Guest post by Mark Boyden

Found this recently (from July 2011, read article for full text, images, videos, documents, and deeper links):

Police To Begin Using Iris Scans From Controversial Iphone App, FED Forms “Center For Identity” At U-Texas Austin Campus

~ Alternative News Report – July 21, 2011

Representatives from private industry and the US federal government has already made a discreet presentation to college students in Austin Texas this spring where the concept of a series of “National Identity Management Centers” aka “The Center For Identity” was introduced to students.

I have wondered WHY this presentation was made on a college campus to college students, most of whom are gullible and many are still innocent to the beguiling tactics of surreptitiously introduced socialism and mass population surveillance programs by the federal government. Restated: most college kids do not understand what “social engineering” means, or “mass indoctrination by media gradualism.”

Until just recently if you were to try to explain these mind control methods to college kids they would hop on their skateboards and laugh it off. But that en mass naivete is now changing. “The Center For Identity” on the University of Texas at Austin has already been planned and now has a web presence.

A close friend, college aged, and a student in Austin, who attended this presentation told me later the entire ambiance of the material was creepy, hard to understand and altogether very ambiguous.

Just exactly WHAT is a “national identity management center’? I examined the literature which was handed out at this presentation and it was all cloaked in well familiar magnanimous federal platitudes about ‘personal identity security” and so forth. There was even a letter included from President Obama. The specific term “RFID” was not referenced in the literature, but I had the very distinct feeling that once these federally staffed “national identity management centers” become operative, that RFID, Iris scans, facial recognition, DNA scans and a host of other high technology personal identification methods will be deployed through the centers. There is a partnership forming between high level corporations and the federal government to establish these “national identity management centers” for profit. That was made very clear in the documents that I examined. I have posted some of these documents at the end of this report.

Read the entire article, view the videos, and included documents, at Alternative News Report.

Anonymous, ZModem, and Whiskey
Image Credit: Jacob Dexe - "Hacktivismen som demokrativerktyg"

“How in Hell Did We Get Here?: Online identity and the fight for cyberfreedom in the age of the Military-Industropolitical Complex”
by Allucquére Rosanne (Sandy) Stone

A fast-forward, semifictional history of online identity, with particular attention to the present collisions of massive political power and individual and collective agency, including how the speaker was transformed into a cat and survived the Great Hurricane of ’39 to become complicit in a Mexican Revolutionary Movement; with Graphical Illustrations, Extremely Bright Lights, and the Sound of Explosions. Maybe.

DATE: Thursday October 6th 7-9pm
NEW LOCATION: B.D. Riley’s Irish Pub and Restaurant [ @BDRileysAustin ], 204 E. 6th Street, Austin, Texas 78701; between Brazos and San Jacinto. We’ll be meeting in a dedicated space towards the back.
RSVP: Plancast
HASHTAG: #EFFatx

Allucquére Rosanne (Sandy) Stone [ website, wikipedia, cyborg anthropology entry ] is an academic theorist, media theorist, author, performance artist, and general troublemaker. She is Professor Emerita in the College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin and Founding Director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACTLab) in the department of Radio, Television and Film. Concurrently she is Wolfgang Kohler Professor of Media and Performance at the European Graduate School (EGS) and Founding Director of the radical new Experimental Media program ACTLab@EGS, senior artist at the Banff Centre for the Arts, and Humanities Research Institute Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. Stone has worked in and written about film, music, experimental neurology, writing, engineering, and computer programming. She is transgender and is considered a founder of the academic discipline of transgender studies, is the author of numerous books, novels, and essays, has been profiled in ArtForum, Wired, Mondo 2000, and many other publications, and Jon Lebkowsky has referred to her as “a force of nature.” She loves chocolate, cats and, apparently, getting herself into hair-raisingly scary situations from which escape is nearly impossible. Nevertheless she finds time to be a loving wife, boon companion, caring mother, and exemplary grandmother, while still running the hell all over the world to perform at conferences in too many disciplines to mention.

B.D. Riley’s on 6th Downtown

Map

The Joy of Tech #354 - They always dreamed of having a home in the range

On Wednesday September 21st, EFF Austin [ @EFFaustin ] was notified about the Austin Police Department’s (APD) Digital Analysis Response Team’s [ DART, @APDDART ] “Operation Wardrive” [ #OpWardrive ] via the KVUE [ @KVUE ] news article that originally appeared at the following URI (it’s relatively common for journalism operations to reuse the same URI to track stories as they develop, sometimes redirecting to new articles):
http://www.kvue.com/news/local/APD-conductiong-Operation-Warfare-to-keep-internet-users-safe-130218768.html

For reference, the text of the original KVUE article is cited in EFF Austin’s response.

