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View Full Version : Obama will hand Commerce Dept. authority over cybersecurity ID




teacherone
01-07-2011, 02:15 PM
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.

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.)


Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20027800-281.html#ixzz1ANlzK1fq

VBRonPaulFan
01-07-2011, 02:43 PM
If we 'need' a unique internet ID, a private company will create one...sort of like what Google has done with their user accounts. We don't need the government to do it, since all they want to do is monitor what we're doing.