Absolutely, any broadly useful digital identity system must include people as essential parts. In that respect, the 6th law is absolutely essential.

Where I’m getting confused is in the long explanation leading the the 6th law in Kim’s post. For example, when he says:

What is to prevent a piece of code running on your machine from overwriting the DNS name and throwing up a fake lock icon – so you are convinced you are visiting one secure site when you are actually visiting another insecure one?

While that is definitely an attack that’s going to happen (Pip Coburn writes on AlwaysOn today about the 611 viruses he found on his wife’s tablet), I would think that once an essential communications endpoint in any system has been broken into and taken over, all bets are off. Kim is certainly not suggesting that digital identity systems must also solve the virus-on-Windows problem?

But if we take the break-in aspects of the issue away, what seems to remain of the 6th law is that we need a "language" (words, symbols, pictures, animations, whatever …) that enables the technical components of an identity system to communicate with the human in a way so that the average user can easily, and unambigously understand the identity-related information and operations offered by a computer screen.

Great idea! Any human-interface researchers out there looking for a worthwhile new project?

P.S. LID‘s architecture should very much facilitate this as every user, at least in principle, can run their very own version of such human-machine interface software. That would allow a hacker to see raw certificates, while it may show a 10-yr old cartoon animations. And technophobes can run minimalistic software installed by their 12-yr olds, but all speaking the same protocol. Catalyzing decentralized innovation will probably be one of LID‘s most valuable contributions to the digital identity universe in the long term.