Panopticon - an overlooked aspect

Stefan Brands often uses the metaphor of the pantopticon to criticise federated identity models (like one possible manifestation of the Liberty Alliance architecture) in which a user's interactions with service providers are (partially) mediated by identity providers.

Stefan and Sun's Pat Patterson had an interesting discussion on the issue a while back. I won't revisit that - it's undeniable that in the LAP model that the IDP may 'learn', the discussion is to the what (it learns) and the when (it isn't appropriate).

There is another aspect of the panopticon model that gets lost in the 'IDP surveillance' theme. Panopticon refers to a proposed model for prison architecture and process in which inmates were distributed in isolated cells about a centralized watch station. In addition to the intermittent surveillance that was enabled, the architecture ensured that inmates had no contact with each other or prison officials. The theory was that such contact would interfere with the inmates reformation.

solitude is in its nature subservient to the purpose of reformation

Liberty today announced the release of another rev of its identity web services framework. This release includes support for what Liberty is calling a People Service. Bottom line, People Service is designed to allow users to manage their online relationships (e.g. friends, colleagues, and family, etc) such that the various applications that depend on a social layer (e.g. photo sharing, Find a Friend, YASN, etc) can build on a single consistent social network rather than each building their own duplicative version. A bit like a SOAP API into a FOAF repository.

The People Service is a key enabler of cross-principal web service interactions, e.g. those where the identity on whose behalf a request is sent is different than the identity that owns the identity resource in question (some site querying my wife's online calendar but indicating that the request is being sent on my behalf.) A key bit of this release of WSF is defining how the multiple identities in such a scenario are expressed in the SOAP Header.

The (admittedly limited) irony is that the ID-WSF People Service enables just the sort of interactions between individuals that the panoptical model for prison (and hospital) architecture was designed to prevent. No analogy is perfect it seems.

The PS spec is here and there is a whitepaper as well.