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).
