Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
artifacts. The implicit hierarchy that places the combination of digital
information and cryptography at the top of the electronic security ladder
has translated into disregard for the security affordances of paper. In par-
ticular, information security designers have tended to ignore the ways in
which these affordances have evolved in concert with work practices,
institutional contexts, and broader cultural settings. As Sellen and Harper
have argued in
The Myth of the Paperless Office,
, technology developers often
rely on a “'Velcro' model of success,” hoping that whatever new technol-
ogy is thrown into a given social context will, somehow, somewhere
“stick.”
10
Instead of this (costly) hit-and-miss approach, Sellen and Harper
suggest that designers should start from the premise that “the role of paper
in office life needs to be understood as having coevolved with work prac-
tices and thus as being hard to disentangle and alter.”
11
Indeed, the spread
of computational devices into both work and domestic contexts since the
mid-1980s has spurred interest in frameworks for systems analysis and
design sensitive to the ways in which information is “deeply bound up
with the material practices by which people organize their lives together.”
12
Yet an immaterial, disembodied view of information technology retains
powerful appeal, an appeal that puzzled systems design theorist Claudio
Ciborra: “How come researchers privilege the geometry of the line con-
necting abstract concepts in a model, while they remain blind to the
blurred reality that any, even slight, ethnographic study would have
revealed?”
13
In this topic, I offer an empirical counterpoint to this fetishism of the
“geometry of the line” by following the deployment of electronic signa-
tures within the very professions entrusted with the production and man-
agement of documentary evidence. As a member of a task force appointed
in 1999 by the French Ministry of Justice to provide guidance on the
reform of the rules governing the admissibility of written evidence in
French courts, I enjoyed extended access to the bureaucracies and legal
professions that produce the documents whose evidential value is crucial
to the functioning of the French state—real estate contracts, birth certifi-
cates, and land titles. The practical responses of these groups to demands
for computerization varied widely, as did their appreciation for the complex
entanglement of their professional practices with paper. Yet in the exami-
nation of such concrete material and organizational practices lies, I believe,
the lessons for a usable framework for electronic evidence, one in which—
