RE: Open Identity

[Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>]

This is a useful discussion, and I'm glad to have it. If you have
followed the Liberty Alliance links sufficiently, then you have some
idea of what the federated identity notion is, and this happens to
correspond closely to a discussion that has been taking place
somewhat behind the scenes, that is, not officially, but for
informational purposes with a co-chair of the xml.gov working group.

I'm not in love with any governmental agency or  any major
corporation or coalition of such corporations taking the lead in this
effort, and coming from California, and knowing where the money trail
of Bank of America leads (to North Carolina and very centralized
interests), and having watched Larry Ellison volunteer to give the
government the tools for implementing a national ID card database, I
am deeply concerned to see any such effort led by any of our
erstwhile rich uncles, Scottie, Larry, or Billy.

However, if we have all three loving uncles involved, which is what
will likely happen since MS has already backed off the proprietary
bandwagon in anticipation of the Supreme Court declining to overrule
the DOJ further such that Hailstorm and dotNet will not be the
draconian, its-my-football scheme it started out to be, and will be
made to play well with others in sandbox, so....

Okay, I'm grudgingly for it, provided, of course, that federated
means just that, decentralized and distributed, so that what Len and
Karl have outlined below makes sense. HumanML will just be another
player with a bit of interpretation that can be used in certain
contexts for limited purposes, such as the levels of identity we can
contribute to.

At 4:52 PM -0500 9/27/01, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>While I don't disagree with this, I am hoping these kinds
>of applications are someone else's job.  I see enough
>of this kind of stuff already. :-(  Still let's pursue
>the trail where it leads.
>
>My instincts are that the first line of users of
>HumanML are sociologists, anthropologists, semioticians,
>etc.  After that, the entertainment industry can mine it
>(see genre applications, VRML, etc).  The
>fact that their work can then inform the work of
>the public safety systems is a valid use, but the
>ps systems already gather and correlate much the information
>they need.  In fact, we are borrowing from their
>schemas now in the physical characteristics section (NIBRS).
>
>While I don't think it appropriate to provide full details of
>public safety schemas, there is a quite a bit of information
>there to be used for identification and profiling, but the
>next levels include special watch lists  created by
>the national security agencies but not made publicly
>available and only available to public safety by special
>request of the security agencies themselves as BOLOs.
>
>The operation/process does differentiate because it points up
>the aspects of policy controls over use and access.
>In the law enforcement domain, there are three
>subdomains that interlock to govern the inputs, outputs
>and subproceses of each: 
>
>o police, fire and emergency services (public safety)
>o courts (not public safety but an inner peer data partner)
>o corrections (prisons) (public safety and inner peer to police)
>
>The police in particular are governed by the courts. 
>Use of and access to certain information or execution
>of certain processes require judicial permission and
>these are determined by policy or fiat (judge signs
>warrant).  Here is an example.  An officer
>in a police car making a vehicle stop wants to know if the person
>driving the car owns the car (identification
>and association) and do they have outstanding
>warrants (BOLO) and this information can enable
>immediate authorized action.  Next they want to know
>if the driver paid their utility bill last
>month (profile based on personal disorder).
>They can get the first set of information
>from NCIC and DMV.  The second requires a
>court order but it is for secondary action
>(follow up, hold, etc).  In the case of a
>BOLO, suspicion is enough to hold and that
>is actually how one of the foreign nationals
>involved in the bombings was captured: a routine
>traffic stop.
>
>They cannot use their resources to collect
>the depth and kind of information we may be enabling
>except in very special cases (eg, application of
>haptics to juvenile analysis).   The information
>might be useful for decision support and policy
>making at higher than the street level (eg,
>policy formulation by the federal government
>trying to determine what special needs are for
>some given class of immigrants).   The issue
>here is task appropriateness.  However, yes,
>one could conceivably use HumanML data for
>an interpreter that is scanning for possible
>terrorists.  I suspect that information would
>be very limited in application compared to the
>BOLOs created by the intelligence groups but
>used in concert with them, would set off
>alerts in the name databases such that the
>officer stopping the car could conceivably
>get the court order much faster.
>
>len
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Kurt Cagle [mailto:kurt@kurtcagle.net]
>
>It's a very valid distinction, and one that makes things interesting from
>the intersection standpoints of other groups. For instance, last I heard
>there was an OASIS-TC that were attempting to create a consistant ACL
>mechanism for OASIS processes (targeting mainly ebXML). I think this
>actuallly raises the issue about the degree to which HumanML should
>subscribe to the notion that authentication falls under its charter.
>Identity is not a process -- it's a state that can be quantified in terms of
>some specific charter (the discussion we had earlier about the need to
>include the author as part of authorization). Identification, however, is a
>process, and is in fact a process on multiple levels:
>
>1) Identification via ownership of a key. This level of identification is
>largely synomous with authentication -- if you have the key (or a necessary
>and sufficient part of the key) then you are assumed to be the person who
>you claim to be.
>
>2) Identification via characteristics. This level of identification creates
>a best fit criterion that establishes a level of confidence that the person
>is who they claim. This would essentially cover the whole domain of
>biometrics.
>
>3) Identification via profiling/association. This does not attempt to
>establish a specific individual uniquely, but instead attempts to determine
>whether they conform to a set of individuals likely to perform some action
>(profiling of terrorists, for instance or profiling of potential customers
>for marketing purposes).
>
>Each of these have their own notion of identity. What we're doing with
>HumanML seems to be somewhere between (2) and (3), which could conceivably
>even be joined together - what differentiates them is not the operation but
>the result; either "Is this the person in the Wanted Dead or Alive picture?"
>or "Does this person look have characteristics that match a likely
>Terrorist?").
>
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--
Rex Brooks
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