Regulating electronic communications with government: improving the architecture or impeding the dialog?

• Authors: Jane K. Winn
• Venue: ICEC '03 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Electronic commerce
• Year: 2003

Under the Government Paperwork Elimination Act (GPEA), the US now requires all federal agencies to establish policies to permit their constituents to use electronic media in their interactions with government. What started out as an initiative to remove impediments to public access to government services may end up imposing significant new regulations on use of electronic media by the public instead. This new layer of regulation of the use of electronic records and signatures can be analyzed at two different levels: is it likely to succeed on its own terms, namely to improve access to government without imposing unnecessary burdens on the public? Second, is it likely to contribute to an overall improvement in the reliability and security of networked computer systems within the US, even if that was not the original objective of the regulations? In 2003, it is too soon to know whether federal regulation of the use of electronic media will succeed at either level, but it seems likely that these regulations may increase the level of security generally while obstructing rather than facilitating electronic communications with government agencies.