Postal Service Pilots 'Federal Cloud Credential Exchange'

CowboyRobot writes with news about a federal initiative to support federated authentication for government services. From the article: "The U.S. Postal Service will be the guinea pig for a White House-led effort to accelerate government adoption of technologies that allow federal agencies to accept third-party identity credentials for online services. The program involves using services ... through standards like OpenID rather than requiring users to create government usernames and passwords. ... The federated identity effort, known as the Federal Cloud Credential Exchange, is just one piece of a broader Obama administration online identity initiative: the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), which aims to catalyze private sector-led development of a secure, digital 'identity ecosystem' to better protect identities online. ... The Postal Service pilot is but one of several different pilots that are part of NSTIC. There are also three cryptography pilots and two non-cryptographic privacy pilots in the works. Each of those pilots is being carried out by multiple private sector organizations ranging from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles to AOL to AARP to Aetna."

Canada

[Nerdfest]

Canada has been working on something like this as well, using banks, etc, as external providers and SAML.

Re:About time!

[g1powermac]

As a rural mail carrier, I can tell you that the USPS isn't going under because of lack of parcels or profit from them. Actually, parcel volume is way up and profiting quite well. The arrangements we have with both Fedex and UPS for 'last mile' runs of their packages actually works well. Us carriers _have_ to go on our routes anyway, so the extra volume in packages we get costs the post office very little yet makes them a decent profit from both of the other national carriers. What is hurting the post office is two fold. One, regular letter volume is way down due to the advent of online bill payments over the years. And two, the federal gov't is requiring the post office to prepay retirements way ahead of people even coming close to retirement. This is far and beyond any corporation or other federal agency is required to do. This is the biggest problem the post office has at the moment.