Re: Input needed: US Federal Reserve Payments Position Paper

Hello all. I've added to the wiki for your assessment, discussion,
revision/rejection, two high-level sections to the document as follows.
They could be considered as a preamble. Interested to know your thoughts.

= Conformance with Open Standards =

The W3C calls upon the US Federal Reserve System to align with the
International Monetary Fund's Code of Good Practices on Transparency in
Monetary and Financial Policies, which recommends that "the coverage of
transparency practices for financial policies in the Code includes those
for the operation of systemically important components of the nation's
payment system". We call on the US Federal Reserve System to ensure that
all ot its operational systems demonstrate auditable conformance with
applicable open standards, as defined in the Code of Good Practice for the
Preparation, Adoption and Application of Standards, Annex 3 to the WTO
Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade. And in particular the W3C
proposes that the US Federal Reserve's operational systems and dependencies
be efficiently documented in conformance with the ISO/IEC 11179:2003
standard for definitions, descriptions, business rules and metadata; and
with the ISO/IEC 19501:2005 standard on modeling language in the field of
software engineering; and that it be structured in conformance with the
ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 27 set of standards on IT Security techniques.

= Principles of a Free and Democratic Society =

All present-day monetary systems and their supporting payments systems are
implemented in the form of computer programs. These computer programs are
the de facto official translations of legislation, regulations, policies,
standards and agreements in operation. In legislation a computer program is
defined as a type of “literary work” that exists as “a set of statements or
instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to
bring about a certain result”. People of a free and democratic society can
rightly demand openness, transparency and accountability for the computer
programs and databases used to operate the Federal Reserve System's
financial storage, payment and reporting systems. Accordingly, Federal
Reserve's computer programs which implement its payments systems:
* Must be well-ordered, never unnecessarily complicated, because complexity
undermines transparency, security and accountability;
* Must be freely available to anyone to read, copy, distribute, study or
adapt, because this enables supplier-independent experts to conduct
security audits of the policies, architecture and programming code (to the
level of line-by-line tests and debuggers to validate each process or
calculation). As a corollary, they must never be encumbered by statutory
artificial monopolies favouring or exclusively accessible to particular
suppliers;
* Must demonstrate a high degree of assurance, integrity (i.e. free from
tampering), privacy, confidentiality, auditability, reliability (i.e. free
from 'bugs' in code, design and architecture), trustworthiness,
authorization controls and availability, as well as timely and effective
issue response methodology and performance.


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Joseph Potvin
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