Identity, Authentication, and the Road Ahead: A Cybersecurity Policy Forum

As the COVID pandemic hit, the Federal government disbursed hundreds of billions of dollars to the states for the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program - and thousands of fraudsters raced in to exploit weak identity proofing controls in the states to steal those dollars.  States raced to implement strong identity proofing systems to stop the fraud - but in some cases, legitimate claimants found themselves caught in a bureaucratic mess straight out of a Kafka novel, where they were unable to get benefits because they could not convince the state who they really were.  This panel will explore different facets of this issue - and ways the government might do things differently going forward.