Notes - Burdens of Proof - page 189

Notes
1 Introduction
1. In effect, a short-form certificate is a statement from the record custodian that
she holds the original document. The long-form certificate is available only to
persons who can demonstrate “tangible interest” in the document—for example,
heirs.
2. See, for example, William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the
Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Pablo J. Boczkowski, Digitiz-
ing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004);
Christine L. Borgman, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and
the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Kathryn Henderson, On Line and on
Paper: Visual Representations, Visual Culture, and Computer Graphics in Design Engineer-
ing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
3. Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Representation in Scientific Practice ,
ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 55.
4. One public-key technology, the Secure Socket Layer (SSL), did succeed in achiev-
ing widespread infrastructural deployment as the cryptographic protocol (repre-
sented as the padlock icon) embedded in all browsers to authenticate servers.
Its success prompted famed cryptographer Ron Rivest to testify to a congressional
committee that “codes I have developed are used daily to secure millions of on-line
Internet transactions.” (See http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/rivest-may-24-01
-testimony.txt.) Yet the effectiveness of SSL is much debated: security expert Bruce
Schneier argues that “SSL does encrypt credit card transactions on the Internet, but
it is not the source of security for the participants. That security comes from credit
card company procedures, allowing a consumer to repudiate any line item charge
before paying the bill. . . . As it is used, with the average user not bothering to
verify the certificates exchanged and no revocation mechanisms, SSL is just simply
(very slow) Diffie-Hellman key-exchange method. Digital certificates provide no
actual security for electronic commerce; it's a complete sham.” Bruce Schneier, Secrets
and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World (New York: Wiley, 2000), 238-239.