Minister promises that Part III is coming

[Peter Mitchell]

Caspar Bowden wrote:
> 
> But only those (previously convicted) suspects who fail to comply with a
> S.49 notice, will then be guilty of a new offence.

But it will be impossible for them to comply with the notice, because
like all of us they will have thousands of unidentified files on their
computers. You may say that police won't be able to serve s.49 notices 
without better evidence than that, but RIPA only requires the officer to 
"believe on reasonable grounds" that some these files are encrypted. His 
"reasonable grounds" could easily be that these suspects are already 
known to be bad hats. That should be good enough for a court, since the 
proposed amendment explicitly states that a suspect's past criminal 
record is enough to suggest that he has committed further offences under 
the Act.

It is odd how often people forget that long-established "civil 
liberties" aren't just there by accident, or because the do-gooders have 
introduced a battery of daft "loopholes" while we weren't looking. They 
are there for a reason. In this case, the rule that says "courts should 
not convict people based on their previous" is there because otherwise 
people with criminal records will simply be rounded up and convicted all 
over again the next time the police spot a crime that they might 
conceivably have done. Anything that undermines that principle is a Bad 
Thing.

-- 
Pete Mitchell