Beginning with KVUE’s article, which appears to have been the only source of information and perspective on APD’s intent, a largely uncoordinated but similarly informed collective action took place across multiple points of interface and communication with APD and the Austin City Council [ @AustinTexasGov, #ATXCouncil ]. This seems to have ensured that officials and decision makers in a position to intervene were made aware of public sentiment in a timely manner. Sufficient public concern was observed to motivate officials towards action.

There is uncertainty about whether “Operation Wardrive” has been canceled or postponed, as reflected in this sequence of tweets from KVUE’s account on Thursday morning.

@KVUE (Thu Sep 22 10:23am, 10:20am, 9:30am CST)

APD Chief of Police Art Acevedo is more clear in his email response (Thu Sep 22 10:13:55am CST) to Austinite Mark Boyden‘s thoughtful email addressed to all Austin City Council members, several local activists, Acevedo, and APD Public Information Office Manager Anna Sabana.

Thank you for sharing your concerns with me. This WarDrive idea was not approved by APD Executive Staff and in fact has been disapproved. We will be releasing a statement later today. Although the involved unit’s intent was noble (educating the public about the risks to your personal information), a PSA or other educational effort would be much more effective. To place you further at ease, the idea was killed before actual implementation.

The APD Public Information Office did not publish a formal statement on Thursday via APD News Releases nor the City of Austin Communications and Public Information Office.

KVUE’s Shelton Green [ @SheltonG_KVUE, bio, email ] reached out to EFF Austin seeking our perspective for a follow-up story. EFF Austin President Jon Lebkowsky [ @jonl, wikipedia, homepage ] sat for that interview, which was crafted into the following story, which led the news on KVUE last night (Thu Sep 22 10:00pm).

What’s Next?

As Shelton Green mentions at the end of the story, EFF Austin would like to work with the Austin Police Department Digital Analysis Response Team to craft a winning public education campaign on the risks as well as the virtues of operating an open, publicly-accessible wireless access point. We’ve begun to compile information and gather existing recommendations in this space (if you have sources, please add as a comment or mention to @EFFaustin with hashtag #OpWardrive).

EFF Austin has also decided to continue with our Texas Public Information Act Open Records request. We expect to receive an assessment of the viability of each of our 10 specific inquiries along with an estimate of fees we must pay to have the records processed.

Yesterday, some members of the EFF Austin Board of Directors were frankly shocked by the arrival of an unsolicited $10 donation. I had forgotten we even have a Paypal account. But it made us feel good, and reminded us that we are embarking on a path which will have attendant fees and expenses. We would like to help serve the public interest by walking that path, and would therefore like to ask if you can help support our efforts. If you like what we’re doing, please consider donating (we’re a nonprofit) to help us defray approaching expenses. There’s a Paypal donate button at the upper right of this page.

We believe in transparency and sunlight’s powers of disinfection. EFF Austin will provide transparency into our expenses and you can be sure we will sing praises to our supporters for their role in helping us act. Thank you.

If you’d like to get more involved, consider following us on Twitter, liking us on Facebook, joining our interesting email discussion list, or coming to our next meetup.

Tom presented at the first of the revived EFF-Austin monthly meetings, June 1st at the Flying Saucer. He presented an overview of Internet identity and authentication issues, including some history, going back to Microsoft’s Passport and the .net initiative called Hailstorm, which were about authentication and storing an individual’s information – and which were ultimately not broadly adopted. Tom compared Facebook Connect to Passport/Hailstorm – they’re proprietary services, and they’re efficient, but not resilient. He talked about the evolution of a commons-based approach (Identity Commons) via the Internet Identity Workshop, and Kaliya Hamlin’s concept of user-centric identity – which is about the “Freedom to be who you want to be online – the right to anonymity and pseudonymity,” methods for identify validation and sharing the information you specifically want to share (vs having the data taken from you), and having an ability to control and curate the information about you that appears online. He also brought up the important question of ownership of a personal identifier – who can you trust? How do we avoid being locked into a (commercial) provider of identity/authentication services (like Facebook). A couple of important concepts here: Federation, which is the OpenID model, and delegation, which is the model used in OAuth (used by Twitter) and Facebook Connect. Tom talked about the question whether User-Centric identity is dead. One next step, the OpenID Connect project, isn’t user-centric, but the National Institute for Standards and Technology, there’s a new National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace that is intended to be designed based on a user-centric federation model. (Tom’s slides are at http://effaustin-identity.heroku.com/#1.

