Utility and telecom industries press government for national identification cards

In the rush to create a national emergency responder identification card, some critical personnel have been left behind. Utilities specialists, for instance, who may be needed to shut off or repair dangerous electricity lines and gas mains, as well as nurses and telecommunications experts, were excluded from early HSPD-12 planning. DHS is now working with a wide swath of industry representatives to provide these groups with national identification cards that, while distinct from the emergency responder IDs, will be interoperable with them.

The first step is categorization by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and its National Incident Management System Integration Center. Each class of first responders will be divided into subgroups, permitting a commander on the scene to ask for a psychiatric nurse as opposed to a critical care nurse, or a natural gas expert with a certain type of expertise. As long as their identification cards were FIPS-201-1 compliant, that person could be sent to the scene with his or her ID already set up to permit access. As it stands now, telecom disaster recovery workers are using state-issued hang-tag identification cards and carrying letters of authorization from their employers.

How to integrate these critical, but not lifesaving, personnel is similar to the problem posed by non-federal emergency workers, who are encouraged but not required by HSPD-12 to be FIPS-201-1 compliant. Not only would planners like all local jurisdictions to adopt the standard, they would also like the cards to be interoperable with one another as well, so that a fireman from Georgia could easily come to the scene of a five alarm fire in Alabama. The expense, however, is staggering and many smaller jurisdictions simply cannot afford it. One small step forward comes from DHS’s Office of National Capital Region Coordination, which is sponsoring a FIPS-201-1-compliant identity card for about 200,000 first responders in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia.

-read more in Alice Lipowicz’s Government Computer News report