Phil Libin

President, CoreStreet

Jon Udell's Interviews With Innovators
38 minutes, 17.7mb, recorded 2007-03-26
Phil Libin

Phil Libin is president of CoreStreet, a company to which I gave an InfoWorld Innovators Award in 2004 for its approach to massively scalable credentials validation. CoreStreet has worked with the U.S. Department of Defense on its Common Access Card program, so Phil has been a ringside observer of what may be the world's most successful large-scale deployment of smart identity cards.

From that perspective, I invited Phil to comment on the Department of Homeland Security's recently published guidelines for the more secure state driver's licenses mandated by the REAL ID act.

Part of the context for our conversation was a letter to the editor I'd written to my local newspaper in response to an editorial that rejected the notion of REAL ID on the grounds that any government initiative toward stronger credentials will necessarily lead to the Orwellian Big Brother. What I've always thought, and what Phil Libin thinks too, is that the technologies of digital identity can be tools of empowerment or oppression, depending on how we understand and apply them, and that for that reason we've got to understand them properly.


Phil Libin is the President of CoreStreet and oversees the operation of the company. He founded and served as CEO of Engine 5, a Boston-based enterprise software development firm acquired by Vignette Corporation in early 2000. At Vignette, he served as Principal Architect and Chief Technologist for Applications. Prior to founding Engine 5, he led a number of software consulting and technology projects at ATG, Xchange and EF.

Libin speaks at conferences around the world on identity, the convergence of physical and information system security, and large scale credential systems, among other topics. In 2004, he was named an "InfoWorld Innovator."

Jon Udell is an author, information architect, software developer, and new media innovator. His 1999 book, Practical Internet Groupware, helped lay the foundation for what we now call social software. Udell has been a software developer at Lotus, was BYTE Magazine's executive editor and Web maven, and has worked as an independent consultant.

During his tenure at InfoWorld he produced a monthly series of screencasts about software, and a weekly series of audio interviews with innovators. In January 2007 he joined Microsoft as a technical evangelist.

Resources:

This free podcast is from our Jon Udell's Interviews with Innovators series.

For The Conversations Network: