Enabled Branch protection rules and update release process to allow checkin w/out signed commit to increment version

[bhamail]

Enabling branch protection rules to require signed commits causes the current release process to fail during the release when the version is incremented and the new version is committed to git without a signed commit. Need to re-enable branch protections and update the release process to work with those protections enabled. see: .circleci/ci-publish.sh

Investigate semantic-release tools that leverage GH_TOKEN, etc