This Week We're Reading... Digital Credentials, NIEM at Eurojust, and Cybersecurity Updates

We found this discussion of online credentials on SecureIDNews interesting - Defining Digital Identities: Part One of Five - these are the same topics we are examining in our work in the federal government. In the article, Jeremy Grant of NSTIC, Judith Spencer of CertiPath, Mollie Shields-Uehling of SAFE-BioPharma, and Scott Rea of REBCA each answered the question, "Why are interoperable digital identities important and what distinguishes them from other forms of electronic identity?" We welcome this kind of dialog with industry because we believe that working together will better ensure  interoperability through standards integration.

The NIEM PMO recently released a case study about Eurojust's (the European Union’s Judicial Cooperation Unit) use of NIEM - Benefits of NIEM Extend Beyond Borders. Eurojust used NIEM as the basis for their data standard for the European Pool against Organized Crime case management system. Among other benefits for Eurojust, NIEM provided a mature, established model with existing semantic descriptions, which eliminated the need to create new semantic descriptions for data items as well as the option to easily extend where no semantic descriptions are available.

In cybersecurity news, Federal News Radio reported that some members of the Congress are trying to update the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) once again. In another interview with Federal News Radio, Howard Schmidt, the White House Cybersecurity Chief, said that the new Federal Cybersecurity R&D Strategic Plan addresses many of those same concerns.

Related blog posts:

• This Week We’re Reading… House Committee on Homeland Security’s 9/11 hearings and PM-ISE on Fed News Radio
• This Week We’re Reading… Delaware and Maryland, FBI, and the citizen focus of open gov
• Thank you for making WIS3 a success - Outbriefs and notes from WIS3