Monday, November 17, 2008

CIA.gov to become OpenID Provider

Reiterating a campaign promise for his administration to be more 'user-centric', President Elect Barack Obama has indicated that one of his first moves once in office will be to direct the Central Intelligence Agency to add support for the OpenID authentication protocol to the CIA.gov web site.

Obama is reported to have said "We've got all this data on our citizens, why not use it to help our them get around the Web. In this day and age, why should a US citizen have to manually enter a detailed record of their sexual history at some dating site when their govenment has that very same data and will serve it up when asked?"

The CIA and other departments already share large amounts of identity data on Americans (and other nationalities). The promised support for OpenID's Attribute Exchange is seen as different because OpenID, through its inherent user-centrism, will give citizens the ability to monitor and control such sharing. An Senior CIA Officer said 'Yes, consent is critical for us. We would never dream of sharing a citizen's identity attributes without first asking a judge'.

Rumours are that the CIA OP will distinguish itself from other large OpenID providers with a major print & web marketing campaign built around the slogan 'Let us tell you about yourself'.

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