Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
The drafting of those decrees would require thorough examination of a
form of evidence whose material qualities could be understood only within
the institutions and practices that ensured its production, preservation,
and evaluation. This examination would not proceed from a blank slate.
Many of the professions involved had already invested significant efforts
and capital to experiment with the potential of networking technologies
to modernize their workflow—and perhaps, along the way, their profes-
sional image as well. To various degrees, all of them were already produc-
ing, transmitting, storing, and even authenticating electronic authentic
acts.
In this chapter, I examine three of these institutional responses to the
new paradigm of electronic authenticity: the deployment of a profession-
wide public-key infrastructure by the Conseil supérieur du notariat (CSN);
the development of an electronic signature solution by the Service central
d'état civil (SCEC) in Nantes; and the transcription of 2 million entries of
the Alsace-Moselle's land registers into a database. Each response was
driven by different sets of motivations, organizational issues, and historical
trajectories of documentary practices. Notaries were primarily concerned
with the role of the privileged witness in the context of real estate contracts
concluded over computer networks; officers of civil status, with leveraging
the benefits of digitization in the context of identity documents exclusively
delivered in print; and the land registry, with the creation of a database
whose contents could be relied on with the same degree of confidence the
paper registers had previously enjoyed. 12
What might we learn from such studies? As noted in chapter 4, cryp-
tographers have tended to assume that the properties of cryptographic
objects will translate transparently into the complex social and institu-
tional settings they are deployed in. That is, all stakeholders consumers,
service providers, legal professionals, regulators, and so on are assumed
to understand and interact with cryptographic technologies exactly as
intended by their designers. Through descriptions of actual contexts in
which digital signatures are being deployed, this chapter argues that this
is not an effective social theory of technology. Instead, as the case studies
will demonstrate, the integration of digital signatures within work prac-
tices, institutional settings, legal traditions, and user's cognitive models
requires significant transformations to the original cryptographic model.
Such case studies then might provide useful feedback for examining the
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