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Does our nation need an integrated national identity management plan?

Identity management is something of a new term and people think of it in different ways.

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For some, our war on terrorism is the primary identity management concern. For others, it is the rampant rise in identity theft or the soaring number of unsecured digital transactions. And identity is still an issue in traditional applications, such as drivers' licenses, healthcare, access control, and financial transactions.

People will tend to solve their own discrete problems first; that's where the attention and resources go. They can't wait for a single solution to emerge at the national level, so a comprehensive national identity management plan is unlikely.