The Federal Government Protecting Our Identity

Protecting Our Identity

As many of us know, Identity Theft is becoming fast a global problem.  Although it has been around for a long time, it has not really received a lot of press or media coverage until mid way through this decade.  It primarily exploded with the advent of wireless communications and wireless applications.  Boy, in some ways, I kind of long for those days when I was growing up, when life was just a little bit simpler.  Now, with the way technology is advancing, the Identity Theft hackers are well ahead of the Security Vendors who are trying to find and deploy solutions as quickly as they can. 

And yes, this even includes the Biometric Vendors.   It has become literally a cat and mouse game, as I have eluded to before in previous Postings.  Until now, trying to address the issues of protecting our identity was pretty much a private sector effort, at least here in the United States.  But now, there is now a serious move by the Federal Government to address this issue. 

Here are some of the details:  “With increasing dependency on information systems and advances in cloud computing, the smart grid and mobile computing, maintaining the confidentiality and integrity of citizens' personally identifiable information is a growing challenge. A new draft document from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) addresses that challenge by adding privacy controls to the catalog of security controls used to protect federal information and information systems . . . Personally identifiable information (PII) is information that is unique to an individual, such as a social security number, birth information, fingerprints and other biometrics. In the wrong hands, PII can be used in identity theft, fraud or other criminal activities. Today, more than ever, citizens are concerned that their personal information is protected as it is processed, stored and transmitted across computing clouds or mobile devices in the federal government and in other areas such as health care and banking. Protecting PII is a key goal of the federal government.”  (SOURCE:  http://www.findbiometrics.com/industry-news/i/9109/). 

My Take

Yea, it is good to see the Federal Government finally stepping up to the plate on this one.  True, balancing the budget and job creation is very important right now, but so is protecting the identity of each and every citizen here in the United States.  So, as you can see from up above, there will be a new document coming out from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to address these challenges, and how our own Federal Government can protect us.  This will be known as the “Privacy Control Catalog”, and based from what I read about, it will be a subset of some much larger piece of legislation (knowing how much our Federal Government loves to use acronyms all the time, even I got lost trying to figure it all out).  I know you might be thinking, and that is how can we be sure our own Federal Government can protect us??? 

Well, they have the resources to do, the problem is deploying them in the most efficient manner and finding the funding to do so.  Hey, it is what it is right???  Not much we can do here.  But, there is one thing that we can actually do.  And that is, to create a regulatory watch group, created in the private sector, to have oversight of the activities in the way and the manner the Federal Government is trying to protect identity.  There is always a fear amongst us as to how the Federal Government has their oversight on us, so the best way is to create this sort of watchdog group.  It is certainly well within our rights, and something which can be done (maybe not so easily), but it will take a lot of time to accomplish. 

When people think of Identity Theft, a black hole image is often conjured up in our mind.  For example, where does it originate, who is launching the attack???  Unfortunately, there is not a lot we can do in this regard, since it has become such a complex and huge problem.  But what we can do, is make sure that the people who are trying to protect us in this regard are doing their job.  And who knows, by taking such a proactive approach in the private sector, the Federal Government will be receptive and can take into account all of the steps they are doing to protect their own citizens. 

This will hopefully reduce the black hole phenomenon we are in, and the resultant factor will be people trusting of our own Federal Government in general.  And another resultant of this will be a big boon to the Biometrics Industry:  The fear of Big Brother watching will be eliminated.

Comments

[replica watches]

Identity Theft is becoming fast a global problem among many countries till now, especially developed countries