Cryptography Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 6.4
Rachida Dati, Minister of Justice and Keeper of the Seals, in 2008 signs the first
electronic authentic act using a graphical pad. Photograph by Luc Pérénom, courtesy
of the Conseil supérieur du notariat.
French Ministry of Foreign Affairs located in the outskirts of Nantes. The
inheritor of the administrative apparatus deployed by the French state in
its former colonies, the SCEC is competent for all events relative to the
civil status of French citizens having occurred outside of the French terri-
tory, including birth, marriage, divorce, adoption, and the like. Behind this
bland legal attribution lies a fascinating administrative history and a for-
midable evidentiary machine: every year, the SCEC delivers about a million
and a half authentic copies of the 15 million records it holds so that citi-
zens may fulfill bureaucratic demands for identification.33
33
To increase the productivity of the public officers who deliver these
copies, the SCEC has developed systems and procedures to partially auto-
mate their workflow. Developed outside of the cryptographic framework,
the design of these systems draws on different assumptions with respect
to the function of signatures, the physical presence of the parties, and
the evidentiary requirements to be met by records produced electronically.
These assumptions are informed by the long tradition of material and
semiotics techniques developed over centuries of experience with the
