Global Challenges for Identity Policies

摘要

Making public policy is a complex exercise. Information technology is a complex subject. Making public policy in a highly technological subject area is therefore doubly complex. Policy makers should learn how to work with this imperative if they hope to make good public policy. Many people recognise that the practice of politics has its own values, motivations and constraints. Few, though, appreciate fully how these shape the policy making process unless they have spent time themselves working within a political sphere. Similarly, many people recognise that information technology (IT) has its own language, its own challenges and rules. Indeed, some might feel they have a level of expertise in the subject given the many ways it touches on their daily existence, from the smart phones in their pockets to the computer systems they use so naturally at work. Yet this sense of ease many people have with IT is usually no more than the familiarity they have with the digital tools they use. Few people appreciate the convoluted ways that today's technologies impact on people as a society, on their social relationships with each other and on their relationship to the state and how they are governed.