Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet & Society to host Identity…

Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet & Society to host Identity Mashup, an
   industry-wide conference on the future of open digital identity management


PRESS RELEASE                         Contact: Amanda Michel, Harvard Law School
June 19, 2006                                                   +1 (617) 495-5236
                                                     amichel@cyber.law.harvard.edu

Conference webcast provided at: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu

Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA -- Key industry and government officials,
technologists, legal scholars, and nonprofit leaders begin discussions about the future
role of digital identity management tools and their policy implications at "Identity
Mashup," a conference hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society beginning
today through June 21 at Harvard Law School. As part of Identity Mashup, next
generation identity cards ­ called icards ­ will be issued and demonstrated for the first
time. Several companies and organizations, including Microsoft, IBM, Novell, BestBuy,
and MyVirtual Model, will discuss and make public announcements about new products
and services, and will demonstrate their next generation identity services. The full
conference will be webcast by Harvard Law School.

"This conference has been a long time in the making, bringing together many of the
key players in shaping an open and interoperable identity layer for the Web," says John
Clippinger, Berkman fellow and conference chair. "The conference is designed to
encourage cross-disciplinary dialogue and to provide examples of open identity enabled
services and applications."

Digital identity management is at the forefront of next generation web services. A variety
of parties ­ governments, technology companies, health organizations, financial
institutions, international agencies, and merchants ­ are clamoring for identity systems to
address a spectrum of issues from terrorism and child pornography to identity theft and
spam. The proposals vary dramatically, from national ID cards with centralized data
storage and a single universal identifier, to highly-distributed "user-centric" models with
distributed data storage and authenticated anonymity. Central to the conference are
questions regarding whether such tools and systems will further or inhibit privacy, civil
liberties, and new forms of online civic participation and commerce.

Conference panelists include: Kim Cameron, Architect of Identity and Access, Microsoft;
Ira Rubinstein, Associate General Counsel, Microsoft; Mark Greene, Vice President,
Global Financial Services, IBM; Anthony Nadalin, Chief Security Architect, IBM; Dr.
Nataraj Nagaratnam, Chief Architect for Identity Management, IBM; Hal Abelson,
Professor of Computer Science, MIT, and W3C; Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director,
EPIC; Doc Searls, Editor, Linux Journal; Christine Varney, Managing Partner, Hogan
and Hartson, and former FTC Privacy Commissioner; Jeremy Warren, US Department of
Justice; Esther Dyson, Editor at Large, CNet; Dick Hardt, CEO, Sxip; Louise Guay,
CEO, My Virtual Model; Stefan Brands, CEO, Credentica; David Berlind, Executive
Editor, ZDNet; and Dale Olds, Novell

For more information, including the full panelist list, conference schedule, and
registration information, please visit: http://www.identitymash-up.org.

The conference will be webcast.

Microsoft Corporation and Best Buy are Identity Mashup conference sponsors. Identity
Mashup is an outcome of Berkman's Identity Metasystem and the Law Project, which
earlier this year announced with IBM, Novell, and Parity Communications, the release of
the Higgins Project for open source software interoperable identity systems.

About the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School: The Berkman Center is a
research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/