How about a nation wide electronic signature system. You would register with the "company" to recieve an account and password. This would represent your legal signature for documents sent and received electronically.
I have had many time both in industry as well as my personal life when an ink signature was required for legal reasons. Some of these instances, an signature that could be done electronically could have save many people a great deal of time and money.
I realize there are issues with this: security, implementation. These are all things that could be solved.
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You can kinda do that with PGP. The real goal would be to get that recognized as a signature.
IIRC, in Britain, a law was passed, recognizing digital signatures (such as those produced by the likes of PGP and GPG) as legally-binding. Problem still remains that anyone can go and create a key for whatever name they want. So I can create myself a key to sign documents in the name of Tony Blair, which is a bit of a problem. However, if I have a pen, I can also sign petitions ands other bits of paper with the name Tony Blair, so documents where you're just signing, but not having to prove identity are okay. Real problem is when people think a signature provides proof of identity, which doesn't work any better than a handwritten one (which only really works at all if you have a previous sample of the signature to go by).I like this idea, but I'd like to know who would pick up the cost for officially producing and authenticating digital signatures. I wonder how many $$$ the average person would be prepared to pay for a crypto key which, when done sensibly, would expire within a year or two.
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