Part One: IDENTITY CRISIS
Cybersecurity has become the dominant concern for geeks and elites around the world, as governments and corporations attempt to exert control over the Internet to protect their interests. News is hot with updates on the TPP and the like, but there is little coverage of the push to control identity.
For many years, the anonymity afforded by the Internet has prompted discussions about the problem of not knowing who exactly you’re interacting with online, i.e. how can you tell it’s a real person, and not a dog? More to the point, how do you know who to trust?
Most of the technical aspects to resolving this issue have been successfully tried and tested for many years now, as those with the most to lose have implemented Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems which offer secure solutions for digital transactions. This has created a powerful industry, especially for military applications; in fact, the market for IAM is expected to grow to $12.3 billion by 2014, from just $2.6 billion in 2006.
This industry is now eager to expand into the civilian market, to provide each one of us with a unique global identification number, together with databases of all the personal information that makes us what we are. This is the age of e-governance, where just about everything is going online: relationships, government and business services, banking, and even law – increasingly these transactions can be done with a mobile device, bringing a whole new set of factors into play when it comes to identification.
