Wes Kussmaul

Founder and CIO

Wes was the sole founder in 1981 of Delphi Internet Services, "The Company That Popularized the Internet,” joining AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy at the forefront of early consumer access to the online world.

In 1986 he launched a spinoff, Global Villages, Inc., to serve magazine publishers and business clients with their own private-label online services, including business planning, management, hosting, and promotion. Delphi was sold to Rupert Murdoch in 1993 and Global Villages’ hosting business to NTT Verio in 1998.

When in 1990 the U.S. National Science Foundation dropped its prohibition on the use of the Internet for commerce, one effect was to disrupt the provision of reliable identities of users of online services. Wes responded by focusing on the need for reliable identities of individuals on the Internet, starting with the development of the VIVOS Enrollment Workstation. Designed to be used by notaries with minimal training, VIVOS bound biometrics of the enrollee to digital identity certificates.

While developing VIVOS, Wes was introduced to a group at the International Telecommunication Union who were attempting to implement a world PKI similar to the one he envisioned. In 2002 The Village Group (a descendant of the earlier Global Villages) became a charter signatory to the International Telecommunication Union's World e-Trust Initiative and is now a Sector Member of the ITU.

In 2008, as a member of the High-Level Experts Group at the ITU's Global Cybersecurity Agenda, Wes introduced the City of Osmio in an address to the United Nations World Summit on Information Society in Geneva. The City of Osmio applies the global public authority of the ITU to the process of identity certification and to other digital certificates.

Wes is an individual adherent to the International Union of Latin Notaries and has been appointed a Notary Ambassador by the National Notary Association. He has written several books about identity, privacy, and PKI, including Quiet Enjoyment (2014), Don’t Get Norteled (2015), and Escape the Plantation (2015).

John King

John is an experienced business executive and IT consultant who has worked with many small, midsize, and Fortune 1000 companies during his career. He has held various management positions including Controller, CIO, Director of Applications Development, and president of his own consulting company. His book The Compass Approach provides techniques for managing a business around the four points of the compass to achieve improved results.

He has always had an interest in startup businesses, going back to when he was involved in the initiation of a commuter airline while in his teens.

John’s role in the Authenticity Institute is to focus on bringing solutions to support the need for “Digital signatures everywhere backed by measurably reliable identity certificates that are owned by their users and which provide privacy via accountable anonymity.” He also oversees finance and operations for the Authenticity Institute.

Suzanne Niles

Suzanne is a lifelong explainer by nature and profession – a hybrid techie/artist with an itch to document, illustrate, celebrate, or commemorate just about anything. The medium can be a document, an illustration, a photograph, a video, a website, a slide presentation, or even a song!

After three years at Wellesley College studying mathematics, she transferred to MIT and obtained a B.S. in computer science. She began her technical career as a systems programmer for the commercial data management system EXPRESS, based on Ted Codd’s innovative work in relational databases, using the early time-sharing system Multics.

A second career developed during the time she was raising her two sons. Again combining tech and art, she became a children’s singer/songwriter working from a do-it-yourself home studio, doing end-to-end songwriting, production, engineering, arranging, and performing. Her award-winning CD Sea Songs has been sold in several aquarium gift shops worldwide.

Suzanne first worked with our founder Wes Kussmaul in 2004, when she edited his book Quiet Enjoyment (forerunner of the current Quiet Enjoyment, Second Edition). After a decade hiatus during which she wrote white papers explaining data center power and cooling for American Power Conversion (now part of Schneider Electric), she is now back with The Authenticity Institute, producing videos to illustrate and explain our critical messaging.

Richard Parry

As a British citizen who has lived in the United Kingdom, Libya, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the US, Richard Parry draws from an uncommon personal and professional background.

Richard is a judicious critic of short-sighted “identity” solutions that do not solve, and which create risks to, parties downstream of those who profit from them. He is a zealous advocate for accountability as a driver of wisdom.

