Identification in Cyberspace as a Main Challenge of e-Government (A Legal Approach to e-Identity Management System)

The penetration and growth of the Internet, as a key technology of the 21st century, caused to some major changes in all individual and social aspects of human life. Some of these changes, which associated with the evolution and changes in the concepts, including legal and political ones, have become a challenge. Identity as a legal and Government as a political concepts are in those fields which have changed and faced challenges in cyberspace. As, identity is difficult to be verified and authenticated over the internet, it leads to problematic aspects of identification in cyberspace. From the public administrative perspective, in fact, the challenge of identity is one of the legal challenges of e-Government. As e-government becomes a reality, all legal and political policy makers, are in an attempt to overcome the challenges of identification in the virtual environment of the internet. Thus the need for building a new legal framework for identification and authentication, as a key prerequisite of e-Government, becomes increasingly urgent. The present article discusses the legal issues of identity and identification in e-Government and tries to propose the solution to related challenges.