Why Convergence?

Link: http://www.ec3.org/Downloads/2002/id_management.pdf

http://www.ec3.org/Downloads/2003/identity_infrastructure.pdf

http://www.ec3.org/Downloads/2003/EnterpriseIdentity.pdf

I helped to develop the above documents with a number of smart capable people.  You should feel free to affix blame for the bad parts to me and attribute the good parts to my colleagues.  These writings should help readers understand a good deal of my thoughts on identity and ID management as a starting point for this conversation.

I have spent most of the last 5 or 6 years working on electronic Government/Commerce issues and implementations and a large part of that time spent has been focused on identity related work.  There are many types of interactions and transactions for which the interacting parties might choose or prefer to be anonymous to each other or use pseudonymous identifiers.  These types of interactions have not captured much of my attention or focus.  My efforts have centered upon interactions in which, for good reasons or not, there existed a need to connect a virtual identity to a real world person or to express the identity of a real person in the virtual world.  Generally, these interactions are those in which a real world person is known and an organization wants to interact electronically with that person or in which there is a requirement for trust between the parties to a transaction and/or that there is some significant value, privacy or security requirement to the transaction.

Throughout our history (and mostly metaphorically for us today) the difference between being dinner or diner depended upon our ability to read and decipher physical cues to behavior.  There are a lot of hard-wired mechanisms in each of us that tie our trust of another to physical attributes we can perceive.  Leaving aside for the moment whether those mechanisms function effectively or not, a lot of us reserve our trust for another to those from whom we can derive clues to their character from their physical person.  Our social interaction and enforcement mechanisms are based on physical restraints and punishment.  The virtual world disrupts those mechanisms.  Additionally, I believe the anonymity of the virtual world has disabled some restraints that prevented most people from performing a variety of acts.  Some of these acts result in an explosion of creativity and invention.  Others lead to an explosion of mischief and crime.

A variety of reasons and excuses have led to a convergence of physical and virtual ID.  As Director of Digital Government for the State of

Iowa

I worked with a large number of people to create a precursor to REALID.  I believe that we were on a course to build a top-quality system that would have met a wide range of uses while maintaining requirements to meet the needs of security, privacy, individual control and information.  One of the primary, maybe the most important lesson from that work has three components:

1. REAlID done right = good

2. RealID done wrong = very bad

3. The bar is high for such a system to be good.

       We aren't close yet!

There is a tremendous value to be had in an identity system that is backed by government in which a real person can perform inline and online transactions, safely and securely in appropriately private ways.  People function in both the real and virtual worlds.  The tools and systems they use should provide a seamless and transparent ability to function in both worlds.  A proper system will foster creativity and invention and limit mischief and crime.

I look forward to the discussion this week.

Comments

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[Aldo Castañeda]

Tangential to REAL ID ACT 2005 but perhaps of interest anyway?

I'm currently writing a legal paper regarding Kim Cameron's Laws of Identity from a legal/IP perspective.

In it I focus on the central role that "consumer trust" plays in wide adoption of a digital identity Metasystem as described in the Laws of ID.

In brief, I argue (to be precise I'm working on the argument) that because building consumer "trust" in the proposed Metasystem is the sine qua none of wide adoption, an independent organization should be created to "house" the IP associated with the UI elements of the Metasystem.

Why?

I believe that an independent organization could establish a set of conditions of compliance which implementers of Metasystem systems must meet in order to gain access (via royalty-free licenses) to standardardized UI elements.

This approach potentially provides the follownig advantages:

First, unlike much proposed Metasystem infrastructure standard UI elements are not abstractions for end-users. Therefore end-users could look for familiar visual clues when "shopping" for compliant Metasystems "services".

Second, these UI elements are also potentially the subject of IP protection.
Therefore when adopted as standard, these elements presumably provide the leverage for the above proposed independent entity to ensure minimal conditions of compliance with regard to both the consumer facing UI elements of the Metasystem but upon less tangible but no less important features that ensure minimal levels of security and/or privacy etc.

I'm trying ;-) ... to keep this short so I won't list some of the other advantages of this approach that I foresee. However I hope I've included enough here to spark some interest in this proposal. If so I welcome your comments.

Best,

Aldo Castaneda

[Jaco Aizenman]

The convergence of physical and virtual ID is an unavoidable trend...

The convergence phisical and the virtual worlds is also unavoidalble...

Constitutions rule the world...

The Metasystem (online identity glue) will operative rule the online world in the future...

The convergence between Constitutions and the Metasystem is a natural evolution...

In Costa Rica, 10 Congressman presented a Constitutional amendment to add an additional fundamental right: not having or having virtual personality.

A free translation is here:
----
The Congress of the Republic of Costa Rica Decrees:

Bill that adds an article 24 bis to the Political Constitution

Article 1- Add a new article 24 bis in the "Chapter IV" of the "Rights and Guarantees of the Individual,"

"Unique Chapter," that will say:

Article 24 bis- "All people has the right to have or not to have a virtual personality, where its presence, content and projection is regulated by each one of them.

It can not be used for discriminatory ends harming its bearer.

The State will guarantee that the information included in the virtual personality have the adequate security and legality; with the exclusion of third parties not authorized that pretend to obtain it.

The State could use the content
of the virtual personality of the people, previous authorization of them, always that it is in the benefit and advantage of the individual."
----
Everyone is invited to a Symposium on this subject, next Nov 17-18 in Costa Rica. You can contact me for details here:
http://public.xdi.org/=jaco

More info here:
http://virtualrights.org/symposium.htm
http://cis-berkman.editme.com/Lexicon