3 Interaction with citizens and business

These guidelines target the communication of SENSITIVE information among New Zealand Government agencies and would probably extend well to include private sector agencies working with government agencies.

The issuing of digital certificates and tokens for general adoption by citizens on their private computers is outside the scope of the S.E.E. project and will need to be investigated elsewhere. We consider that the use of digital certificates with tokens on private computers will not be manageable until commonly used operating systems natively support tokens just as they now tend to support printers. Such an investigation should determine whether it is feasible for citizens to access all agencies with which they wish to communicate using one authentication mechanism that is secure, portable and manageable.

The interaction of government agencies with their suppliers will generally be driven by the e-Commerce strategies of the suppliers, however where the supplier provides a service which makes use of PKT, on behalf of the agency, the supplier should consider these guidelines.