I haven’t blogged much about XDI yet, in part because it’s not as far along in the standardization process at OASIS as XRI. This will start changing as the first early XDI data sharing applications start surfacing (hint hint). In the meantime, U.S. homeland security blogger W. David Stepheson has recognized its relevance to that topic. In an email he asks:

I thought you might be interested in my “smart mobs for homeland security” concept, and I’d be very interested in your thoughts on how XDI might help make it a reality.

Since one of the prime directives of DHS is information sharing and collaboration, the most obvious relevance of XDI is as a open standard protocol for implementing trusted data sharing at the massive scale DHS requires (linking all security agencies/personel at the international, federal, state, and local levels.) Frankly I don’t know anything other than Dataweb architecture that can accomplish this (but that may just be my XRI/XDI blinders on.)

However as David points out in “smart mobs for homeland security”, to leave the public out of this information sharing loop would be as shortsighted as leaving citizens out of local law enforcement. So the simple answer to David’s question is that XDI can help create a flow of authenticated information back and forth between citizens and government agencies that enables the defense mechanisms of the “whole organism”.

I won’t dive into technical details here, referring folks instead to The Social Web paper that made David aware of XDI. But I very much agree with his point that technologies like XDI can build on other networking/communications tools to make us all much more effective participants in our own security.