A breach in the dam of trust

Bruce Schneier, Chief Security Technology Officer of BT, a renowned technology security expert, wonders in his blog why we accept faxed signatures.

He wonders this because they are so easy to fake. His answer is, they exist in a bigger communications context, including required-by-law fax headers and fax machine phone call logs and previously-existing relationships, and are seldom used for the final authorization of anything major, and so the chance of great harm coming from accepting a faxed signature is low.

Still, I have -- with the consent of the purported signers, I wish to point out up front -- assembled signed documents with many signatures on them, signatures of people who did not see the final document and were never in the same room together, and printed these documents out, and distributed them, and no recipient was any the wiser. Not legal documents, but documents. And I have a high-quality scan of my own signature for dropping into electronic documents that need my signature, so someone else could make their own high-quality scan of my signature -- which is readily available on the Internet -- and attach it to a document.

So, I personally do NOT trust signatures on documents I receive by fax or email, not for anything important. I want to see an original, and look at and feel the back of the paper for the imprint of the signature.

By the way, YOUR signature is readily available on the Internet, too, if you have ever bought or sold real property in King County, Washington. And probably lots of other counties.

Posted: Wed - June 11, 2008 at 12:05 PM

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A breach in the dam of trust

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