself more accessible to the citizenry (G2C) and to business (G2B) via web services. Lots of federal/state/local government agencies provide certain services to end users, but these services do not work together and you have to deal with each one of them, and their idiosyncracies, separately. In the government this is known as "stovepiping" (each agency maintains its own separate stove pipe). And that's a very bad thing for being an efficient, useful organization to its customers (the citizens).

An example. Let's say you want to register yourself as a sole proprietor sales company. There's a myriad of organizations you will ultimately have to deal with, from OSHA to federal and state income and sales tax agencies to warranting that you're a drug-free employer or a nondiscriminatory one or whatever the latest law is. You'd like a one-stop shopping location, perhaps NewBusiness.gov, which acts a front-end to all these agencies at all levels and pulls it all together for you. Now that'd be nice, wouldn't it? Or how about one-stop location for handling all the stuff that deals with disasters? Or moving to Michigan? Or going to grad school, complete with Pell Grants and checks for available assistantships?

This is what the government wants to do. They know that they are fractured into little beaucracies beyond usefulness to the average citizen. So there is a major MAJOR initiative, fronted by the Bush White House, to make the government work together so it can be more responsive and helpful to you. National Science Foundation, GSA, a bunch of groups are working on this. They want to move the government into the twentieth century at least, much less the twenty-first!

Trouble is, how does the government know it's you who's applying for the Pell grant, as opposed to Joe Fraud who's stolen your identity? They need some kind of potent self-identification. But right now the government is scared spitless about using even cookies on its websites for fear that privacy spooks will start rumors that they're tracking your every move and a congressman will immediately put them out of work.

So the government is also trying to find ways to make it possible for you to manage, distribute in a protected fashion, verify, and guarantee your identity, or even act anonymously in a way you know they can't reasonably crack. Otherwise citizens will never ever use these services. They know this.

Commercial crap like MSN Passport just aint' gonna cut it. Passport has a dismal privacy record. Hence the interest in Liberty Alliance etc.

Yes, the Total Information Awareness project is scary (though anyone who's involved in the project can tell you it basically has no teeth at all -- it's a paper tiger). And various spook agencies are impressive at digging into your private live: well, at least the one in Maryland is anyway. But what's going on in this iniative is, in fact, totally benign. The government wants to really give you your bang for the tax buck, and are trying to figure out how they can do so without scarying you spitless on the privacy side.

There are in fact people in the government who are there because they want to help make the world better, you know! Not many. But they're there.

-- a researcher in the DC area...

DoD soldier information

[TFloore]

The DoD is very interested in having easy identification for the 1.3 million military personnel in the United States. This means pay information, service records, ratings, training, specializations. Medical records. Retirement information.If it's tracked, they want to have it all referenced to a single identity, cross-referenced on different systems.

They were working for a while on smartcards for all military personnel, and that's actually gone pretty far along.

But they've probably learned that there's too much to stick on a smartcard, and you can't get good enough security to put confidential information on the smartcard that you give to 1.3 million people. Too many will lose them, and then you have problems.

So they want to have the records, and have them easily tied to individuals. And have them available in the different commands, on different servers scattered thoroughout the DoD command structure.

They are very interested in something like the Liberty Alliance, and making sure that they can use it for their purposes. Keeping this diverse array of information for 1.3 million people is just what this project is made for.

Seems good that the DoD became aware of it, and decided to participate. And I'm reassured that they didn't decide to just go with the Microsoft solution without considering the options. (Maybe they learned from the problems the Navy has been having with NMCI.)