Waiting for the Knock

Andrew G. Feinberg writes "in this LinuxToday story, Richard Stallman talks about some upcoming laws that could be disasterous for British citizens." Guilty until you prove you're innocent, no right to remain silent, no right to a jury trial, produce your encryption keys or go to jail... At least in the U.S. we have some time off while Congress takes a break.

Comments

Glad to see it mentioned

[rde]

Although the tories were blamed for introducing this reprehensible legislation, the current Home Secretary Jack Straw looks like he's trying to out-bastard the tories. And he seems to be succeeding.
The Brits seem to be facing the same problems as the Americans in that there's no way a Tory (or Republican) government could get away with this sort of shit, but under Labour (or the Democrats), it becomes acceptable.
I was happy to see Blair get in -- and there's no doubt that he's done wonders in Northern Ireland -- but the laws just keep getting worse and worse. Given the closeness of Britain and Ireland, and the (slight) tendency to follow the lead of neighbours, I fear for the laws of Ireland.

The Prevention of Terrorism Act

[jsm2]

Unfortunately, RMS repeats a few myths about the PTA in this otherwise excellent essay.

1. IIRC, the PTA was passed by a Labour government, not a Conservative one.

2. In fact, the PTA would not necessarily linger on after peace in Northern Ireland. It was only passed for the current year, and must be debated, voted on and passed by the Houses of Parliament, or it lapses. Unlikely, I know, but the potential is there.

3. The attack on the right to silence comes from the Criminal Justice Act, which was passed by the last Conservative Government. In effect, it says that if you choose to rely in court on information which you refused (as in, were asked, but refused) to speak to the police about, they can mention this fact. Any infringement of liberty is bad, but this one is quite mild.

4. However, the CJA does not have any sunset provision like the PTA. WOrryingly, nor will the Electronic Communications Act.

jsm

Re: Key on demand and the IOCA

[DaveHowe]

This has been on the table for a while - The Government here in .uk were trying to slip it through by making it a component of a more sweeping "eCommerce enabling" act.
After a lot of complaints from pro-liberty and pro-cryptography groups (CyberLiberties, for example) it was finally removed from that bill and slotted into the RoIP bill - unchanged. The official slant was that the RoIP bill was a "better vehicle" for this.
The basic problems with it are these:

1. You do not need to be even SUSPECTED of a crime - you just need a police officer to be OF THE OPINION that a given file is encrypted.
2. If you can't hand over a key (because you don't have it, or the file isn't encrypted) then you are liable to a jail sentence
3. If you tell anyone about having been served the warrant, you are liable to a larger jail sentence
4. if you tell your solicitor about the warrant for purposes of your defence (and the only defence is to PROVE you don't have the key - an impossible task) HE is also bound by the clause not to tell anyone
5. There is only one appeal to the warrant - not to a criminal court, but to a closed panel, not accountable to any judicial body and not required to give an explaination of their decision.
6. You are not entitled to compensation unless the warrant was signed personally by the head of the Home Office (a government department). A warrant signed by a police inspector is just as legal, but doesn't carry any compensation.

If anyone has looked at my homepage in the last few months, now they know what my profile means :+)
--

Raising The Costs

[Effugas]

Guilty until you prove you're innocent, no right to remain silent, no right to a jury trial, produce your encryption keys or go to jail... At least in the U.S. we have some time off while Congress takes a break.

Congress ain't asleep at the wheel. Brilliant law coming out that lets the government claim that an encrypted message says anything they want it to, and they have no requirement to disclose how they decoded that message. Their decoding becomes presumptive fact.

Steganography isn't the cure for this; quite the opposite! Under this legal system, you could provide all the keys you've ever touched in your life, you'd be unable to prove that the government didn't actually find incriminating evidence hidden under an alternate passphrase channel.

The general idea being bandied around both legal systems is to insert as much nervousness as possible, taking advantage of people's natural laziness and trustfulness to make them avoid encryption technologies. Then, anyone who isn't lazy and trustful can be selected and monitored--go check out the NSA drowning with info story. Imagine cracking a SSH session only to find some teen chat!

The big stick on both sides is as follows: "You try to hide your messages from us, and we'll manipulate the legal system to give us unlimited power to ruin your life and the lives of those you love."

But I must be fair. Power abhors a vacuum. Data Mining is quickly building comprehensive profiles of many more people much more efficiently than any CoIntelPro could have hoped, but the knowledge is not going into any organization with a mandate to the people.

I have to wonder. Which to prefer? A constitution? Or a stock certificate?

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

Misleading but worrying ...

