Today, at Stanford University, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and I were pleased to announce that the Commerce Department will host a National Program Office (NPO) in support of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC). As I’ve written previously, the NSTIC fulfills one of the action items in the Cyberspace Policy Review (pdf) and is a key building block in our efforts to secure cyberspace.
This holiday season, consumers spent a record $30.81 billion in online retail spending, an increase of 13 percent over the same period the previous year. This striking growth outshines even the notable 3.3-5.5 percent overall increase in holiday spending this past year. While clearly a positive sign for our economy, losses from online fraud and identity theft eat away at these gains, not to mention the harm that identity crime causes directly to millions of victims. We have a major problem in cyberspace, because when we are online we do not really know if people, businesses, and organizations are who they say they are. Moreover, we now have to remember dozens of user names and passwords. This multiplicity is so inconvenient that most people re-use their passwords for different accounts, which gives the criminal who compromises their password the “keys to the kingdom.”
Fonte: White House