Burdens of Proof: Cryptographic Culture and Evidence Law in the Age of Electronic Documents

Records of Civil Status

140 Chapter 6 Figure 6.3 Simulation of the new notarial contractual scene, staged and projected on a screen at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the profession. On the lower left-hand corner of the screen, parties and their notaries can witness their mutual consent through a video link. The new rules for electronic authentic acts mandate the continuing inclusion of handwritten signatures as well as the application of the cryptographic signatures of the notaries. Photograph courtesy of the Conseil supérieur du notariat. electronic authentic act (see figure 6.4). After the president of the Conseil supérieur followed suit with his cryptographic signature, the deed was finally done. There was no doubt, however, that the scene of theses signatures differed in fundamental respects from the one initially envisioned by cryptographers in figure 4.2. Records of Civil Status Scattered on my desk, a selection of administrative dispatches from various corners of the French bureaucratic empire: the records of civil status of French nationals born in France’s former colonial empire, including Algeria, the protectorates of Tunisia and Morocco, Indochina, and other former African, Asian, and Indian Ocean colonies (see figure 6.5). I collected them during a visit at the Service central d’état civil, an administrative unit of the Paper and State 141 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 territory , including birth, marriage, divorce, adoption, and the like. Behind this bland legal attribution lies a fascinating administrative history and a formidable evidentiary machine: every year, the SCEC delivers about a million and a half authentic copies of the 15 million records it holds so that citizens may fulfill bureaucratic demands for identification.33 To increase the productivity of the public officers who deliver these copies, the SCEC has developed systems and procedures to partially automate 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 142 Chapter 6 Figure 6.5 A selection of records of civil status from consular offices and former French colonies . Images courtesy of the Service central d’état civil. Paper and State 143 production of documentary evidence. Given their convenience and their operational deployment in the production of millions of identification records, the systems developed by the SCEC would eventually constitute a serious conceptual challenge to those, such as notaries, who sought to ground the reform of civil law authenticity in cryptographic technologies. On one level, records of civil status can be read as pure concentrates of administrative rationality, tersely listing major data points of an individual life—birth, marriage, adoption, divorce, death: Birth Certificate, Sabrina, Mona CHAÏBI—On December ninth, nineteen sixty six, at five hours and thirty minutes pm, was born, at AIN TAYA (Alger), Sabrina, Mona, female, of Saïd CHAÏBI, born in EL HARRACH (Alger–10th arrondissement), on July thirteen nineteen forty, a shopkeeper, and of Gisèle, Marie-Thérèse JEAN, born in LOOMARIAQUER (Morbihan), on April fifth, nineteen forty three, no occupation, his wife, both residing in ALGER-PLAGE (Alger).34 The birth certificate serves as the master record, in the margin of which events modifying the civil status of a French national—such as adoption, marriage, naturalization, divorce, death, and so on—must be transcribed, further tracing the life trajectory of the individual: “Married in CARACAS (Venezuela), June 5th 1993, with Edouard, Christian, Laurent, RUELLOT.” And finally, “Deceased in BÉZIERS (Hérault), July 4th 2000.” In this way, although individual records exist for each event (e.g., marriage or death certificate), the birth certificate provides the fullest description of an individual’s administrative identity at any moment. This...