According to a January 7 article on tech-news purveyor CNET.com, the Obama administration has announced plans to assign to the U.S. Department of Commerce a still-vague project involving the creation of a verifiable online I.D. for Americans.
The program, titled the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, has apparently been evolving for some time; a first draft of the proposal was released last summer, describing a sort of voluntary Internet-wide certificate of authenticity citizens could use to diminish the possibility of fraud and identity theft while conducting transactions online.
This article appears in Jan 6-12, 2011.