RIPA Part III

[Brian Gladman]

Owen Lewis wrote:

>> At the risk of knocking you down with a feather, please do chronicle
>> this fascinating history here at length. So many times I remember being
>> told that The Minister's mind was made up, the policy was firm, no
>> further compromise, No.10 unshakeable. Silly me, and they were all along
>> trying to parley.
> 
> Just once more. Through the early 90's, UKG was reluctant to abandon the
> previous arrangement under which govt had once been  the single mass user of
> cryptosystems and all others acquiring and using such systems did so under
> conditions set by govt and of some greater or lesser stringency.  In '97 a
> consultation was begun that would determine future policy recognition that a
> continuation of current policy was both possibly not in the national
> interest and in any event probably untenable in an open society. In short,
> recognition of a need to change was a necessary pre-cursor to the
> intelligent discussion of change. That no one seems to have told you this
> should not have prevented you from deducing it for yourself
> 
> An interesting feature was that the necessity for change was *not* brought
> about crypto lobbyists but by the IT revolution which, from the late 80's,
> on had entered onto the steep part of the adoption curve.

You are right that the IT revolution and particularly the internet made
it inevitable that government's would either (a) loose control over the
use of cryptography for civilian purposes or (b) see the need to promote
civilian cryptographic use for economic or national security purposes.

US and UK policies on the control of cryptography were both based on the
inevitability of an eventual loss of control and were hence designed to
do no more than to delay this for as long as possible.

What the lobbyists achieved was to bring about the death of government
controls on civilian cryptography significantly earlier than would have
been the case had they not taken the action that they did.

It is also worth noting that the UK 'debate' was close to irrelevant in
this process since it was US policy that had to be changed in order to
make any real progress.

   Brian Gladman