USPS Providing Electronic Postmarks

isn't my name writes "Back in 2000, Clinton signed the ESIGN Legislation which set forth the requirements for making electronic signatures. But many questioned the weakness of its definitions that allowed an e-mail address to be used as an electronic signature. Well, it seems the USPS has come up with something stronger. They even have a Java and MS COM SDK's Apparently, the USPS feels that the strong legal protections against interfering with the US mail will apply to the EPM program. It seems that AuthentiDate is doing all the heavy lifting. According to the whitepaper on their site, it provides non-repudiation and legal timestamps of documentation by having the customer use a public-key to sign a hash of the document, which is then sent to AuthentiDate's servers which combine that with a timestamp and sign with their key. So, AuthentiDate does not have access to any of the data in the documentation. It sounds very similar to the free PGP Digital Timestamping Service, but it likely is more likely to be legally defensible in a US Court. They also have a new plug-in for MS Word documents. Interestingly, despite the mention of the SDK and it's ability to work with any documents, the only login setup I could find just allows you to use the MS Word version."

Comments

Want to do this now as an end user ?

[j_dot_bomb]

Want to do this now as an end user ?
go to http://www.getstamped.com/

What PGP Corporation has to say about it

[Betabug]

There is an article by PGP Corporations CTO Jon Callas about it. His tagline is "Do we need another version of digital timestamps?"

What he has to say looks like plain common sense to me:

• requires Windows xP/Office 2003 - expensive
• requires purchasing a certificate, which is not really necessary for a timestamping service
• the price seems high

His conclusion: "To me, this seems like a solution in search of a problem." He even mentions open standard file formats. Nice read.

SDK Download Request Location

[isn't my name]

Before submitting the article, I e-mailed to ask about this and the pricing. Did not get a response until after I had submitted to Slashdot, but here is the link for requesting an SDK.

And here is the link for pricing. Note, I was told that the introductory pricing period has passed and I was also told that the entire website was due for an update in the next week or two. Had I known that when I submitted the Slashdot article, I would have waited a bit. Maybe a good slashdotting will get a redesign that can handle a heavy load. :)

Re:Something Similiar

[vaguelyamused]

Actually the Postal Service is not really privatized. The Postmaster General is still an appointed position, they do not pay taxes to local or federal governments nor abide by labor standards set forth for private companies. That said their budget is entirely seperate from the federal budget, they receive absolutely no tax money and are expected to be self-sufficient. Their employees are federal workers in the civil service system however and are entitled to all benefits as such.

The aren't allowed to keep all of their profits either though. In years they make too much money the federal government takes most of it for general revenue. Additionally the USPS has to comply with all kinds of draconian rules set by Congress (see Franking privileges).

So you see they aren't privatized, their leadership is federally appointed and the workers federal employees but the USPS is not completely integrated into the federal government (like..say..the Park Service).