There is no doubt that there has been a sea change in priorities in the US in the past year due to a severe down turn in the world economy and a new President that disagrees with much of the past administrations programs and policies. While there remains a no comment on much of the Bush administration work on secure documents and IDs, one thing is clear: we cannot understand where the US needs to be in the area of secure documents without looking at where we have been.
Secretary Chertoff believes secure documents and identity, working in tandem, are the cornerstone of a more secure nation. He sees a widening expanse of applications for secure documents and IDs that will work in the future in conjunction with our blackberries and other PDAs that will facilitate for us real time, all the time, access to secure sites providing what we described on the 9/11 Commission as security with facilitation.
