Open ID for Government Takes Its Tentative First Steps

Nancy Scola | September 9, 2009 - 12:21pm | 1 comment | Email This!

Amid much talk of potential and possibilities, news of a concrete step towards a more "2.0" government came out of today's Gov 2.0 Summit. HHS, NIH, and a handful of other federal offices announced that they are launching a pilot project that will enable Open ID on some government websites. With a single sign-on, users will be able to create and maintain a persistent identity when they visit and revisit government sites. In the first stage of the project, Open ID will be enabled for users as they access research materials, register for events, and user collaborative tools like wikis. Of course, the whole idea of identity gets tricky when it comes to interacting with government, and so a sort of mediated form of Open ID is being implemented for the project. Kaliya Hamlin, a.k.a. Identify Woman, has details:

Those already familiar with OpenID know that typically when users login with it they give their own URL – www.openIDprovider.com/username...There is a little known part of the OpenID protocol called directed identity – that is a user gives the name of their identity provider – Yahoo!, Google, MSN etc – but not their specific identifier. The are re-directed to their IdP and in choosing to create a directed identity they get an identifier that is unique to the site they are logging into. It will be used by them again and again for that site but is not correlatable across different websites / government agencies. The good news it is like having a different user-name across all these sites but since the user is using the same IdP with different identifiers (unlinked publicly) but connected to the same account they just have to remember one password.

Note that, as far as the pilot project goes, the participating agencies are all related health offices. That makes this a project of limited scope. But as long as the privacy concerns of users are a central concern as the project develops, enabling Open ID for government is a step towards creating a government that better supports its citizens.

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oogle has disabled both

by williamsacott on September 16, 2009 - 4:33am

oogle has disabled both uploads of videos and comments on the Korean version of YouTube after the South Korean government tried to enforce a new law which requires web sites with at least 100,000 users to verify the person's real name if they upload files or leave comments debit card. The Cyber Defamation Law, as it's called, went into effect on April 1st. According to officials at the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), the country's broadcasting and telecommunications regulator, the law is an attempt to quell the cyber-bullying and spread of misinformation on the internet. However, critics say that it's just another example of the Lee Myung-bak government's overzealous efforts to monitor and control cyberspace.

The new requirements for web sites were rushed into legislation after the death of a popular Korean actress, Choi Jin Sil, who was driven to suicide after a series of online rumors and threats. Since people now have to submit their real name when uploading content homes for sale by owner, the government hopes this will cut down on the problem of cyber-bullying in the country.

Or perhaps that's just what they want you to believe, say critics. The Korea Times, for example, notes that it's more likely that the government is simply continuing its crackdown on free speech. Already they have been "repeatedly attacked by bloggers," the paper reports, "first over the controversial decision to resume U.S. beef imports, and more recently for its ineptitude in economic policies. The watershed moment came in January when police arrested Park Dae-sung, a blogger known more widely as 'Minerva' and a frequent critic of the government's economic polices mortgage calculators, on charges of 'deliberately' undermining public interest by distributing fraudulent information."
Google Provides an Alternative Method for Uploads

In response to the new legislation, Google has decided they would rather prevent uploads and comments instead of requiring YouTube users to submit their real names and national ID number - a number similar to the United State's Social Security Number and yet another requirement of the new law. consolidate debt