Larry Orluskie, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said the DHS next week will start rolling out PIV cards to about 5,500 employees in the Washington area. The agency's goal is to make the cards available to all of its employees and contractors within a year, he said.

The DHS is using smart cards called ID One Cosmo that are made by Nanterre, France-based Oberthur Card Systems SA. Like all PIV cards, Oberthur's feature both a contact interface and a contactless radio frequency interface in order to make it easier to integrate the cards with both building access and IT security systems. At the DHS, though, the cards initially will be used only for physical access, Orluskie said.

Likewise, the SSA at first will use PIV cards only to control access to buildings and other facilities before eventually linking them to its computer systems, Green said.

ActivIdentity Inc. in Fremont, Calif., is supplying smart-card technologies to several government agencies. Robert Brandewie, the company's senior vice president of public-sector solutions, said meeting the HSPD-12 card-distribution deadline even in a small way "is a tremendous accomplishment," given the amount of work that was needed and the relatively short amount of time that was available to agencies.

"There has been a tremendous amount of behind-the-scenes effort to get the infrastructure ready and to get the technology in place to meet the deadline," Brandewie said.