[members-discuss] Request to update the SSA - Article 2.2, acceptance of documents

Dear Tom,

> Can you please clarify, why it is that you think email is appropriate for digitally signed documents, not paper based documents signed by hand, scanned and sent by e-mail?

I am not a lawyer, but as far as I know, in case of a litigation a digitally
signed document is usually accepted by the court as evidence with much higher
confidence than a scanned document. One of the roles of the digital signature
is to ensure non-repudiation. A valid signature usually proves who signed the
document (usually through a certificate issued by a trusted CA) and it also
proves that the document has not been changed since. If it also contains a
qualified time stamp, then you can also know for sure the document existed in
this form at that time.

> I stand corrected on fax use, I had no idea it was still growing! Although, I think the demographic of ISPs may have lower than average fax usage. Our company have a fax simply because some customers do, we would not choose to fax or post over email unless it was absolutely necessary.

Well, we cancelled the company fax a couple of years ago. :)

> I suppose you could consider fax or post more secure than email, but I'm not too sure how valid that argument is.

Post and original (signed) documents are definitely more secure than fax
or (digitally not signed) e-mail. In case of the fax, I tend to agree with you,
but there was a time, in Hungary at least, when courts did accept fax as evidence,
while e-mail was usually not accepted. The judges were of the (probably wrong)
opinion that fax is more difficult to forge than e-mail.

Best regards,
Janos

> Kind Regards,
> Tom Corney