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Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans

engadget.com

1–10 of 199 posts

Re: Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans

#2
The silver lining is that by the time this project goes through study after study, development, testing, and finally deployment 5-10 years will have passed and the Internet will fundamentally change in ways that either makes this instantly irrelevant or impossible to enforce.

Re: Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans

#5
This article is pretty light on details. Here's a quote from the White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt:

Schmidt stressed today that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain possible on the Internet. "I don't have to get a credential, if I don't want to," he said. There's no chance that "a centralized database will emerge," and "we need the private sector to lead the implementation of this," he said.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20027800-281.html#ixzz1AZD...

Re: Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans

#6
post #3

Is this done anywhere else in the world? It is the scariest of the scary Big Brother measures I've seen recently...

Norway has a unified authentication scheme for government sites, but that's as far as it goes. --If the US wants to do that, fine, but if they think private sites are really going to go for it, they're dreaming.

I wouldn't trust the government to handle identification across multiple sites any more than I trust Facebook or Google.

Re: Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans

#7
This headline is actually pretty misleading. From what I've seen of the project, it is not about the government issuing online identities. Rather they've realized that people already have identities from services like Facebook and Google as well as banks.

This project is aimed at making it possible for people to interact with government agencies using identities they already have. Some interactions require very little security and knowledge of who a person is (leaving a comment here for example) while others (paying your taxes) require quite a bit.

Re: Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans

#8

This headline is actually pretty misleading. From what I've seen of the project, it is not about the government issuing online identities. Rather they've realized that people already have identities from services like Facebook and Google as well as banks. This project is aimed at making it possible for people to interact with government agencies using identities they already have. Some interactions require very littl…

Is it really in the best interest of collecting taxes to defer authentication (and even authorization) to a third party such as Google, or even banks?

Re: Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans

#9
This sounds very Orwellian, but I doubt much will become of this. Based on the statement the article attributes to Locke, it sounds like they're selling it to us as a single sign-on provider. Somehow, I doubt this will become as popular as current single sign-on providers such as Facebook or Google without legislation.

Re: Obama administration moves forward with unique Internet ID for all Americans

#10
post #2

The silver lining is that by the time this project goes through study after study, development, testing, and finally deployment 5-10 years will have passed and the Internet will fundamentally change in ways that either makes this instantly irrelevant or impossible to enforce.

We need a publicly-controlled identity infrastructure that's compatible with the Internet. The problem isn't that internet ID is somehow evil, but rather the government.
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