From CBS News:

President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.

It’s “the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government” to centralize efforts toward creating an “identity ecosystem” for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.

That news, first reported by CNET, effectively pushes the department to the forefront of the issue, beating out other potential candidates including the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. The move also is likely to please privacy and civil liberties groups that have raised concerns in the past over the dual roles of police and intelligence agencies …

The Obama administration is currently drafting what it’s calling the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, which Locke said will be released by the president in the next few months. (An early version was publicly released last summer.)

“We are not talking about a national ID card,” Locke said at the Stanford event. “We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities.”

The Commerce Department will be setting up a national program office to work on this project, Locke said.

Details about the “trusted identity” project are unusually scarce. Last year’s announcement referenced a possible forthcoming smart card or digital certificate that would prove that online users are who they say they are. These digital IDs would be offered to consumers by online vendors for financial transactions.

Schmidt stressed today that anonymity and pseudonymity will remain possible on the Internet. “I don’t have to get a credential if I don’t want to,” he said. There’s no chance that “a centralized database will emerge,” and “we need the private sector to lead the implementation of this,” he said.

More legislation by executive order.  If you can’t get the people to go along, then just abuse your authority and demand it anyway.  Isn’t that how the American system works?

And don’t you just love government guarantees?  There is no chance – NO CHANCE – that a centralized database will emerge.  None.  I guess Schmidt is a “prophet or son or a prophet” (viz. Amos), but as for me, I suppose I could be hit by a rogue meteor today that enters the earth’s atmosphere and aims straight for me, and I certainly don’t know that a centralized database cannot emerge.

Truth is that whether I am hit by a meteor today, progressives don’t care about freedom and never have, any more than they care about your rights.  All they care about is government control.  It’s their faith, their worldview, their framework for life.  The state is the savior of the people, and we should all be glad that the government cares enough about us to worry over how many computer passwords we have to memorize.