From [HERE] U.S. Senators Kyrsten Sinema, an independent of Arizona, and Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, have introduced Senate Bill 884, also known as “the Improving Digital Identity Act of 2023.”

The bill was introduced March 21 and ordered to proceed out of committee on March 29 without amendments and with a favorable recommendation.

The bill’s text states:

“The lack of an easy, affordable, reliable, and secure way for organizations, businesses, and government agencies to identify whether an individual is who they claim to be online creates an attack vector that is widely exploited by adversaries in cyberspace and precludes many high-value transactions from being available online. Incidents of identity theft and identity fraud continue to rise in the United States, where more than 293,000,000 people were impacted by data breaches in 2021.”

The bill calls for the formation of a public-private partnership to bring this digital ID system into being.

“The public and private sectors should collaborate to deliver solutions that promote confidence, privacy, choice, equity, accessibility, and innovation. The private sector drives much of the innovation around digital identity in the United States and has an important role to play in delivering digital identity solutions.”

The bill references the bipartisan Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity, which has called for the federal government to “create an interagency task force directed to find secure, user-friendly, privacy-centric ways in which agencies can serve as 1 authoritative source to validate identity attributes in the broader identity market. This action would enable Government agencies and the private sector to drive significant risk out of new account openings and other high-risk, high-value online services, and it would help all citizens more easily and securely engage in transactions online.” [MORE]