| Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in France between September 1999 and August 2001, this thesis investigates the definition and introduction of electronic signatures within the French legal system, arguing that digital signature technologies enabled diverse social groups to each make a claim to relevance in a global political and economic order powerfully dramatized by the rise of the New Economy. The synergy was especially strong in the case of legislators, as digital signature laws simultaneously affirmed the continuing relevance and efficacy of Nation-States in shaping the future Information Society and endowed digital signatures with a unique social valence, by granting them the same evidential value as handwritten signatures.; While the trope of ‘technological neutrality’ made for a categories of law, the design of the underlying infrastructure proved more contested terrain. This dissertation thus focuses on the nuts and bolts of infrastructure as a space where regulators, notaries, standardizers, archivists, cryptographers, and vendors debated the terms whereby the complex mechanics of digital signature infrastructures would redraw the lines connecting the institutions, professions, and material practices concerned with the production, preservation, and legitimation of authentic documents. The juxtaposition of the multiple lifeworlds in which digital signatures operate is meant to disrupt visions of the legal, technical, and social inter-operability on which much of the policy and technical utopias underlying electronic security infrastructures have been built.; Because the rhetorical power of mathematical models, through objective formalization of complex social ecologies, provided much of the impetus behind digital signatures, this dissertation provides a threefold critique of the digital signature model itself: first, it suggests multiple difficulties in assuming that mathematical proof transparently translate into legal proof; secondly, it outlines the mechanics behind the ‘provable security’ label, by following a controversy within the community of cryptographers over the epistemological status of proofs performed under the ‘random oracle model’; thirdly, it provides a variety of alternative models for the metrics undergirding digital signatures, metrics offering suppler forms of engagements with the cultural, institutional, and material worlds within which digital signatures operate. |
