This is interesting. It’s almost as if they are taking the Incident Qualification Card that I was talking about in another post, and trying to come up with something similar. But really, this is the first time I have ever heard about this. –Head Jundi
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DOD tests contractors’ ID cards
By Alice Lipowicz
Published on September 22, 2008
The Army is testing a program that allows contractors to use an identification card approved by the Defense Department to gain access to the service’s facilities and computers.
The Army’s Materiel Command is running the Synchronized Pre-deployment and Operational Tracker program, known as SPOT, as a pilot project at Fort Belvoir, Va., in coordination with the nonprofit Federation for Identity and Cross-Credentialing Systems group — or FIXs — a vendor certified by that group, and others.
“The ultimate goal is to give us visibility to the contractors in the battlefield,” said Col. Archie Davis, a spokesman at the Army command. “This goes a long way to solving that problem.”
The project, which has been planned for several years, is one of the first in which DOD is participating in a federated identity management system with a private entity to verify identities for nongovernment personnel. The contractor ID cards are modeled after the federal employee identity cards developed under Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12.