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

Notes

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, Digitizing 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 Engineering (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 achieving widespread infrastructural deployment as the cryptographic protocol (represented 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. 194 Notes 5. An eloquent articulation of this line of thought is provided by Michael Benedikt: “Cyberspace: The realm of pure information, filling like a lake, siphoning the jangle of messages transfiguring the physical world, decontaminating the natural and urban landscapes, redeeming them, saving them from the chain-dragging bulldozers of the paper industry, from the diesel smoke of courier and post office trucks, from jet fuel fumes and clogged airports, from billboards, trashy and pretentious architecture , hour-long freeway commutes, ticket lines and choked subways . . . from all the inefficiencies, pollutions (chemical and informational), and corruptions attendant to the process of moving information attached to things—from paper to brains—across, over, and under the vast and bumpy surface of the earth rather than letting it fly free in the soft hail of electrons that is cyberspace.” Michael Benedikt, Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 3. For a discussion of the immateriality trope in computing, see Jean-François Blanchette, “A Material History of Bits,” Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology 62, no. 6 (2011): 1042–1057. 6. John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” The Humanist 56, no. 3 (1996): 18–19. 7. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 61. 8. George L. Paul, Foundations of Digital Evidence (Chicago: American Bar Association , 2008), 19. 9. Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot, and Scott A. Vanstone, Handbook of Applied Cryptography (Boca Raton: CRC Press, 1997), 3. 10. Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office (Cambridge , MA: MIT Press, 2002), 196. 11. Ibid., 187. 12. Phil Agre, Computation and Human Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 57–58. See also Lucille Alice Suchman, Human–Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000); and Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). 13. Claudio Ciborra, The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 21. 14. Sellen and Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office, 198. 15. Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman, “New Directions in Cryptography,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 22, no. 6 (1976): 644–654. 16. See Susan Landau, “Find Me a Hash,” Notices of the American...