Last Friday, the White House releases the new National Strategy for Trusted Identities draft in Cyberspace confident of creating a strategy to safeguard people on the net.
The White House is looking for people to volunteer by creating a system that would allow people to generate trusted identities to work with in online transactions.
White House cyber-security chief Howard Schmidt said hello is his goal to secure and protect transactions online through use of a unique ID ‘a smart card or digital certificate’ that would prove that individuals are who they say they are. These digital IDs will be told her i would consumers by online vendors for financial transactions.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has recently launched a Web site to elicit ideas and feedback on the public. The federal government plans to collect comments once your there through July 19 before promising to finalize its strategy later this fall.
The draft on the NSTIC was created with input from key gov departments, business leaders, and privacy advocates responding to one of several action pieces of President Obama’s Cyberspace Policy Review, according to Schmidt. With online consumers and companies grappling with fraud and identity theft, the administration wants an ‘identity ecosystem’ in which people can feel more safe and secure, when they conduct business on the internet.
In discussing the NSTIC’s digital ID initiative, Schmidt outlined quite a few specific benefits. A good identity card would eliminate or at least reduce the requirement to juggle a multitude of user-names and passwords for each online service. Such an ID system would also let individuals choose and control the amount private information they desired to reveal to authenticate themselves online.
The application of identity cards both offline and online has is proposed and debated for several years. Such cards have started to locate a niche in Europe, however the U.S. response may be cautious. Proponents have advocated digital IDs so that you can ultimately safeguard our identities, but opponents fear that such efforts would make it more convenient for governments to hold an eye on citizens.
