The United States and England: two countries divided by a common language, and now by legislation. In July, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or RIP, received Royal Assent in Great Britain, the last step in the lengthy process of turning a bill into law.
RIP was intended to update several laws for the electronic era, most dealing with police powers and the collection of evidence. The act contains many contentious parts, but the clauses that should provoke the greatest anxiety among U.S. businesses concern the "interception of communications," as the British delicately call wiretapping, and strong cryptography, a critical technology for guarding the confidentiality of data as it traverses the public network.
Essentially, RIP requires "public telecommunications services" to install interception equipment to make their networks tappable, and it lets police demand decryption keys that unlock coded data. Law enforcement agents would still be required to get warrants, but such warrants would be signed not by a judge but by the politician heading the Home Office, Britain's equivalent of the Department of Justice. More alarming are provisions that let the police insist that the very existence of the decryption notice be kept secret. The act creates a new criminal offense known as "tipping off," which can land you in jail for as long as five years if you tell anyone other than your lawyer that communications are being decrypted.
Opposition from technical experts and civil libertarians has been vocal.
