Foundation for Information Policy Research
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Press Release on 3rd Reading of RIP Bill by House of Lords

20th July 2000 - FOR IMMEDIATE USE

*) Remaining concessions unsurprising

ISPs should feel pleased to have won a statutory Technical Advisory Board
and an allocation of £20m to cover intial black-box costs, but will need the
courage to complain publicly if government reneges on recent assurances to
keep scale of interception within reasonable bounds.

*) Brute fact remains UK will be only western economy with GAK powers
(Government Access to Keys)

Powers to seize keys *are* now more tightly constrained, but government
pointedly refused to close a large loophole yesterday  through which extra
hurdles to key-access can be circumvented. A person who no longer has
possession of the coded text obviously will be unable to decrypt and
handover plaintext - so this constitutes an indirect means to seize a key,
with a lower level of authorisation and without the test of "special" 
circumstances.

The government repeatedly refused a benign amendment requiring that the 
authorities should provide the ciphertext where necessary, unless the 
explicit intention *was* to demand a key.

Other amendments rejected included an activation clause for Part.III that
would have enabled the government to hold the decryption powers in abeyance
for up to three years to wait and see if other countries enacted GAK laws.

Caspar Bowden, director of Internet policy think-tank FIPR commented that
this was an "unfortunate reversion to the blinkered obstinacy that had
characterised RIP's passage through the Commons".

Overall Bowden welcomed the government U-turns on the infamous "reverse
burden-of-proof" on key possession, and access to web-page logs without a
warrant, which had been the main targets of criticism by FIPR. But Bowden
said that the amended Bill was still atrociously ill-conceived, and
predicted that the residual GAK powers would prove an unenforceable human
rights quagmire.

"It's Zombie legislation. Although clinically dead with macabre wounds, it
still lumbers on menacing both individual privacy and commercial confidence"

Lord Cope (Conservative front-bench) said that the Uppper House had much
improved the Bill, but it was still deeply flawed, and could prove both
ineffective for law enforcement and dangerous to e-commerce.

For full Hansard of debate see http://www.fipr.org/rip/Lords3rdReading.htm
--
Caspar Bowden               Tel: +44(0)20 7354 2333
Director, Foundation for Information Policy Research
RIP Information Centre at:    www.fipr.org/rip#media