message for confirmation before forwarding it. With computers, there are much more powerful techniques, but we’ll be satisfied with those examples for the time being.

Certainly, central to the concept of policy and a seminal aspect of the concept of trust is the ability to ascertain the integrity of information involved in a transaction, less we can trust that information.

The ultimate goal of transactions is the attainment of a consequence. Within some policy infrastructures, we sometimes don’t address the consequences, or at least certain aspects of the consequences, until the transaction is over. Thus, we typically need a history of what went on during the transaction. In the military, messages must be traceable. If something goes wrong, we want to know what happened, to avoid the same problem in the future. So we want to keep a good record of the message. More generally, the more we know about past interactions and their outcome, the better we may be in the future in the face of adversity.

Trust requires verification. So it is necessary to track at least some elements of the transactions. Thus, we recognize the concept of a feedback loop through which reputation in the form of history is used to modify the trust infrastructure for future interactions. In this way, we see the emergence of recursion within the mechanisms of the trust and policy infrastructure. This will be a developing concept through the remainder of the book.

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