Like many long time federated identity focused people in the identity community, I have been closely monitoring the early development of the U.S. government's National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) program -- most recently when the Secretary of Commerce and related folks went to Stanford to discuss the program in more depth.  The NSTIC program, and others like it in other countries such as Canada and New Zealand, have the potential to catalyze a true marketplace for trusted identities on the Internet, making life online both safer and easier for everyone.

Maybe I am naïve to politics in Washington, but the quality of the reporting on the NSTIC program has been highly inconsistent at best.  While some reports have been right on the money, such as this one from Fast Company, others have been poorly researched and have shown that they have not understood (and probably not even read) what NSTIC is all about in particular or the value of federated identity in general.

If you are leery of the centralization of personal information and credentials, in particular by governments; don't want a government monopoly on verifying online identities; don't want the excessive sharing of personal information between organizations, including government organizations; and don't want governments creating IT systems that can't interoperate and leverage best practices from the private sector; you should love the NSTIC program, not hate it.

Organizations have been federating their user's relatively high-security sessions for years now, generally in support of tightly coupled business relationships, such as the IT enablement for supply chains or other B-to-B applications.  More recently identity federations have grown in support of low security applications around social networking (Facebook Connect & Google's OpenID) and University-oriented research collaborations.  But what has been lacking to date is more arms length federations for trust requiring applications.  NSTIC is a great example of a large community of potential applications (government ones) coming forward to take advantage of trusted identities that already exist on the Internet from potentially thousands of sources.  Not only could this benefit U.S. citizens by enabling improved, more secure, and less costly access to government applications, but it could also have spillover benefits to the private sector, by helping to establish a new revenue generating business model that has benefits for all participants - including the user.