[119043] in Cypherpunks
UK: Straw sent coded confession to show 'flaws' in Bill
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Wed Oct 13 14:24:06 1999
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Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 13:40:10 -0400
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
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Reply-To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
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Date: Wed, 13 Oct 1999 04:24:20 -0400
Reply-To: Law & Policy of Computer Communications
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Sender: Law & Policy of Computer Communications
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From: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@COIL.COM>
Subject: UK: Straw sent coded confession to show 'flaws' in Bill
To: CYBERIA-L@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
Status: U
Telegraph 1.10.99
Straw sent coded confession to show 'flaws' in Bill
By Mark Ward
JACK STRAW was sent an email this week. Nothing unusual in that.
Except that were the Government's e-commerce Bill now law, simply
by downloading the email, even if he never read it, the Home
Secretary could become a wanted man.
Malcolm Hutty, of Stand (http://www.stand.org.uk) - a group
campaigning for safe e-commerce legislation - sent the email,
attached to which is a confession to a crime. The confession has
been encrypted and all the keys that could unscramble it have been
destroyed. Under the Government's proposals, if the police call on
Straw and he cannot prove he does not have the keys, then he could
go to jail for up to two years.
As the unencrypted message from Stand to Jack Straw says: "You will
not be able to understand the confession because the words have
been scrambled using a strong cryptographic key. This key was created
in your name and has been registered on international public key
servers.
"The police may come and demand that you supply the key requried to
make this message intelligible. If you fail to do so you will be
committing an offence under the e-commerce Bill. The fact that you
don't possess this key won't help you unless you can prove that you
don't have it. I wish you well in proving that it isn't hidden away
on a disc in your secretary's home, or squirrelled away on the
Internet somewhere. We might have sent it to you last week; but
according to the Bill, the police won't have to prove you ever had it
at all."
Law enforcers around the world are worried that as electronic commerce
grows and more encryption software is used to protect online commerce,
their ability to read the messages criminals send each other will be
impaired.
The Government's electronic Bill shies away from making everyone store
a copy of the key that can unlock their scrambled messages with a
neutral organisation - so-called key escrow. Instead, civil liberty
campaigners say the Bill potentially imposes a heavier burden on
anyoneusing encryption. Says Hutty: "It asks you to prove a negative,
which is impossible."
A spokeswoman for the Home Office denied that the Bill was flawed and
that it asked the impossible. "The Bill is not a silver bullet," she
said. "It's only one important part of the package the Government is
putting in place to address the problems encryption poses for law
enforcers." She said that the Bill puts in place a test for anyone
being asked to prove that they don't possess a key. "There are a
number of conditions that they can fulfil to prove they don't have a
key."
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Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
