But Gregory is right, you cannot really trust anybody completely. Even the larger and more respectable commercial organisations will be unable to resist <insert intel organisation here> when they ask for dodgy certs so they can intercept something..
No, as soon as you have somebody who is not yourself in control without any third party verifiably independent oversight then you have to carefully define what you mean by trust.
i am having trouble with all this. i am supposed to only trust myself to identify citibank's web site? and what to i smoke to get that knowledge? let's get real here. with dane, i trust whoever runs dns for citibank to identify the cert for citibank. this seems much more reasonable than other approaches, though i admit to not having dived deeply into them all. randy