Use of "Legal Terms of Art" in Technical Standards.

["TS Glassey" <tglassey@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

We in the IETF have a tendency to 'use  existing legal terminology to 
describe things we are doing or trying to accomplish' but generally this 
pertains to things that we as technologist' want to change in our own image. 
I had exactly this argument with Stephen Kent of PKIX and Harald Avestrand 
years ago, and was hammered for it, but today since there is commentary 
specific to this from 'the relevant US District Court Judge' I thought I 
would share that commentary with you...

For those of you who were unaware, the RSA2008 Conference featured an 
expanded Law and Liability Track and one of the sessions featured an 
interactive session with US District Court Magistrate, John Faciolla and his 
Honor was very clear that the only relevant rules for Authentication were 
those of the Federal Rules of Evidence, and that this changed what we 
labeled as 'authenticated' significantly. Yes this means that our definition 
of 'authenticated' is different than the Court's who would review the 
submission of document's so controlled. So let me ask you folks, what do you 
think that means as far as relying on a LTANS solution? My take is that it 
makes our work harder not simpler.

My taker is that this means that our technical standards need to meet the 
"rules of evidence" and not our own images of what we want those to be... To 
that end I propose for LTANS that it only rely on 'established legal 
terminology' for its operations.

Todd Glassey