When wading through my backlog of weblog posts and mailing list emails, I come across two identity related scenarios. In the first one Phil Windley blogs Bill Smith's talk at Digital ID Summit:

"Bill starts off by posing a scenario where your car tells you that a gas station with the brand of gas you like to buy is coming up on the right, its $0.10 less than average and you have a quarter of a tank left. Sounds like a great application for OnStar. He poses another scenario where the same car gets in a accident with you driving and the arriving EMTs get medical information about you before they get there. Two scenarios, different identity requirements. Moreover, there are multiple service providers in each case that need to federate to use that identity."

The second one by Peter Bachman on IP mailing list explores another thought experiment, only not in automotive but in military context.

"The concept is that civilians in war zones should have an ability to "de-target" themselves from smart weapons by activating, and thus showing up on a battlefield map. This takes place at a group level.

Thus pointing the way to relief services, as well as building infrastructure, as well as registering themselves for those services. This is derived from known flag behaviors that have guided ROE for many years, but makes that knowledge available to smart weapons, pilots and troops.

The technology would involve a GPS device which would "light up" i.e. transmit it's location, allow for the self registration of a person into a grouping of people.

This might take the form of a flexible information based geo-political container, say c=IRAQ,l=BASRA o=Water Management District cn=Nerigilassar Said. Nerigilassar is the person who has self registered himself into that container, in the locality of Basra, the organization of the Water Management District, and the country of Iraq."

Both scenario give an example of what Howard Rheingold describes as the upcoming era of sentient things. Which will be heavily using location based services, identity infrastructure and service oriented architectures. And which will involve huge privacy and security issues.

8:45:17 PM