IP: "BIG BROTHER: Government unveils e-mail surveillance law"

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>From: "Caspar Bowden" <cb@fipr.org>
>
>http://www.ft.com/hippocampus/q34646a.htm
>Financial Times, Friday February 11 2000
>BIG BROTHER: Government unveils e-mail surveillance law
>By Jean Eaglesham, Legal Correspondent
>
>The government will face an "inevitable" human rights challenge to a new law
>unveiled yesterday allowing officials to bug and tap e-mails and mobile
>phones, civil liberties campaigners said.
>
>Industry also expressed concern about the potential cost of the law, which
>will force internet service providers to have the technical capacity to
>intercept communications.
>
>Ministers insisted the regulation of investigatory powers bill was not a
>"snoopers charter", despite its extremely wide ambit.
>
>The law covers surveillance, bugging and tapping by all state bodies,
>including tax and social security inspectors, police and security services.
>
>Jack Straw, the home secretary, insisted none of the powers in the bill were
>new. "Covert surveillance by police and other law enforcement officers is as
>old as policing itself," Mr Straw said. "What is new is that for the first
>time the use of these techniques will be properly regulated by law".
>
>The bill is intended to update rules on surveillance to cope with modern
>technology including mobile phones, e-mail, pagers and the internet. It is
>also meant to provide a legal shield for existing techniques that have been
>ruled to breach the European Convention on Human Rights.
>
>The government aims to push the bill through Parliament before the Human
>Rights Act, incorporating the convention into UK law, takes effect in
>October.
>
>But controversial powers in the bill to decode encrypted e-mails will lay
>the government open to "inevitable" human rights challenges, according to
>the Foundation for Information Policy Research, an internet thinktank.
>
>The bill will allow people to be imprisoned for up to two years and fined
>for refusing to either provide a decryption key or a plain text version of
>the intercepted message.
>
>Caspar Bowden, director of the FIPR, said Britain had become "the only
>country in the world to publish a law which could imprison users of
>encryption technology for forgetting or losing their keys".
>
>Civil liberties campaigners also expressed concern that the new law will
>allow agencies such as the police to sign their own warrants for covert
>surveillance.
>
>Industry criticism centred on the cost of the new measures. The government
>said it has not yet decided whether the taxpayer should pick up the bill -
>it will consult on this issue later this year.
>
>Nick Landsman, secretary general of the Internet Service Providers
>Association, said he was pleased the government was open to consultation but
>companies did not see why they should pay for crime enforcement measures.