In a world of disembodied strangers, the issue of trust is com- plicated.
Some governments seem to think there's a simple solution-just make everyone trackable.
The British government, for example, talks quite a lot about nonrepudiable digital signatures without ever acknowledging that a piece of electronic information is never going to be perfectly bound to a human. The notion that the security systems we've been relying on don't work for the mass market the way we'd hoped they would occurred to me last December. An e-commerce site sent me a message saying the certificates built into earlier versions of Netscape were expiring. That part I knew. Certificates in their current incarnation are electronic strings of seeming gibberish that securely identify a person, organization or e-commerce site to my computer.