Sri Lanka is now e-ready to march forward on e-Governance says Attorney General Mohan Peiris, President's Counsel.

The Attorney General said so during his keynote address at a conference in Colombo last month organised by the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) to provide the Secretaries of all Ministries a deeper insight into the e-Government Policy, adopted by the Cabinet of Ministers in December last year. This e-Government Policy is aimed at helping Government entities transform their activities to ensure that public service is more people-friendly.

Attorney General President's Counsel Mohan Peiris delivering the keynote address at the conference held in Colombo recently for Secretaries of all Ministries on the legal aspects of the e-Governance Policy -Mario Fernandopulle

Whilst commending ICTA's leadership in formulating e-legislation, the Attorney General's keynote address on the legal aspects of the e-Government Policy was itself highly friendly to the audience and took the senior most public service official of Sri Lanka through a legal journey, tour-guided in simple layman's language.

Taking the audience from the traditional environment of the rims of paper to legal intricacies, from the simple to the more complex, the Attorney General first whetted the interest of the audience with an anecdote where an employee could even submit his resignation electronically, by e-mail.

Sensing the question that the anecdote of resignation by email had raised in the minds of the audience, the Attorney General said: "Now you might ask me the question, what happens when somebody else sends an electronic resignation by impersonating you? Now this might happen; conceding the fact that this can happen - we have a host of hackers and crackers into our emails - the answer … is contained in digital signatures.

Leading the audience in a survey of the salient features of legal environment in which e-Governance could be practised, the Attorney General said: "Now let me focus therefore, on the salient features of this legislation which lays the foundation, so to speak, for e-Governance....The preamble and objectives of the legislation are quite eloquent of the laudable theme that lies behind e-Government strategies.

Section 2 of this Act sets out the objectives as facilitating electronic filing of documents and promoting the efficiency and the delivery of Government services by reliable means of electronic communication.
Introducing the audience to the Section that paves the way to a huge shift from the traditional requirement of a written and signed document, the Attorney General led the audience to a consideration of Section 4 of the Electronic Transactions Act: "Notwithstanding the fact that the provisions of any written law for the time being enforced in Sri Lanka attached legal validity to certain legal instruments only if such instruments had been reduced in writing, such requirement shall be deemed to be satisfied by a data message, by an electronic document, by an electronic record or other communication in electronic form. Now that is a paradigm shift from what we were traditionally used to. Of course there is a little rider there.

The next line: It says 'if the information contained therein is accessible so as to be usable for subsequent reference', in other words, it must have the ability to be able to be forwarded. If I was to simply put it, it must be communicable. That is the rider. So, so long as it is communicable, it is not something that will go into the cash memory or something like that and is stored away never to be used perhaps or probably discarded or deleted. It must be transferable, can be forwarded and communicable. It is only then that one can do that shift of not having it written or not having it signed.

Having made this clarification, the Attorney General led the top deliverers of public service to the understanding that Sri Lanka was legally equipped for e-Government: "Now having set out the definition for you and the advantages, it is important that we also set up the legal tools, the legal environment to support that project. Now the Electronic Transactions Act No. 19 of 2006 which some of you may be familiar with … renders Sri Lanka e-ready. Really I must say that we are now e-ready with this law, as the ICTA Legal Advisor of ICTA, Jayantha Fernando was pleased to observe. Now, thanks to the efforts of ICTA, we have given you the legal environment in which we can practise e-Governance. Therefore, we are now e-ready to march forward, I say, on e-Governance.

Providing the much-looked for answer as to how the traditional signature will be replaced in an electronic and paperless environment as provided for in the e-Government Policy the Attorney General said: "Now an electronic signature is defined in Section 26 of the Act and you can place your signature in the electronic medium in numerous ways as set out in that Section. …But the most useful, I say, and reliable one is likely to be what is called a digital signature, a digital signature, which uses the technique of cryptography.. to convert information into disguised data. Cryptography simply enables you to convert information into what is known as disguised data…

The message sent is unique to the person sending the message and cannot be copied in the same way that a written signature is unique to each individual. ..The signature that cryptography enables one to digitise and to translate into hidden, disguised form is as unique as a signature that is peculiar to anyone person that places a signature. I am told, I am no expert on this, that this is done through a certification authority and a certification service provider as provided in Sections 18 to 20 of the Electronic Transactions Act".