Ever heard of Frank Luntz? He is the conservative pollster and language jockey who gets paid to sell controversial political initiatives to the American public. His great contribution is word choice. A couple of his masterpieces: Welfare Reform, Tax Reform, and The Death Tax. In practical terms, there is no difference between "Welfare Cuts" and "Welfare Reform" or between "Estate Tax" and "Death Tax". The difference is in how the different words used to describe an initiative drive how the initiative is perceived/received. You can disagree with Luntz on his politics/ethics but his effectiveness provides a model that would be of some use in our ongoing conversations about digital identity.
Digital Identity is certainly controversial. Privacy is the 3rd rail in any discussion of how a universal identity system will affect users, while Liability Shifts and Trust Management are seen as non-trivial barriers to establishing portable identities in the enterprise space. Any initiative that seeks to deliver identity as a network service will inevitably bump into these and other objections.
One way of looking at Kim Cameron's laws is to see them as a set of pre-emptive distinctions that address the privacy concerns that threaten to derail a broad digital identity initiative. He's done good work inventing a common language. Another area in need of more effective distinctions is how the current state of digital identity is described.
The status quo of digital identity presents greater threats to privacy, liability, and trust than any of the currently proposed solutions. The current state of digital identity looks to me like a perfect storm: Widespread Identity siloing, weak credentials, lack of transparency, convoluted liability ownership, overwhelmed and/or incompetent IT administration and so on all combine to create the downright spooky environment in which identity transactions currently take place on the network. Yet when the conversation is framed in terms of innovation - i.e. "let's invent a universal identity system that provides x,y,z benefits" - there is strong resistance.
And so, I suggest that the current state of digital identity is badly in need of REFORM. The Liberty Alliance, SAML, SXIP, FOAF, WS-* are all initiatives aimed at reforming a badly broken system.
Comments