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GCN Home > 03/21/05 issue

Defense, GSA and other agencies offer help with common ID cards

By Jason Miller, GCN Staff

The Defense, Homeland Security, Interior and Veterans Affairs departments and NASA have one message to all other agencies that have not started planning or implementing smart-card programs: Stop whatever else you are doing now and begin preparing for the rollout of standard identification cards.

Smart-card chiefs from these and other agencies pleaded with government officials at a recent smart-card conference to understand how much work must get done over the next two years to become compliant with Federal Information Processing Standard 201, which the Commerce Department made final late last month [www.gcn.com, Quickfind 391].

“Without an aggressive plan, agencies will not meet the standard,” said Bob Donelson, chairman of the Interagency Smart Card Advisory Board, which helped the National Institute of Standards and Technology create the specifications for governmentwide personal identity verification (PIV) cards.

FIPS-201 was the chief topic this month at the fourth annual Smart Cards in eGovernment Conference in Washington. Many of the sessions focused on the new standard, and feds chatted extensively about it between sessions as well.

The standard details a two-step plan for government use of interoperable smart cards. NIST also has released Special Publication 800-73, which outlines interface specifications for federal cards.

Agencies have until June to submit a plan to the Office of Management and Budget describing how they will meet the FIPS-201 requirements. By Oct. 27, agencies must implement the first phase of FIPS-201. Called PIV I, the first phase includes setting up identity-proofing, registration and issuance processes.

OMB then will determine the deadline for when all agencies’ systems must be interoperable, which is the second phase, PIV II. Some in government have said this second deadline could be as early as October 2006. At minimum, federal officials said they ex- pect OMB will require that agencies begin implementing interoperable systems by October of next year.

“Small agencies need to come to DOD, NASA or others for help in developing their transition to PIV,” suggested Bob Gilson, a management and program analyst with Defense’s Common Access Card office. “Without support from the more experienced agencies, meeting the dates will be a daunting task. This is an open invitation for these agencies to pick our brains.”

More news on related topics: Biometrics, Defense IT, IT Security



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