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

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 :+)
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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.)