"straw man" article outline annotated

["jmessing" <jmessing@law-on-line.com>]

Benjamin G. Snipes undertook to produce a "straw man" outline of an article for our discussion and consideration. I have inserted comments where I believe issues have or should be flagged for further discussion and consideration by the subcommittee. Certainly there are others to be raised and considered. Please take a few moments to familiarize yourself with the information prior to the meeting.

Many thanks to Ben for a fine job. The comments are intended to further our collective reflection and work on the outline and not to criticise Ben.


From: 		Benjamin G. Snipes
To:		ABA-OASIS eTrust Subcommittee
Re:		Best Practices Paper for Electronic Notarization by Notarial Regulators
Date:		March 16, 2004

I.	Forward
II.	The notarial function in electronic content
	a. Identification (of the individual or entity)
		1. By Notary
			A. Non-repudiation (signer’s intent)
			B. Personal appearance (signer’s representative capacity)

<comment: what about signer identification?>
<comment: is representative capacity verification by a notary always permissible under state law?>

		1. By Notarial Regulator
			A. Apostille (governmental identification)

	b. Authentication (document content)

<comment: does this apply primarily to civil law notaries or to all notaries?>

	c. Prevention (of fraud and duress)

III.	a. Notarial acts
		1. Notary Publics
		2. Other governmental authority
		3. Civil-law Notary
IV.	Notarial record keeping
	a. Notarial Journal/Protocol

<comment: how specifically should this tie into the article?>

II.	UETA and E-Sign authorization for digital notarization
	a. Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) by the National Conference of 	Commissioners on Uniform State Laws (NCCUSL) http://www.nccusl.org
	b. Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN), 15 	U.S.C. §§ 7001-7006 (2000).
	c. State notarial law (rubber stamp and seal requirements) - seeking survey 	material for submission

<comment: what is the scope and purpose of including these items?>

III.	Current electronic notarization technology
	a. Electronic imaging

<comment: is this a document capture method or a notarization method?>

	b. Public Key Infrastructure

<comment: why limit this to PKI? Digital signatures are much broader in scope and do not necessarily imply a PKI architecture. Also, what about symmetric ciphers, HMAC's and timestamping?>

	d. Current ad hoc or Just-in-Time (JIT) electronic signature implementations

<comment: what is meant by this? JIT usually refers to a type of compiler used to create object or pseudo-code, not a signature technology.>

	e. Electronic Journal


IV.	Best practices for Notarial Regulators
	a. Document processing
		1. Web Services http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/NOTE-ws-arch-20040211/
A. XML DSIG
B. WSML
C. WS-Security
D. SAML
E. PKI
F. B2B, B2G- SOAP, ebXML, legalXML
G. DSS
	b. Atomic identification/authentication
		1. Humanistic identification
		2. Electronic identification
			A. PKI

<comment: what is meant by this? Authentication by means of a digital certificate or knowledge based authentication required to activate the cert through a username and password>

			B. Ad hoc methods

<comment - why are these considered to be ad hoc?>

			A. IncML (W3C) http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-InkML-20040223/
			B. Biometrics (OASIS) Fingerprint, retinal, and facial data

V. Conclusion
	a. Best practices are the overlapping application of humanistic and technological processes.

<comment: This raises issues about the relationship between humans and technology. Tom W. and John M. believe the subcommittee took a position on this in SF that technology serves the humans to perform their societal tasks; does this formulaiton suggest otherwise?>

	b. How notarial regulators fit into the larger web services framework.



Please consider if and how you can help to further refine this outline and work with Ben and others to produce a second draft.

Thanks to all.