HSPD-12 PIV Cards Moving into States and Enterprises
October 27th was deadline day for the four-year-old HSPD-12 initiative. Attendees at the Smart Card Alliance Smart Cards in Government Conference got a firsthand report Friday on the governmentwide credentialing program’s impressive results from a key figure in the program—Karen Evans, administrator of e-government and IT for the Office of Management and Budget.
In what she termed a “successful partnership between government and industry,” Evans summarized the achievements of the last four years. Standards were created and implemented; identity vetting and issuance processes are in place; 34 system integrators and 370 products were qualified; every agency has plans in place to implement both physical and logical access control using the Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards; and as of September 1st more than 1.2 million credentials had been issued to federal government employees who were fully vetted by the new process, according to Evans. One particularly telling anecdote is that the new PIV card and surrounding infrastructure enabled the President to electronically authorize and submit the official U.S. budget to the Government Printing Office (GPO) and Capitol Hill earlier this year, a first for the United States or for any country, she said. Up-to-date results on how close the government came to its goal of credentialing approximately two million federal employees will be announced this week.