A Utah farmer who wants a loan offers his tractor up as collateral on the Web.
A clerk at the Salt Lake District Attorney's Office files a case in court without getting up from her desk.
The cyber signatures necessary to seal such transactions — just validated by Congress on Friday — are already a part of daily commerce in Utah, the first state in the country to approve the use of digital signatures.
"Utah's a little bit ahead of the game," said Robert Stewart, the state's digital signature coordinator. "It's just the federal government that finally got on board here."
On Friday, the U.S. Senate approved legislation giving records and signatures sent through cyberspace the same legal validity as a pen-and-paper document.
The House approved the measure earlier this week, and the bill awaits a signature from President Clinton, who has expressed support.
While the federal bill has been two years in the making, 46 states have passed laws recognizing electronic signatures. Utah passed its Digital Signatures Act in 1995 and added a broader version of a nationally developed law called the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act this year.
In the interim, several Utah companies have developed software to make digital signatures a reality.
In most cases, the technology is based on two codes consisting of a long string of random digits. A computer database assigns the numbers to a user, who keeps one private and registers the second with a repository, in some cases a bank.
When a document with a digital signature is sent, the receiving party can find the sender's public signature "key" in the repository and use it to decipher the signature without learning the private code. If the document is tampered with en route, the signature mutates.
Experts say these digital signatures, which can also be used to encrypt documents to keep them secret, will make online business deals, home mortgages or car sales a reality.
"Today most people go to a Web site to fill out an application for a loan or an insurance policy . . . and then have to do the rest (of the transaction) on paper," said Ben Gould, vice president of marketing for iLumin, an Orem-based company that has developed digital signature software.
"Now, I can go to a site, fill out that application, sign it digitally and I'm done. I can even have the money transferred without getting out of my seat," he said.
Gould and others in the field expect the technology to be widespread within a year. Banks and government offices in Utah are already using it.
The Salt Lake District Attorney's Office has been filing warrants and cases online for more than a year as part of a program developed with iLumin.
Since February 1999, First Security Bank, working through the Salt Lake-based digital signature licenser USERTrust Inc., has accepted electronic bids from state residents who want to offer private property as collateral for small loans, like the farmer with a tractor.
And this spring, Digital Signatures Trust, a subsidiary of Salt Lake City's Zions Bancorp., became the federal government's first contractor for digital signature certificates.
The company is exploring ways to allow companies to electronically file their employees' W-2 forms to the Social Security Administration or have students sign up for Department of Education loans over the Web.
Digital Signatures Trust CEO Scott Lowry said the Senate's approval Friday should pave the way for those applications and more. He said the step could be as important to e-commerce as the creation of America's highways was to traditional business.
"The fact that a lot of states had passed a lot of legislation was good, but on the other hand you ended up with a patchwork quilt of legislation that wasn't viable for interstate commerce," Lowry said.
"If we had to build the interstate highway system one county at a time or one state at a time, we'd probably never have an interstate highway system."