RIP matters

[Peter Sommer]

UKCrypto has indeed confined its interests to the crypto aspects of RIP,
not surprising really in view of its name,  but those who saw  parts of
the Second Reading Debate will see that there was some considerable
discussion of the continuance of the current s 9 IoCA regime (whereby the
content of intercepted traffic is inadmissible).

On the matter of s 20, PACE (computer data to be presented in a legible
form):  the general view in law enforcement as well as many lawyers is
that this provision would have been ineffective as a means to compel
decryption - in fact it was this that prompted the search for the powers
that now appear in RIP.  The problem is that s 20 was really designed (in
the early 1980s, remember) for those situations where law enforcement
under warrant sought computer data and found that it was held on a
mainframe in a proprietary format - police officers wouldn't want to take
away a mainframe and would lack the resources to read the data if they
did.  Hence s 20, which was designed to provide them with something that
could easily read.   These days of course,  with the greater use of PCs,
we have much more portable hardware and there are relatively few
difficulties in reading the main file formats.

|->   Peter Sommer   -------------------------------------------------->|
|->   hcorn@cix.co.uk   P.M.Sommer@lse.ac.uk  ------------------------->|
|->   Academic URL:  http://csrc.lse.ac.uk/People/SommerP/SommerP.htm ->|
|->   Commercial URL:  http://www.virtualcity.co.uk  ------------------>|