I've been invited to speak at the Digital ID World conference in Denver on October 9-11th. 

Identity and identity management is something I've written about before on these pages.  The ironic thing is that state governments issue what is now considered the gold standard of identity for most purposes: the driver's license.  Yet, state's don't consider themselves to be in the identity business.  We have abdicated that responsibility to private companies.  This may be OK, but we should pay attention to what is really happening: we're changing a fundamental model for identity, even if that model has been ad hoc or implicit.

The other side of identity in government is that governments store large amounts of personally identifying information on citizens.  Citizens are schizophrenic about this state of affairs: they demand the services, yet they fear the IT systems required to provide them. 

Come what may, this is a public policy debate, not a technology debate.  The most we can hope to do as technologists is to inform the debate as best we can and provide the best technology we can for what ever decision the public process comes up with.