“Celebrating the Birth” 1664 / Jan Steen
“Birth is the sudden opening of a window,
through which you look out upon a stupendous prospect.
For what has happened? A miracle.
You have exchanged nothing for the possibility of everything.”
— William MacNeile Dixon
A title from the standards catalog published by the North American Security Products Organization (NASPO) may interest education communities:
ANSI/NASPO 2019 BC Minimum Security Requirements for United States Birth Certification Documents
From the product prospectus:
The scope of this standard is to define minimum security requirements for the design, production, supply chain, and recommendations for issuance of government birth certificates used for official purposes. The standard will not establish requirements for the handling and security of Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
The goal for this standard is to protect against fraud and reduce the risk associated with using compromised documents that support critical transactions. This standard establishes the minimum security technologies that should be incorporated into birth certificates for authentication, and the minimum requirements for manufacture and distribution to vital records offices. This standard also recommends best practices for the secure storage and issuance of birth certificates.
Many education communities are bound to statues that require confirmation of a student or employee’s country of origin. Our reading of best practice literature reveals that every state has its own rules for establishing residency status; at least among US nationals, so this product appears to offer more dimension to birth certification particulars.
NASPO sells the product. A certification and training regimen is offered. NASPO members receive discounts. This is a feature of the business models of many ANSI-accredited standards setting organizations.
There are enough issues in the $300 billion facility operation of US education communities that we do not need to stray outside our wheelhouse getting involved in birth certification issues but, since we work in a related domain, we simply pass this on to others on the front line of student residency issues. An industry very close to combustion temperature should at least know about NASPO consensus products.
NASPO is ANSI’s US Technical Advisory Group Administrator of the US position on ISO Committee 292 — Security and resilience — a global committee focused on standardization in the field of security to enhance the safety and resilience of society. ISO products provide policy templates for governments in all nations. We urge our colleagues in education communities to participate in NASPO and/or ISO consensus product development as a user-interest. As of this posting, there are no education community representatives on the US TAG to ISO 292 CLICK HERE to communicate directly with NASPO.
We maintain NASPO products on the standing agenda of our periodic Risk and Global teleconferences. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
