Why do all roads seem to lead back to Clinton?
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,14831,00.html
04:00 AM Sep. 04, 1998 PT
DUBLIN, Ireland -- In a historic ceremony on Friday in Dublin, Ireland, US President Clinton and Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern will put their digital signatures to a joint communiqué on ecommerce agreed between the two countries.
Digital signatures -- a secure technique for verifying the identity of a person -- have never before been used to seal an agreement between national leaders.
"It's a significant event, and it comes at an extremely good time," said encryption and ecommerce legal expert Robert Bond of Hobson Audley Hopkins and Wood in London. "It will help to get an acceptance of a process."
For Ireland, the signing is intended to showcase its readiness to become the world's ecommerce hub. But the signing may raise hackles in the US "crypto community," which sees encryption as a civil rights issue.
"It's a nice publicity stunt," said David Banisar, policy director for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington.
In its attempt to deflect focus from encryption in signing the communiqué, the US government is instead highlighting it, Banisar said. He noted that most individuals and companies simply don't want to send an unencoded plain-text document accompanied by an electronic signature.
"You can't separate the two," added Banisar. "Encryption is just as important as signatures in most cases."
Encryption is one of the most bitter areas of contention among the US government, technology companies, and individuals. The government sees it as a national security threat, while nearly everyone else says it's necessary for ecommerce and other applications.
Ironically, the company supplying the smartcard technology to be used for the signing is Dublin-based Baltimore Technologies. The Irish company has established a thriving business by selling "strong" encryption products -- those with the most secure digital "keys" for encoding information -- in the global market. That market is off limits to US companies, which must comply with the US government's export restrictions on strong encryption.
Not surprisingly, Baltimore prefers to present the event as a boost for signatures alone, carefully avoiding the "e" word.
Ireland, which is more frequently in the news for its fraught peace process, may seem an unlikely place for such an event.
Ireland is also looking to partner with private companies to build the high-bandwidth telecommunications infrastructure it needs.
"For Ireland, [the signing] shows we really mean business," said Ireland's Minister for Public Enterprise, Mary O'Rourke.
"This is exciting news to us," said Warwick Ford, director of advanced technologies for digital certificate company VeriSign. His company, like Baltimore, has been a strong critic of encryption restriction in the past.
"From our perspective, we'd like to see the wide availability of the technology," he said. "We definitely would prefer not to see any barriers."
A European Commission directive on electronic signatures is loosely worded and allows individual European Union member states to choose relaxed policies (as in Ireland) or more restrictive approaches, as in the United Kingdom, which is about to introduce a secure electronic commerce bill into Parliament.
The ceremony Friday will involve the use of smartcards embedded with a microchip that contains a numeric key for each leader to encode his signature, and a digital certificate verifying the identity of each country's leader.
After inserting the cards into a reader attached to a PC, the two leaders will type in a PIN to unlock the card. Software then processes the communiqué to guarantee that it hasn't been altered and generates a signature. The signature will be attached to the document as the seals of the Prime Minister of Ireland and the President of the United States.
The ceremony will be held at Gateway Computer's Dublin manufacturing site and will be attended by an audience of several hundred people, including Irish ministers and members of parliament, Commerce Secretary William Daley, and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.