Global InformationTeleadministration information
Teleadministration is based on the concept that documents in electronic format have legal value. Administrative informatics is not new, but for many years it was merely Information Technology applied to legal documents, that is, the reproduction of paper-based legal documents into electronic file systems. Instead, Teleadministration turns this approach into its head. It is based on research conducted in 1978, the year when, at a conference promoted by the Court of Cassation, Giovanni Duni launched the then-futuristic idea that an electronic document could have legal value.[1] 1978 was also the year in which the first research on digital signatures (RSA)[2] was published in the United States, yet it would take more than twenty-five years for jurists and mathematicians to start working together.[3]
For many years, and even before 1978, IT helped Public Administration but kept a “safe distance”, assuming that the ‘sacred nature’ of the Law demanded the use of pen and paper. Information Technology merely managed and filed copies of legal documents: it was known as “parallel IT”,[4] since it was an accessory to the activity with formal value, the one based on pen and paper.
Thus, the logical, legal and material premise of Teleadministration is the conferment of legal value to IT documents.
- ^ 1. Duni, G., L'utilizzabilità delle tecniche elettroniche nell'emanazione degli atti e nei procedimenti amministrativi. Spunto per una teoria dell'atto amministrativo emanato nella forma elettronica, in "Rivista amm. della Repubblica italiana", 1978, pag.407 ss.
- ^ 2. Rivest, Shamir e Adleman, A method for obtaining digital signature and public key cryptosystems, in Communications of the ACM, vol. 21, febbraio 1978, 120-126. This research referred to the asymmetric encryption technology (Diffie and Hellman, New directions in Cryptography, in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, November 1976, 644 ss. Diffie and Hellman’s research was disseminated in Italy by Gardner, “Un nuovo tipo di cifrario che richiederebbe milioni di anni per essere decifrato”, in Le Scienze, December 1977, 126 ss.), who added the regulation for issuing the keys and the public certification process associated to them.
- ^ 3. The first application of the research by Rivest, Shamir and Adleman was the 1995 Utah Code, § from 46-3-101 to 46-3-504 (Enacted by l. 1995, ch. 61). The Utah code was analysed in the brilliant dissertation written by Francesca Flora, Evoluzione della informatica nel sistema di governo degli Stati Uniti d’America (Cagliari, dept. Of Political Science, November 1996). For application at the federal level one had to wait until 1998: US Senate, S. 1594, Digital Signature and Electronic Authentication Law (SEAL) of 1998. — US House of Representatives, H.R. 3472, Digital Signature and Electronic Authentication Law (SEAL) of 1998.
- ^ 4. Duni, G., Amministrazione digitale, Voce della Enciclopedia del diritto, Annali, I, Milano 2007, p. 13-49.