Digital contract signatures [ non-linux topic, nerd topic ]

Christopher Browne cbbrowne-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Thu May 3 21:58:50 UTC 2007


On 5/3/07, Pavel Zaitsev <pavel-XHBUQMKE58M at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Hello,
> I wonder if anyone uses digital contract signatures, like GnuPG signed email messages, sent and replied to. If this has legal precedent of being somewhat legally binding. Just wondering if it has any legal standing in terms of protection. Since GnuPG signatures generally are harder to fake then handwritten ones, if I am not mistaken.

We use digital signatures for verification of data escrow submissions,
but that is a mighty specialized application, and I'm not sure that
the people 'involved' that are sufficiently distant from technical
details that they're not sitting at a Unix prompt all day necessarily
understand the cryptographic issues with terribly much depth.

During WWII, *successful* use of cryptography required applying
technical discipline to a really considerable degree.  (And it
included being aware of lots of irritating nit-picking details such as
making sure that trash was being destroyed securely; it does no good
to encrypt things if someone can pull unencoded draft copies of the
documents out of a trash bin...)

Absent of that sort of discipline, our computers are leaky enough
systems (considering /tmp files, EFI, and such) that I'm a bit leery
of believing that you can get terribly much security, at least on
documents, unless the "you" in question is someone that's pretty
knowledgeable about cryptography and are also pretty anal retentive
about it as well.

For people in, oh, call it the legal industry (covers lawyers,
paralegals, anyone caring about contracts), the usual paucity of
mathematical knowledge makes me think they'll be largely unable to
regard cryptography as being meaningfully different from magic.  If
they don't understand this frightfully technical artifact, I don't
think they can use it competently, and if they can't, it's not much
good.
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