Wyoming Digital Identity Legislation Update

It was an honor, and frankly, a pleasure, to draft the initial digital identity legislation for Wyoming with the guidance and leadership of State Senator Chris Rothfuss (Chair of the relevant Select Committee), input from Scott David, University of Washington, and in collaboration with members of the Select Committee’s Digital Identity Work Group, led by Christopher Allen.

I testified on the legislation before the Wyoming Select Committee on Blockchain, Financial Technology, and Digital Innovation, which met in formal session on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2020 to consider the legislation, among other matters.

Above is a video clip of the testimony of Daniel “Dazza” Greenwood, founder of CIVICS.com (Consultancy Services) and Executive Director of Law.MIT.edu (Computational Law Research). This testimony was proffered in my personal capacity and may not reflect the opinions of organizations I’m affiliated with.

The Select Committee led a very engaged and thoughtful discussion of the digital identity draft and explored many of the issues, options and opportunities arising from the measure. You can find video of the entire hearing here: https://youtu.be/jP0UbeABWPo?t=7247 (the digital identity topic is at timespan 2:00:50 to 3:23:40). At the end of the hearing on this matter, the Select Committee unanimously voted to advance the digital identity legislation to the next stage in the law-making process.

UPDATE April 2, 2021: This legislation passed the Wyoming House and Senate and was signed into law by the Governor of Wyoming. For more information on the final law, see: https://civics.substack.com/p/the-digital-identity-act

Update: June 2, 2021

I'm pleased to share my testimony of 6/28/2021 (below) on the recently enacted digital identity legislation, delivered before the Wyoming legislature’s Select Committee on Blockchain and Technology Innovation.

This testimony outline potential next steps to extend and connect the new law to other parts of the existing statutory code, and explores the concept of “principal authority” and the differences and connections between the personal digital identity that an individual uses to communicate or act through on the one hand and personal data or personally identifiable information on the other hand. I have also included some relevant excerpts from other parts of the hearing on this law.

The May 28th, 2021 testimony is available here and embedded below:

Original Post:

I'm pleased to share my testimony of 3/23/2021 (below) on recently enacted digital identity legislation, delivered before the Wyoming House Judiciary Committee.

This bill passed the Wyoming House and Senate and earlier this week was signed into law by the Governor (see:https://governor.wyo.gov/media/news-releases/2021-news-releases/2021-bills-signed-into-law).

For more background context on the legislation see this CIVICS.com blog post: https://civics.com/2020/09/29/wyoming-digital-identity-legislation-update and for an informative discussion of this bill at the 2021 MIT Computational Law Course by Senator Rothfuss, see the video below:

To read the bill text, as passed by the Wyoming House and Senate, see https://wyoleg.gov/Legislation/2021/SF0039

I hope this new law provides a helpful legal building block with which people can start to control their own digital identities.

Kudos: Chris Rothfuss, Christopher Allen, Tiemae Roquerre, Scott David, Brittany Kaiser, Henning Diedrich, Clare Sullivan, Carla Reyes, Tyler Lindholm, Tara Nethercott