Love the story today about President Obama and the auto-pen. Gotta love the pic of Thomas Jefferson’s Polygraph on that page too.
Both Jefferson's gadget and the auto-pen raise the question of cause and effect in the legal concept of signing/notarizing/witnessing.
In the old days a single cause (person with pen) created a single effect (signed vellum sheet). As soon as something - anything - intermediates between the cause and the effect, things get a lot more complex.
In IT, a so-called "digital signature" has little in common with its physical world analogs. For example a single cause may general multiple effects (one signed doc gets replicated a million times - each "copy" indistinguishable from the "original"). Moreover, the "cause" is always a computer program - not a person.
If I write the software that has the button that you press to "sign". Who/what does the signing? My software or you? If I change my software so that it just signs whatever needs to be signed, every day at 12:00 O'Clock. Who/what is doing the signing now? Given that "signed" documents produced from the latter process are completely indistinguishable from the former, how can the courts deal with the fact that my software may have gone haywire and signed a bunch of things on your behalf that never should have been signed?
In the world of bits, the blunt truth of the matter is that an "original" bit-stream of any object is a tough, tough thing to pin down. The closest analog that I know of is tamper evident content addressable storage like EMC Centera (That is what we use in the KEEP system here in Kansas).
Monday, June 06, 2011
Friday, June 03, 2011
More on media-neutral citation
I applaud the start of the http://universalcitation.org/ initiative but would urge those involves to not limit their purvue to just caselaw.
A full picture of the law at any point in time requires not just caselaw but also statutes, session laws and regulations to name but three. Relevant here is Joe Carmel's http://legislink.org/ initiative.
Law is a wonderful example of a domain where standards for citation are at least as important as standards for formats of the documents themselves.
The last 20 years are littered with failed initiatives to standardize the formats for all the document types relevant to law. Universal standard (semantic) formats for legal documents is a wonderful target to aim for but a tremendous amount of value can be unlocked by the significantly less daunting challenge of a universal citation framework.
In KLISS, we use the phrase "no wrong door" to describe the idea that any legal asset (a bill, a statute section, a journal, an attorney general opinion, a regulation, a court judgement etc.) that has cross-references *should* be traversable by machine. Moreover, to do this properly the linkages ahould be such that retrieving new documents by following links, retrieve the assets as they were at the time the originating document was created.
Anything short of that results in an incomplete (or worse, false!) view of the overall legal synoptics involved.
A full picture of the law at any point in time requires not just caselaw but also statutes, session laws and regulations to name but three. Relevant here is Joe Carmel's http://legislink.org/ initiative.
Law is a wonderful example of a domain where standards for citation are at least as important as standards for formats of the documents themselves.
The last 20 years are littered with failed initiatives to standardize the formats for all the document types relevant to law. Universal standard (semantic) formats for legal documents is a wonderful target to aim for but a tremendous amount of value can be unlocked by the significantly less daunting challenge of a universal citation framework.
In KLISS, we use the phrase "no wrong door" to describe the idea that any legal asset (a bill, a statute section, a journal, an attorney general opinion, a regulation, a court judgement etc.) that has cross-references *should* be traversable by machine. Moreover, to do this properly the linkages ahould be such that retrieving new documents by following links, retrieve the assets as they were at the time the originating document was created.
Anything short of that results in an incomplete (or worse, false!) view of the overall legal synoptics involved.
Apache OpenOffice
As a big user of OpenOffice, Xerces, Ant and SVN - to name 4, I'm very happy to see OpenOffice move to Apache Foundation.
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
The end of the 2011 Legislative Session in Kansas
Today, the House and the Senate adjourned sine die. We have a lot of very exciting plans for KLISS going forward and work on those starts now. I will be blogging the journey as it unfolds...
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