Launched by Liberty Alliance members from Ericsson, NEC, NeuStar, Orange, Symlabs and TeliaSonera, and chaired by Jose Luis Mariz of Ericsson, the group is the tenth vertical-specific Liberty Alliance special interest group (SIG) that is open to the public. The goal of the group is to develop best practices for managing identity-information and identity-enabled transactions and services in the telecom and service provider industries, and to advance identity-enabled telecom applications based on Liberty SAML 2.0 Federation, Liberty Identity Web Services (ID-WSF 2.0) and the policy-based Liberty Identity Assurance Framework. The entire press release follows.