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U.K. E-Mail Law Reaches the U.S. By Dan Calloway, TheWorldJournal.com 
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The passage last month of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act of 2000 officially allowed the U.K. to broaden its powers to access the email of its citizenry. This act also included any and all encrypted communications. This law goes into effect on October 5, 2000 and is leaving the world in a state of panic. The law passed both the House of Commons and the House of Lords and was signed into law by the queen on July 28th of this year. RIP was celebrated by the Home Office, which is the governing department whose assignment is to oversee the new law's enactment. This new law, RIP, will ensure that the U.K. government has the enforcement and security capability it needs to effectively do its job in the ever-changing technological world in which we live. The U.K. sees these laws not as intrusive but rather as necessary and that's exactly why they feel these powers should be closely regulated. Tony Benn, member of British Parliament in the Commons and former minister for technology in the 1970s, sees RIP differently. "The concerns [of RIP] are various: the cost to business, the intolerable imposition on civil liberties, the fact that it gives the security services just completely uncontrollable powers, [and] the fact that it creates new offenses -- if you refuse to disclose your password you're liable to be put in prison for that," Benn says. "It is a terrifying bill and it's something Joe Stalin would have been proud to have if the technology was available at the time." RIP is only one such instance of governments around the world becoming increasingly involved in electronic surveillance. I reported in an earlier article that the U.S. is currently arguing over Carnivore and, in July, the Dutch government admitted that its security service, BVD, has been collecting e-mail messages sent abroad by companies. The U.S. government's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had until the 16th of September, 2000 to select a University that would independently monitor Carnivore's activities and report its findings to a Federal Judge. What is RIP exactly? It is a law in the U.K. which permits the government there to require its ISPs to track all data traffic passing through their computers and route it to the Government Technical Assistance Center (GTAC). The GTAC is being established in the London headquarters of the U.K. security service, MI5, the equivalent to the FBI in the U.S. ISPs in the U.K. have expressed concern that the cost of establishing the technology required by RIP would be crippling. Should U.S. companies worry? RIP has yet to make any impression on the collective minds of the U.S. consciousness of the corporate community operating in the U.K. Officials at such companies as Novell, when solicited for comments about RIP, said they had never even heard of it. Officials at other fortune 1000 companies, such as Wal-Mart, Citigroup, and Boeing, all stated they were unaware of the new legislation and requested more information on RIP before commenting further. When that information had been provided to them and they had been recontacted, they declined to comment. The official text of the RIP act of 2000 can be found online at http://www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts2000/10000023.htm © October 2, 2000 |
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