National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

The subject of this post is something that I discovered today.  Preliminary analysis tells me this is a big thing that deserves some attention.  So, I will give it some attention because it touches so many areas of my interest expressed in this blog related to information structures, object oriented analysis and the writing on the wall (or shadows on the wall) that looking at things this way produces.

National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace is a program of  National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) which is an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce.  The Secretary of Commerce is Penny Pritzker.  While Big Business is involved with all aspects of government,  the Department of Commerce is the official focal point of Big Government and Big Business where official partnerships are formed including academia in joint areas of interest.  As exemplified by the Secretary of Commerce there is a typical revolving door between the business/academic domain and the government.

It is evident that the initiatives of the NIST are probably initiated by the business domain and the interest of academia to participate in the study of these initiatives.  I would conclude that that the NIST "work" is largely the product of the business community initiatives handed to the NIST for its official sanction.  In other words, business serving itself and its corporate interests through government.  Likewise, government agencies external to NIST are serving themselves as well through participation in nominal NIST initiatives by introducing their own government agency initiatives to the NIST.  The conclusion is that much of the domain under the umbrella of the NIST is matrixed with involvement of both other government agencies and businesses that have mutual interest and benefit from NIST initiatives.  There may even be a governmental agency revolving door among the top level staffing of NIST equivalent to a government/industry revolving door.  Pure speculation but something to be aware of in my research.  Some SES drones might prefer to advance withing the government rather than to go outside.  Some do both, I would guess.

For example:  This website presents the revolving door at the FCC.  It goes on to name names.

Like so many problems in American government, the policy shift may relate to the pernicious corruption of the revolving door. The FCC is stocked with staffers who have recently worked for Internet Service Providers (ISP) that stand to benefit tremendously from the defeat of net neutrality. 

However, that is all just background to looking at the agenda of various players in the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace.

In the news recently is the two tiered internet speed and the higher speed opportunity for those that pay more to get more.  Is "Two Tier" an emerging business security model?  One tier for all "users" that is secure based on the willingness (or requirement) of users/consumers of service to provide absolute ID as a price of entry to receive the services, the other lower tier with less or no security offered to those that do not wish to participate in the secure ID requirements necessary for higher level services and therefore facing lower level barriers.

In this situation, government gets secure individual user ID information and tracking and business also gets it. Big Data and Big Data mining.  Non participants are not excluded,  it is just more difficult for them, maybe so difficult that they might as well be excluded.  Like the job market where job seekers just give up and resign themselves to the cost/price of under employment.

National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace looks and sounds like total information all the time with absolute identification to the individual (and everything about them) interacting with the information system.  The wet dream of both business and government.

National Program Office

A National Program Office has been established at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to coordinate the federal activities needed to implement NSTIC. The office will lead in cooperation with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) activities involving public policy development and privacy protections. The National Program Office will serve as the point of contact to bring the public and private sectors together to meet this challenge. As the federal coordinator, the National Program Office will collaborate with other federal partners on the implementation of NSTIC.