If you're in the public and you want to get a government-issued credential, no problem. We can do that. We have a program called ACES, Access Certificates for Electronic Services, which would provide that. On the other hand, if you want to get your own credential and have the government accept that, we should be able to do that. Likewise, if you're in a company and the company wants the company-issued credential to be accepted, the government should be able to do that.
Flexibility is the key point here.
We don't want to prescribe a single approach and force everybody to employ it. There are two laws here. There is of course GPEA, the Government Paperwork Elimination Act, which predates the e-Sign legislation that the President signed in June of this year. GPEA basically provides that electronic signatures, of which digital signatures using PKI are a subset, shall have full force and legal effect. Whereas GPEA provided that for transactions with the government.