Want to help shape national cybersecurity strategy?

On Friday Howard A. Schmidt, Cybersecurity Coordinator and Special Assistant to the President, announced the launch of National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. The vision statement states the goal is that:

Individuals and organizations utilize secure, efficient, easy-to-use, and interoperable identity solutions to access online services in a manner that promotes confidence, privacy, choice, and innovation.

The difficult part of that statement is creating a solution that is easy to use, and getting people to use it. Of course, that's the purpose of a vision statement, to provide lofty goals to strive for. The PDF of the draft strategy includes a more manageable set of goals:

More specifically, the Strategy defines and promotes an Identity Ecosystem that supports trusted online environments. The Identity Ecosystem is an online environment where individuals, organizations, services, and devices can trust each other because authoritative sources establish and authenticate their digital identities. The Identity Ecosystem enables:

· Security, by making it more difficult for adversaries to compromise online transactions;
· Efficiency based on convenience for individuals who may choose to manage fewer passwords or accounts than they do today, and for the private sector, which stands to benefit from a reduction in paper-based and account management processes;
· Ease-of-use by automating identity solutions whenever possible and basing them on technology that is easy to operate with minimal training;
· Confidence that digital identities are adequately protected, thereby increasing the use of the Internet for various types of online transactions;
· Increased privacy for individuals, who rely on their data being handled responsibly and who are routinely informed about those who are collecting their data and the purposes for which it is being used;
· Greater choice, as identity credentials and devices are offered by providers using interoperable platforms; and
· Opportunities for innovation, as service providers develop or expand the services offered online, particularly those services that are inherently higher in risk

The purpose of the website is to get public feedback. Go to the site, read the comments, read the PDF (35 pages) and put your two cents in. If we don't tell them what we think, we deserve whatever they put in place.