UK Government to Force Encryption Key Handover
19 May 2006
I’ve just been reading this article. This is really, really bad, and it seems like George Orwell was right. Essentially, they’re wanting to deny everyone the basic human right of privacy, in an attempt to stop terrorists and paedophiles from hiding stuff from them. If we ask them why, they’ll probably just tell us that if we have nothing to hide then there should be nothing wrong. But this isn’t the point. When we write private diaries, we aren’t doing anything wrong, we’re just making use of our right to privacy.
And at any rate, even if they did enforce this, they wouldn’t be any closer to findout out what all the ‘bad guys’ are doing. They simply wouldn’t give the keys, and even if the government found some data they believed to be encrypted messages, they could simply deny the fact that either it is encrypted data (it looks just like random data), or deny possessing the key. Taking this idea a little further, we can move from cryptography to steganography, so no-one would even know the encrypted data was there in the first place (in theory).
Interestingly, Bruce Schneier wrote a similar article very recently too, but not in relation to this forced handover article. It’s a great article, better-written than the random things I’ve just been saying, and I encourage you to read it.
Those wanting to protect their basic human right of privacy should download a suitable program. I recommend GnuPG, so that people can send encrypted stuff to you securely, and because it’s free software.
I read this just today too: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/business/legal/0,39020651,39270045,00.htm
UK needs a pirate party: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party :-)
Thanks for the link David. Perl could become illegal? These guys are more stupid than I thought.
I’m liking the Pirate Party; Sweden always has some bright ideas. The only problem with these sorts of parties though of course is that they’ll never get taken seriously, because there are many other major issues that will (must?) take priority over issues like copyright. Certainly in the eyes of the general public, anyway. If only we could convince Labour or the Conservatives to do away with copyright. We probably have more chance with the Lib Dems, but they have enough trouble getting enough votes as it is.