in this particular case. The word “me” refers to the speaking party. If such a statement were issued from a transcendent personal device in order to initiate an Internet supported transaction, then the speaking party would be interpreted as the bearer of the transcendent personal device. The word “this” refers to a spatial designation of a specific book. Should the utterance be made between two people, then “this” may refer to the book held in the hand of the speaker. If the utterance is issued by a transcendent personal device on behalf of its bearer, then the word might well refer to a specific Web location that references a contextual summary of the book and its physical availability, cost etc. Implied by the entire statement is the requirement to deliver the book “here,” which is to the current physical location of the bearer of the transcendent personal device. Thus, to use such natural language in discourse regarding policy, it is necessary for the transcendent personal device to be able to establish the necessary contextual relationships, and therefore to become a deictic center for the bearer.

The determination of location for a transcendent personal device can be accomplished in at least a couple of different ways. Of course, the most general such approach is the provision of a Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) transponder within the body of the transcendent personal device. Depending on the resolution effected by the GPS, the location of the transcendent personal device could be determined to within a meter or so, if not to within a small number of centimeters. Certainly, this level of resolution is sufficient for all but the most stringent needs for the determination of locality within a transaction. An additional approach is to use the fine resolution timing of the reception of radio frequency signals from transmitters at known locations, which allows positioning according to an internalized map, which is more closely related to how we humans locate ourselves.

Most of the discussion applied to the accurate and trusted determination of location of a transcendent personal device is also applicable to the trusted determination of date and time. Measurement of the passage of time is somewhat more straightforward, but it offers some special problems in its own right if the numbers are actually to instill trust. As we’ve noted previously, if continuous power is available, then extremely accurate time periods can be established using oscillator circuits. Such circuits can be locked into external loops with highly accurate time sources (e.g. atomic clocks) such that they can maintain synchronized accuracy over long periods. The trick to accomplishing this in a trusted manner is to have the timing circuitry be part of a transcendent personal device body that can be made extremely tamper-resistant through continuous monitoring by its trusted core agent.

A significant need on the part of the transcendent personal device, since it must function as a fiduciary for its bearer, is to have some mechanism to very tightly bind to the person. In essence, there must be a strong authentication of identities between the bearer and the transcendent personal device. When this is accomplished, the bearer can expect the transcendent personal device to engage in policy machinations on the bearer’s behalf and to be assured that the policy specifications that it adheres to are those given it by the bearer. Within the scope of currently available technology, the most appropriate mechanism for this tight binding, specifically of the bearer to the transcendent personal device, is the use of one or more of the biometric characteristics of the human body. The human body is replete with such characteristics. We recognize that our physical appearance and our very physiological being is an artifact of our DNA, so DNA is one possible biometric characteristic. Interestingly enough, DNA actually breaks down as a unique marker in at least a couple of cases: identical siblings and clones. Moreover, for some technical and societal reasons that we discussed earlier when we considered the concept of identity, DNA isn’t our first choice for a biometric differential identity marker. Fortunately, due to a biophysical process called random morphogenesis, there are actually a number of biophysical

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