[charlie]

I live in Scotland. First of all, it's worth pointing out that these laws apply to England and Wales -- Scotland has a different legal system and its own parliament with control over domestic affairs. Whether similar measures will be introduced up here remains to be seen, but the fact that the Labour government has no outright majority and depends on the Liberal Democrats for support -- and the LDP has effectively got a veto over this sort of legislation -- suggests that they won't.

Secondly, all these measures were originally mooted by the last (conservative) government. New Labour is not so much attempting to turn England into a police state as it is continuing policies established by Thatcher and her successors.

Why they're doing this is a strange question. It seems to me that the whole of English culture is in the grip of a wave of security-related hysteria that has nothing to do with terrorism (we put up with the IRA for thirty years, after all) and everything to do with accelerating social change. People feel insecure and worried, and respond by looking for some group to blame. New age travellers, gun owners, paedophiles -- they're all identifiable targets who stand out from the herd and give the herd reason to dislike (or hate) them. So it's no surprise that they come in for attack.

What's new and frightening is the introduction of "zero tolerance" measures in law, in a country that doesn't have a strong constitutional foundation. (There's a bill of rights, and there is an unwritten constitution, but it's hard to attack bad laws on the grounds that they violate constitutional rights.) Add half a million CCTV cameras in public places and a willingness to install another sixty thousand cameras a month and you can see why the UK is now the nation to visit if you want to buy neural-network based face-recognition software. Big Brother is alive and well and living in London.

Digging a bit deeper, we may also be seeing a once-in-a-century re-alignment of British politics. Traditionally, the Westminster parliament has been a two-and-a-half party system. Until 1923, it was Conservative/Liberal with a minor Labour presence. Labour replaced the Liberals, ushering in a period of Conservative dominance -- the Tories ran the UK for 40 out of the 60 years leading up to 1996 and Tony Blair's historic landslide victory. But they blew it, the same way the Liberals blew it in the 1920's; corruption scandals cost them the election and are still haunting them, while the Liberal presence in parliament is the highest it's been since the 1920's. Meanwhile, New Labour has lurched so far in the direction of the authoritarian right that they're staking out a claim to be the true right-wing party in British politics!

There's a general consensus in UK politics about the need for broadly free-market economics, but the traditional proponents of the market in the UK are strongly associated with the authoritarian right. The Liberal Democrats are beginning to reassert liberal values -- civil libertarianism mixed with moderate economics -- and may be staking out a claim to be the new party of the left in the UK, but for now neither of the main parties has any truck with civil liberties.Worse, the current right-wing authoritarian party of government is dominated by ex-Trotskyites. If there's one thing more zealously conservative than a hard-core Tory, it's an ex-Trot who has repented, seen the light, and bought an Armani suit and a BMW. (They're born control-freaks with no sense of humour, and you can't trust 'em either -- they know they've gone over to the Dark Side, and they just don't are about anything other than Power any more.)

Me, I'm just glad that after the last Conservative election victory I resolved to move to another country! (I made good on that promise -- and came to Scotland.)

Labour and bad laws

[CormacJ]

Labour have always had a tradition of making *really* bad laws like this (not just with the PTA). It's usually something like this that ends up getting an otherwise useful government voted out of office.

The sad thing is that the government will keep trying until this gets passed. This is the second attempt at this. It will probably get thrown out, but it will surface again under a different name in 6 months or so. They may end up passing it very quietly, and not telling anyone about it.

This law is the prevention of terrorism act revised. They seem to have fixed all the things that the courts found flaws with, eg letting solictors have publicity (those nasty terrorists would have never been found innocent if Gareth Pierce had been gagged), giving people appeals, and the right to a trial.

The law even allows the minister responsible to alter the legislation later if something isn't working.

When they passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act, a South African minister was said to have retorted "I wish we had laws like that". This law is something from the text book of a dictator, "give us what we want or else we lock you away and there is nothing you can do." I'm sure there are a few people in Chinese government looking at this saying "Oooh... Thats nice. Think we can get away with do that to our people?"

I think I'll start renaming the various ministers as characters from "Animal Farm".

Trial by Jury

[nstrug]

The UK is not getting rid of trial by jury. It is simply limiting the right to trial by jury for certain minor offences. Currently, you can demand a trial by jury for any criminal offence including traffic offences (speeding etc.) For those in the US - imagine being able to get a jury trial for parking in front of a hydrant. The government is simply proposing that minor offences (the UK equivalent of misdemenors) can only go for a jury trial with the consent of the magistrates - the 'judges' (actually Justices of the Peace) who try minor offences.

Although, I disagree with the proposal, it is incredibly hypocrtical of Americans to attack them, as they have always had this system - the vast majority of offences in the US are not and cannot be tried by juries.

Nick