Question on U.S. Postal Service and crypto

[Robert A. Costner]

At 02:07 PM 1/6/98 -0800, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>This is for a story for Time on the "new" U.S .Postal Service. I vaguely
>recall the USPS trying to set digital signature standards and/or serve as
>a CA. I'd like to mention this.
>
>Can't remember the details, though. Does anyone have 'em (or a pointer to
>them) handy?

A few months back I asked a USPS rep about this, and was told that the idea
had been scrapped.  I do not know that this was correct.  The USPS was
going to do timestamping as well as act as a CA as I recall.  The
timestamping is a action that "postmarks" the digitally signed message.
Many attorneys feel this is a very good thing, though I have had a hard
time justifying the need for this to some technically inclined people.

Try "digital postmark" in yahoo.
http://www.aegisstar.com/uspsepm.html
http://xent.ics.uci.edu/FoRK-archive/fall96/0328.html

An interesting feature of the digital postmark is that the USPS was making
the claim that if you receive an email that the USPS send to you that was
not meant for you, then you have committed a federal crime when you read it.

Additional timestamping services are available perhaps from Pitney Bowes,
Arthur Anderson, and http://www.itconsult.co.uk/stamper.htm.  My memory on
this fails me.  


  -- Robert Costner                  Phone: (770) 512-8746
     Electronic Frontiers Georgia    mailto:pooh at efga.org  
     http://www.efga.org/            run PGP 5.0 for my public key