Identity as if PEOPLE mattered…

Why should you care about the Internet Identity Movement? What makes it a BIG DEAL? How identity is handled online has always been a huge issue, and is a big issue for your privacy and online experience.

Tom Brown at IIW. Photo by ValeskaUX

Back by popular demand! EFF-Austin’s resuming monthly public meetings on Internet and cyber liberties topics of interest.

Our first event is June 1st, 7PM at the Flying Saucer, 815 W 47th St at the Triangle. Free RSVP here.

Tom Brown

Our very special guest speaker is coder extraordinaire Tom Brown, just returned from Internet Identity Workshop #12

The IIW is an open space workshop focused on user-centric digital identity. Attendees at IIW12 included many more people traveling from overseas and representation from the U.S. government with the emerging NSTIC initiative. We will have a conversation about the good, bad and ugly of NSTIC and the relationship and progress of protocols supporting user-centric identity including OpenID, OAuth and OStatus and derivatives like OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0.

Bio: Tom Brown is an open source software developer who can be found on github.com as herestomwiththeweather. Tom has added OpenID, OAuth and OpenTransact to popular open source ruby projects and has attended most of the identity workshops since IIW7. Tom co-founded SuperBorrowNet, Inc. and maintains the oscurrency project in use by the Austin Time Exchange, the Bay Area Community exchange and emerging community exchanges in Oregon, Canada and Ireland.

Jay Unger’s IIW11 slides are a very helpful introduction to the 36 page National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace document produced by Deloitte last year. Also, during the session, Jay shared some things he had heard from the Department of Homeland Security such as “expect the ecosystem to be private sector led” and suggested that this initiative was leading towards commerce (“reading between the tea leaves”). It seems Jay was right and it seems to me that the main catalyst here, although not clearly defined as a vision, was stated in the White House blog post on NSTIC this week.

we can…cut costs for businesses and government by reducing inefficient identification procedures.

Think about how much money businesses and government could save for each customer it can convert from doing things by phone and mail versus online. “Money is what jumpstarts this” is among my notes from the IIW session.

So, it seems a good question to ask about trusted identities is “trusted by who?” If the goal is to reduce costs which is desired by business and government, who truly needs to trust them are we, the people. This seems to be a matter of changing our perception about the security of doing our business online. Of course, there will still be security vulnerabilities and privacy compromises. We just need to perceive that NSTIC is fixing those. Therefore, I agree with Kaliya Hamlin’s sentiment that We Shouldn’t Freak Out About NSTIC.

Update 1/11: Here is the video of last Friday’s Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research event with Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt and ID Commons post-event conference call notes. To keep updated with these calls, check here.

IIW11 was held November 2-4, 2010. IIW12 is is May 3-5, 2011 in Mountain View, California.

IIW2009a took place May 18-20th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Please check the top of the notes page for links to other blog coverage.

The previous workshop IIW2008b was memorable for the many sweet apps (several from Google) that made use of OAuth and the marathon session on evaluating different options for discovery facilitated by Eran Hammer-Lahav (and lots of great suggestions from John Panzer, et al.). One of the principles of the open space talks is that sessions don’t necessarily end at any particular time.

The conversation about discovery continued across multiple sessions at IIW2009a. The topic of discovery is as fundamental as the social construction of reality. From a node’s perspective on the network, it can be summarized in two steps:

• Given a resource (identified by a URI), where can I find information about it?
• What format is this ‘information about’ in? How do I make sense of it and use it?

Here is video of Eran Hammer-Lahav’s lunch session “Introduction to Discovery: How do we Interact with the Unknown?”

I was very impressed by the work John Bradley and others are doing with interoperability testing for user-centric identity (OpenID, etc.). Allen Tom discussed the OpenID User Interface Extension and showed off some of the work with puffypoodles.com. Here’s his recap at the Yahoo Developer Blog. Of course, Facebook announced it is now the biggest OpenID relying party at the workshop.

Guillaume Lebleu facilitated Identity and the Future of Money. Guillaume reviewed several complementary currencies that have sprung up on the web in the last year.

It’s amazing to overhear everyday conversations today. Talk of messages on a wall, bizarre notions of friendship and fan pages are common. The social web experience shared by millions of people is sadly monolithic. Are these new contexts getting in the way of a more interesting voyage of discovery? If we want a healthier (perhaps less addictive) experience, do our spaces on the web allow us to realize that intention?

The next Internet Identity workshop will be November 3-5.