Obama Wants Internet ID for Americans

[[ What's next?  A big byte tax? ]]

Obama Wants Internet ID for Americans Scotty Starnes | January 8, 2011 at 5:00 AM | Tags: Barack Obama, digital IDs, Google, internet ID, internet identification, Obama, President Obama, spying on Americans, trusted identity, wiretapping the internet | Categories: Uncategorized | URL: http://wp.me/pvnFC-42W

Just whatever you do...don't ask Illegal immigrants for identification. Identification is only for Americans.

CBSNews.com reports:

STANFORD, Calif. - President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.

More laws through regulations. Who'd a thunk it?

It's "the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government" to centralize efforts toward creating an "identity ecosystem" for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.

That news, first reported by CNET, effectively pushes the department to the forefront of the issue, beating out other potential candidates including the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. The move also is likely to please privacy and civil liberties groups that have raised concerns in the past over the dual roles of police and intelligence agencies.

The announcement came at an event today at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, where U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Schmidt spoke.

The Obama administration is currently drafting what it's calling the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, which Locke said will be released by the president in the next few months. (An early version was publicly released last summer.)

"We are not talking about a national ID card," Locke said at the Stanford event. "We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities."

The Commerce Department will be setting up a national program office to work on this project, Locke said.

Details about the "trusted identity" project are unusually scarce. Last year's announcement referenced a possible forthcoming smart card or digital certificate that would prove that online users are who they say they are. These digital IDs would be offered to consumers by online vendors for financial transactions.

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.

This coming from an administration that wants to make wiretapping the internet easier and that is tied to Google. Google admitted to stealing people's passwords, emails and IP addresses. Remember, this isn't about identification. It's about spying on Americans.

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