On July 21st, the Sejm passed an amendment to the Electronic Signature Act, which involves postponing the effective date of regulations governing the rules for submitting applications and requests, as well as performing other activities in electronic form by recipients of certification services, from August 16, 2006, to May 1, 2008.
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The deadline for publishing official journals and indexes to these journals, collections of local law acts established by the county, as well as collections of municipal regulations and normative acts and other legal acts announced therein in electronic form, will also be postponed. Now, the Senate will address the amendment on August 2nd. The amendment to the Electronic Signature Act gives the administration an additional 20 and a half months to prepare in terms of personnel, IT, and organization, including defining templates for electronic documents. For the legislator, it provides time for a planned, more comprehensive amendment to the Electronic Signature Act, issuing missing regulations, or interpreting those already issued. However, there remains a doubt whether the awareness of such a distant date – May 1, 2008 – will not have a demobilizing effect on officials.
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Although four years proved to be too short a period for issuing appropriate legal acts and for our administration to prepare, it was also too long for many commercial companies expecting profits resulting from the development of the PKI market. During this time, the qualified Certification Center Signet, belonging to TP Internet Sp. z o.o., withdrew from the certification services market. Nevertheless, we are observing a continuous increase in interest in services and products related to electronic signatures. Certainly, the increase in computer user awareness and new threats to which Internet users are exposed have an impact on drawing attention to IT security resulting from the use of PKI.<\/div>
Despite the postponement of the deadline, many public authorities are preparing or have already prepared to enable recipients of certification services to submit applications and requests as well as perform other activities in electronic form. Among public authorities, there are already several hundred institutions – government, public administration, county offices, municipal and city offices – that have purchased qualified certificates from the Universal Certification Center CERTUM (1,200 qualified certificates issued for these institutions alone), and many of them are currently in the process of implementing such contracts. No less interest is shown in the possibility of using the Electronic Inbox (ESP) as part of the PCC CERTUM service – Electronic Submission Office, or purchasing the ESP in the form of a “box” (several dozen institutions).<\/div>
Since the beginning of its operations, i.e., from December 15, 1998, PCC CERTUM has issued a total of over 1,100,000 various types of certificates for verifying electronic signatures. The most important recipients of our certification services and PKI solutions include, among others, ZUS (Social Insurance Institution), KRUS (Agricultural Social Insurance Fund), ARiMR (Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture), PZU Życie, institutions submitting reports to the General Inspector of Financial Information and the Insurance Guarantee Fund, entrepreneurs participating in electronic auctions, and the notary corporation. But interestingly, the most popular service is time stamping. It is used, among other things, in e-tender systems, protection of electronic documents, securing software against forgery, and long-term securing of archived electronic signatures. In the last year alone, PCC CERTUM has issued over 2,500,000 time stamps. Clients from all over the world use the service, including those from Peru, Japan, the USA, Great Britain, Belgium, France, Brazil, and Uruguay. Among domestic clients, the main recipient of time stamping services is the Central Board of the Prison Service. All this allows us to look to the future with some optimism, especially since Unizeto Technologies has recently recorded a significant increase in international cooperation in the field of PKI, where a project for verifying electronic signatures submitted by participants in international trade deserves special attention.
(* the article is a commentary by Unizeto Technologies)<\/div><\/div><\/div>
(* the article is a commentary by Unizeto Technologies)<\/div><\/div><\/div>