Federal Files Go Digital Via Post Office

Federal agencies get a secure pipeline for confidential transmissions through NetPost.Certified service.

Jennifer O'Neill, Medill News Service

WASHINGTON--Government agencies and businesses have started transmitting Social Security information securely with the speed of a click using a new Postal Service program.

The system, called NetPost.Certified, allows sensitive data to be safely transmitted and authenticated over the Internet, provided that one party is a government agency.

"This is now a government service that won't be directly visible to consumers," says Stephen M. Kearney, an executive of the U.S. Postal Service, which developed the system with the help of IBM and AT&T.

But efficiency improvements behind the scenes affect some 6 million transactions, according to Kearney. He says NetPost.Certified "will help the federal government be efficient and save tax dollars."

Easing Paperwork

The Social Security Administration was first to sign up for the program, and uses NetPost.Certified instead of magnetic tape to transmit birth and death information in five states. Also, three states transmit information on prisoners, who lose benefits if they're incarcerated for more than a year.

The Health Care Financing Administration is testing the program along with Social Security because neither agency requires new agreements with states in order to use the NetPost.Certified method, says Marsha Rydstrom, acting chief information officer of the Social Security Administration.

This program is the latest effort by the Postal Service to keep up with technology, making paper mail increasingly obsolete. September saw the launch of NetPost Mailing Online, a kind of Post Office-run mail-merge service. The NetPost CardStore, an online service to help you create and send custom cards, opened for business in December.

"The United States Postal Service is adapting to and embracing change. We think the reduction in regular mail will happen no matter what and we see this as us adapting," says John Nolan, Deputy Postmaster General. "It's what our customers want and what our nation needs," he adds.

The program will help the Post Office comply with requirements of the 1998 Government Paperwork Elimination Act. But NetPost.Certified's primary focus is security.

Privacy is Paramount

"Security authorization and privacy are important for the Social Security Administration because we deal with every American and the information they want kept private, like wage data," says Bill Halter, deputy commissioner. "The transmission of that information is something we want to make sure is secure."

NetPost.Certified applies encryption technology from TecSec and security technology from ValiCert. The program also integrates technology from Cylink, which provides public key infrastructure; WareOnEarth, which furnishes the peer-to-peer data exchange functions, and several other security technology firms, including GemPlus, PubliCARD, RSA, and KeyCorp.

It's important to note that "the Postal Service is never in possession of the data being transmitted," adds Bradley Reck, of the Netpost.Certified program office. It merely provides the conduit, as it has traditionally in paper-based times.