“What is this all about? Sounds kind of
important...”
The North American Security Products Organization (NASPO) has issued a Call for Participation in the effort to create an Identity Verification (ID-V) Standard. A friend of mine wrote the note above in response to an email about the upcoming ID-V Kick-Off meeting in Kansas City.
Yes, indeed. I think that it is very important. I (and others) have invested hundreds of hours of effort over the past few years in work groups leading up to this Kick-Off.
Several years ago ANSI and the BBB collaborated to create
the Identity
Theft Prevention and Identity Management Standards Panel, IDSP. Jim
McCabe, acting on one or more recommendations from others, asked me to chair the first
meeting.
My guess is that Jim had little idea of what he was wading into when he signed on to support the IDSP. He started out with relatively little knowledge of the topic, but did an amazing job becoming conversant in the subject matter in short order. He also displayed an expert touch managing the lot of us and helping us be productive.
After that initial meeting I participated in the work groups to create an initial
document, Identity
Theft Prevention and Identity Management Standards Panel: Report and Webinar,
and a second one, IDSP
Workshop Report-Identity Verification.
This second effort presented the
case for an identity verification standard, especially to be used for issuing
particular government documents such as birth certificates, drivers' licenses, and Social Security Cards. The report highlights issues, gaps and
deficiencies that we saw in current processes for the purposes of identity verification. The intent was not to criticize current practices, most of these issuance processes were not created to support the use of these government documents for identity verification. But members of these organizations and numerous others have recognized and accepted that in reality these government documents are used for this purpose and thus the associated issuance processes should be improved. One important component of the issuance processes for these documents is identity verification.
After the second phase of the ANSI IDSP a follow on effort
was undertaken by a small subset of the IDSP participants to create a document that would serve as a basis or a starting point for an identity verification standard. The group included participants from
DHS, NIST, NAPHSIS, Liberty Alliance, AAMVA, a State DMV, NASPO, and others. (Please forgive me for any I have omitted.) I do not think that all of our ideas will survive intact nor perhaps should they, but I do believe that we created a document that will catalyze a lot of discussion and I hope will generate significant interest in
the standard creation effort.
NASPO has published the report on their website, http://www.naspo.info/. Get a copy here, NASPO ID-V Project Report.
For the past year or so the group, in particular NASPO, Mike O'Neil and Graham Whitehead, has been searching for a way to fund a standard creation effort and carry on the work that the group started. Kudos to NASPO for carrying on this important effort.
Dan Combs
