[Raven] FT 11/2/2000: "BIG BROTHER: Government unveils e-mail surveillance law"

["Caspar Bowden" <[e-mail]>]

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.


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