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.
Federated identity systems enable portability of identity information across domains. Participants trust one another to properly verify identities and maintain various standards. In the Army pilot project, the trust is based on a 2006 memorandum of understanding between DOD and FIXs.
The memorandum is rare because it allows a private entity to issue credentials for accessing federal facilities, said Raj Nanavati, partner at the International Biometric Group consulting firm in New York.
But the Army’s motive is to create a scalable Web-based system to improve efficiency and save money in managing access for large numbers of contractors, who are difficult to track because they frequently change jobs and roles.
If successful, the pilot project could spawn other credentialing projects at DOD and other federal, state and local government agencies, Nanavati said.
Eventually, the SPOT program would be expanded to Afghanistan, Iraq and other military locations, Davis said. Initially, it is providing FIXs-certified credentials to about 3,000 contractors, according to the Army.
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