January 12, 2011 - 3:15am
American people will soon be assigned special Internet passports to roam online. The White House is developing a "National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace" under which the Commerce Department becomes responsible for an "Identity Ecoystem".
Users in the United States will be given IDs to log in across websites all over the web. The IDs are supposed to secure consumers against fraud and eliminate the need to remember countless passwords.
The announcement of the new strategy provoked much skepticism and criticism. Many observers doubt if government can succeed where technology giants like Microsoft or Google have not. As some have pointed out, the company that's probably come the closest and has the best chance of accomplishing becoming online users' universal ID would be Facebook, given not only its enormous amount of users, but its integration into a large portion of the web through Facebook log-in. On the other hand not many people today do trust Facebook to be their universal ID, with many very concerned with how the company treats privacy issues.
Much of the criticism of the White House's efforts has been over the vagueness of the strategy, and of course many simply don't want the government involved in this.
Howard A. Schmidt, the Cybersecurity Coordinator and Special Assistant to President Obama, explained the strategy this way:
This holiday season, consumers spent a record $30.81 billion in online retail spending, an increase of 13 percent over the same period the previous year. This striking growth outshines even the notable 3.3-5.5 percent overall increase in holiday spending this past year. While clearly a positive sign for our economy, losses from online fraud and identity theft eat away at these gains, not to mention the harm that identity crime causes directly to millions of victims. We have a major problem in cyberspace, because when we are online we do not really know if people, businesses, and organizations are who they say they are. Moreover, we now have to remember dozens of user names and passwords. This multiplicity is so inconvenient that most people re-use their passwords for different accounts, which gives the criminal who compromises their password the "keys to the kingdom."
We need a cyber world that enables people to validate their identities securely, but with minimal disclosure of information when they're doing sensitive transactions (like banking) - and lets them stay anonymous when they're not (like blogging). We need a vibrant marketplace that provides people with choices among multiple accredited identity providers – both private and public – and choices among multiple credentials. For example, imagine that a student could get a digital credential from her cell phone provider and another one from her university and use either of them to log-in to her bank, her e-mail, her social networking site, and so on, all without having to remember dozens of passwords. Such a marketplace will ensure that no single credential or centralized database can emerge. In this world, we can cut losses from fraud and identity theft, as well as cut costs for businesses and government by reducing inefficient identification procedures. We can put in-person services online without security trade-offs, thereby providing greater convenience for everyone.