It illustrates at least two well-known principles: (a) there's [at least] one on every committee and (b) nobody gets round to updating the documentation.
It's not too difficult to visualise the sort of thing that must have happened. A working group is appointed and deals with all the techy bits around data representation with the actual communication being dealt with on a level of "Just email it, encrypted and signed". Then some pedant says "No, you need to specify that" so some poor soul gets the job of writing it up.
The draft of that addition goes back to the committee and some PHB pipes up with "Ooh, that sounds very complicated. Won't it cost a lot of money?". It gets explained that Outlook, Netscape or whatever he's using handles that already. "Well put that in, then." And so the document ends up with an explanatory paragraph that didn't need to be and shouldn't have been in there and which has aged to the point of ridicule. But, of course, nobody wants to revisit it to take it out; as the article indicates, when the documentation is an international agreement the inertia is a few orders of magnitude worse than what most of us experience in this respect.
As to levels of encryption maybe reality has already replaced that specified. Presumably keys will have expired and been reissued using later releases of PGP the S/W. Of course, as diplomats will have been involved there might have been undue influence of the US who don't like the rest of the world using encryption at all. And on the subject of keys - the document is, as far as I can make out, quite bereft of any mention as to how these will be managed. That's consistent with the committee considering that the whole communication issue was outside its scope.
Netscape Navigator, of course, lives on. It's now called Seamonkey. It's what I'm typing on right now.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