His professional roles have included:

• Chief Inspector commanding a public company and banking task force division in the Hong Kong Police Force
• Head of Risk Services at Visa International’s Asia Pacific Region
• Global Fraud Risk Management Director for Citigroup’s global consumer business
• Fraud, Remote, and Cross-channel Risk Executive at JPMorgan Chase
• An identity risk startup founder
• An advisor to startups (current)
• CEO of a secure payments startup (current)
• Member of The Authenticity Alliance (current)

Activities as a Risk Executive at Bank One (later JPMorgan Chase):

• In 2004 identified the pressing need to address discreet authentication measures in online banking.
• In 2005 highlighted the folly of one-time passwords (OTP) in a mass-consumer banking environment
• Stopped the Financial Services Technology Consortium from submitting a paper to the FFIEC giving blanket endorsement of the banking industry for OTP authentication.
• One of the first in the banking industry to identity call-center account takeovers as the primary threat to online banking
• Became a vocal advocate for intrinsic characteristics of people rather vulnerable data about people to be the basis identifying people
• In 2011 identified a rapid rise of hitherto misidentified synthetic identity, and demonstrated that “identity,” AML, and KYC tool vendors were passing synthetic identities, enabling them to acquire high credit scores and become embedded in the national commercial infrastructure

Later, as a private advisor and frequent public speaker on identity risk, Parry demonstrated that the FIDO standard and other outstanding biometric-based authenticators were inadvertent enablers of synthetic identities.

Richard is the author of a series of cartoons called “The Chaps” published on LinkedIn, which call out absurdities in the world of Identity and cybersecurity.

Martin Boßlet

Martin has been working with cryptography, security, and PKI for over a decade. He served as principal consultant for Electronic Signature Service Infrastructure (ESSI), a platform provided by the European Commission for creating, extending, and validating electronic document signatures. As an independent consultant he helped startup and enterprise clients to realize their vision – creating a robo advisor platform for a financial startup, an online digital signature service for a CA, implementing a HIPAA-compliant chat application for a medical startup, and improving the security of email systems used by governmental authorities.

He likes to share his passion at local and international conferences or at one of his regular workshops with diverse topics such as cryptography, Git, Rails, JavaScript, or web development in general.

Martin is interested in all programming languages, but his primary passion is the Ruby language. He's a member of the Ruby core team, a maintainer for Ruby's cryptography library, and received one of the first two Ruby Association Grants for his project Krypt.

He received his M.S. in Mathematics and Informatics from TU Kaiserslautern, Germany.

Carina Cyril

Carina is a software engineer with 8 years of experience in UI development, with expertise in Bootstrap, HTML/HTML5 , CSS/CSS3, Jquery, Javascript, and other platforms.

She is very passionate about cooking, and shares all her interesting recipes on her YouTube channel “Carina’s Food Adventures.”

Carina holds a Bachelor's degree in Information Technology from Marian Engineering College, Kerala University, India.

Juanita M. Little-Lyons

Juanita is a Virginia Remote Online Notary and is the President / CEO of The Council of Attestation Officers (CAO) which is the cornerstone for delivering Identity Management and Digital Signature services to our customers.

Supporting the virtual community with credible and reliable online identities is a passion of mine. When technology fails to accurately identify a User, we are all at risk. Empowering likeminded individuals to create a new generation of Attestation Officers fills me with gratification.

As our world shrinks and more and more of our everyday lives are virtually connected, it becomes critical to know who you are interfacing with. With experience and success building a community of Virginia e-Notaries Public, I can lead our Attestation Officers into the future of Identity Verification. My experience as an IT professional places me in a unique position of being able to bridge the knowledge gap of everyday people and the fast-paced world of technology, building stronger identity management for both businesses and individuals alike.

Juanita earned degrees in Computer Science and Database Technology from Strayer University and an MBA from the University of Phoenix.

Dan Kioria

Dan Kioria is an enthusiastic content writer and digital marketer from Nakuru, Kenya. Dan has been working as a freelance content writer and digital marketer for the past 4 years. Dan is an AUTHENTICITY evangelist for The Authenticity Institute.

He's working to get people talking about authenticity, and why it is important in the modern internet space.

"Writing brings me Joy de Vivre. In particular, writing about technology caters to both my pain points and pleasure points. It keeps me upbeat with new technological advancements and also helps me engage with other technology enthusiasts."

Dan holds a BSc in Electronics from South Eastern Kenya University.