David McNett :: Thawte Web of Trust

This page is no longer relevant. Thawte was bought out by Verisign and they've finally killed-off the old Thawte services and are trying to push people to buy their email certificates instead. Sorry. It was a great system while it lasted.

I am a thawte Web of Trust Notary capable of assigning 35 assurance points.

thawte Web Of Trust Notary The thawte Web of Trust is a community-driven trust model similar to the PGP web of trust but instead overlaid on top of a central recognized Certificate Authority. It blends together the better aspects of using a peer-based trust mechanism with the consistency of using a key-signing authority.

Creating an account with thawte allows you to send and receive secure emails in just about every mainstream email application in existence. Where PGP/GnuPG have never really enjoyed popular support, keys generated by thawte will be understood by generic installations of Outlook, Outlook Express, Mozilla Mail (and cousins), mutt, and Apple's Mail.app. pine can be modified to support the keys as well. The email certificates are rfc-compliant S/MIME X.509 certificates.

It's a much more approachable system than PGP/GnuPG has ever managed to be. And since mailer support is nearly universal you don't have to be careful to not sign most of your mails. Rather, since mailers tend to cope well with these signatures, there's an incentive to just sign all your mails by default. Some mailers will even take the next logical step and allow you to automatically encrypt mails you send to people who have previously sent you a signed mail. Overall, it's seamless and self-propagating encryption that will hopefully encourage more widespread use of secure and private email.

I'm also quite happy to also assert identity for the CAcert web of trust, as well as sign your PGP keys at the same time.

Useful links:

I live in the Northwest Austin area and will be happy to meet with anyone in the general Travis/Williamson County areas. If you would like to meet with me so that I can assert your identity, please send me an email to arrange a time and place to get together. Alternately, we often have many Notaries present at our bi-weekly taco-eating parties (usually every other Wednesday evening). If you can make it to one of these events, that's usually the best plan. Please note the following guidelines:

We must meet in person
Please email me in advance with your Thawte login ID (this will probably be your email address). This will allow me to print out the paperwork before we meet to save us both a bit of writing.
You'll need to visit the notary directory and click the "Allow David McNett to view your details" link.
You should bring the original documents of at least two forms of government-issued ID.
One form of ID must be the document you used as your primary ID with Thawte. The number on this document must match the "National Identification Number" of your Thawte account.
At least one of these documents which must bear a picture of your face that looks like your face.
You must provide me with a photocopy of the documents mentioned above.
I am required by Thawte to retain the documentation of the assertion for five years. I will use the same care to protect your confidentiality as I use to protect my own personal, sensitive documents.
If you have a PGP/GnuPG key, I will be happy to also sign it as well. Please provide me with your PGP key ID and fingerprint if you wish me to do this as well.