authority enables lower authorities, who now use the top authority to vouch for them, by distributing boxes that contain information that can be verified with the top authority. As you can imagine, lower authorities can have even lower authorities, and so on, until the world is covered with distribution centers that allow scaling down the trust system from the top authorities to all the levels of authorities needed for the full network to be covered. That’s an elegant system, which has now taken the name of public key infrastructure. The similarity with trust infrastructures of religious systems should be readily apparent.

Well, we now understand how trust can be conveyed by a third party. If I want to know about this stranger in Ulan Bator, Mongolia that I need to do business with, I can ask her for a certificate. I can then check with the certificate authority of Mongolia, and I furthermore check that this latter authority is itself certified by the root authority, let’s say, Verisign. So now I should be contented, since a reputable institution, the certificate authority of Mongolia, has told me that my banker from Ulan Bator is a recognized person, and presumably reputable. However, I would certainly want to know something more first. That is, how did the certificate authority of Mongolia double-check the identity of the banker? Moreover, if I am the truly suspicious sort, how did Verisign double-check the reputation of the certificate authority of Mongolia? Well, we are now back to the question of identity, of a person or of an institution. Suffice it for the moment to say that certificates typically include an indicator of the thoroughness with which an identity search is performed, starting with simply accepting the word of the person to using the most advanced biometric measures.

At this point, the reader should have a good idea of what a formal trust infrastructure looks like in the computer world today. We should emphasize its two main characteristics, which are trust conveyance and identity assertion. We will now look in details into policy, but let’s not forget that trust infrastructures need to address aspects of trust way beyond those basic elements. Even if I know with good assurance that I am talking with a recognized banker of Mongolia, I still don’t know if that person is going to help me in all our interactions: where is the additional trust? This is the subject that we will now develop.

Purveyors of Interaction Rules

We have alluded to the actual formulation of social ecosystems. It might be useful to identify two of the principal mechanisms for such formulation found in the dominant social structures of today, those of organized religion and of secular governments. The build-up of the trust and policy infrastructures is a distinguishing characteristic between religions and secular governments. Trust and law within a theistic religion ostensibly emanate from a deity. Trust and law within secular government emanate specifically from people acting either individually or collectively. Let’s very briefly note the primary purveyors of each: prophets and solons.

As Mircea Eliade illustrated thoroughly in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, religions are characterized by the presence of the shaman: an individual who can enlist a state of altered consciousness through which enhanced trust is established. Within deity based religions, the shaman is trusted to convey the message of the deity into the physical and social ecosystems that encompass peoples’ lives. In this way, law is established as ostensibly a direct dictate from the deity. In Islam, the Angel Gabriel conveyed the laws of God to Muhammad who enumerated them within the Qur’an. In both Christianity and Judaism, a variety of prophets created the various manuscripts from which the Christian Bible Old Testament and the Jewish Torah were derived. Also in Christianity, Jesus served a similar purpose in conveying the new covenant that served as

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