Driver's License for the Internet? White House working on it...

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Government is raising its expectations. While it hasn’t been uncommon in the past for governments to consider money wasted by fraud, mismanagement or inefficiency as an expense of doing business, times are changing. New technologies are preventing such waste and initiating cultural change in the public sector. At the Florida Department of Children and Families (DCF), that transformation is being realized through the adoption of an online authentication tool the agency is using to ensure that the benefits it issues, like food assistance, are going to the right people.

Such incarnations of online authentication technology are sprouting up in state government agencies around the country, led by a White House vision of a new, central form of identification, what some are calling “a driver’s license for the Internet.”

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But, of course, fraud doesn’t only happen in Florida. In 2011, the White House started looking at the issue differently when it released the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC). The program outlines a framework for an online identity verification system that would attempt to reduce fraud, while creating a convenient way, federal officials say, for Internet users to prove their identity, without the need to remember passwords. The New York Times called it “a driver’s license for the Internet.” Even better, the White House reported that such a system would improve the Web economy by bolstering public confidence in security and authentication of online businesses and services.

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